Seattleites who bike to work are waaaay happier, survey finds
Chart from the 2024 Seattle Commute Survey (PDF) by Commute Seattle.People who bike and walk to work are way happier with their commutes than everyone else, and it's not even close. This is one of the findings from Commute Seattle's 2024 Seattle Commute Survey, which was released recently. This is great news for the increasing number of people in Seattle who are biking to work since many major employers instituted return to work policies.
Biking is at the top of the chart with a +33 net promoter score," a customer satisfaction metric to determine how likely a person is to recommend something to someone else. People who bike registered an insufferable +33 compared to a dismal -43 for driving alone, the most miserable way to get to work. What's fascinating is that walking (+20) and biking are the only modes for getting to work that people like more than working from home (+5).
It is very common to hear a bike commuter say, My commute is my favorite part of the day," which is something I'm not sure I've ever heard someone stuck in I-5 traffic say. Biking is a wonderful experience, and it's a vital source of accidental exercise" for people like me who are not apt to go to a gym or do some other form of intentional exercise. Starting and ending every work day with a bike ride is a fantastic way to process the stresses of life while also experiencing the city in a deeper way. I once made a Vine (remember those?) that was just a couple seconds of bike riding with the text A bike ride is a love letter to your city." I still feel that way.
People of all ages are biking to work in Seattle. It's not a young person's thing, despite what you may have read in an angry comments section somewhere. People 15 to 24 years old are as likely to bike to work as people 65 and older. The 25 to 34 age bracket did have the highest rate at 5%, but only the 55 to 64 bracket dropped below 4%, clocking in at 3%.
The 2024 data shows that commute trends are still getting sorted out as more workplaces fill up after years of heavy remote work that started with the 2020 pandemic shutdown. For example, the share of people driving alone to jobs in the city's central neighborhoods actually went up in 2024, but this was before major return to work mandates hit in January and the streets in downtown and South Lake Union ground to a halt during commute times. I suspect many people got caught up waiting forever to turn onto Mercer Street and decided to figure out a different way to get to work.
As a share of the total, bike commuting to the city center remains essentially unchanged at a stubborn 3% even as the public transit share oscillates wildly. The center city bike commute rate is actually lower than the citywide rate of 4%. Biking wasn't affected by pandemic concerns the way transit was, and it's clear that workplaces and transit promoting organizations have a lot of work to do to build back the 46 percent mode share transit carried to the center city in 2019. Note also that the survey only measures the primary commute mode, so someone who bikes to transit or the ferry would most likely count as a transit user since the transit portion is likely to cover more distance.
Speaking of distances, the average bike commuter in Seattle lives five miles from their workplace, which is about the distance from Westlake Park to Magnolia, Ballard, Green Lake, UW, Mercer Island, Columbia City, Georgetown or North Delridge. So while there are always going to be suburban bike commuting heroes, most bike commuters to the center city are going to be Seattle residents.
The specific shares of walking, biking and transit matter less than their totals together, especially since they are often mixed anyway. The walking figure is especially skewed since the vast majority of transit users walk to transit. As light right service continues to expand, it will capture more biking trips as people route to light rail rather than biking the full distance. Improving bus service by reducing headways with more service and improving reliability through bus lanes and other bus priority techniques will likewise attract more trips that might otherwise be walking or biking trips, but this is a good thing. People should have options.
The gender gap for bike commuting remains an issue with 6% of men biking to work compared to only 2% of women. But wow, non-binary or non-conforming folks are transit champs.
As noted in our recent story about the climbing Fremont Bridge bike counter numbers, Seattle is in the midst of a huge change in commute patterns, and 2025 is a huge opportunity to encourage more people to form new habits. Transit use has the most headroom by far since it was much higher in 2019. Biking can also grow, but it will need to head into unknown territory to do so since the biking rate has remained at its 2019 level.
Seattle has make a lot of bike network improvements in the center city area since 2019, so the demographics for biking have the potential to widen as more and more people look for ways to get there. I hope that as people try biking for the first time, they are more likely to have a positive experience and decide to keep going. And as the survey suggests, if they do keep biking they are likely to love it.