Who bikes to work in Alexandria

The American Community Survey is put out by the Census Bureau and provides a neighborhood by neighborhood view into a variety of factors from income to housing. I was curious about how Alexandrians get to work and given that the Census Explorer data is a little hard to follow, created my own map below.

While we know that about 55% of Alexandrians drive alone to work and about 1.1% ride bicycles, that is an average across the entire city. At the neighborhood level, those factors can be significantly different. For example, my census tract—2015—has about 2.2% of residents biking to work, twice the city average.

Looking across the city, the top bike to work neighborhoods are highlighted in darker green. For some neighborhoods, lots of people biking to work should come as no surprise. Del Ray for example, split into tracts 2013 and 2014, has 3.3% and 3.6% respectively. Others were more of a surprise as two neighborhoods northwest of Del Ray had 4.8% and 3.7%. In other cities, there is a direct correlation between good bike infrastructure and the number of people who actually ride. For example, the Old Dominion Blvd bike lanes run through the middle of the tract and 4.8% of residents ride to work, the highest in the city. In 2000, just 1.2% rode to work here, likely before bike lanes were installed.

In Old Town, the King St corridor had a respectable 3.2% which should go up after Complete Streets is implemented on Cameron St and Prince St. Notably, tract 2018.02 immediately west of Founders Park, had 4% of residents bike to work. While these numbers are from the 2013 American Community Survey, I looked briefly at the same data from 2000, and found that in the Founders Park tract, 0% of people biked to work. More broadly, biking to work increased significantly across the city over that 13 years. Check out your own neighborhood below.

Data Source: http://www.census.gov/censusexplorer/censusexplorer-commuting.html.