Squirreled away in the new census data is this: the Northwest has more bicycle commuters than farmers. Way more.
Check it out:
The chart shows the number of people whose primary occupation is farmer compared with the number of people whose primary mode of commuting is by bicycle.
Needless to say, this snapshot doesn’t include the heap of people who work in the agriculture industry more generally but who aren’t actually farmers. (And it doesn’t count farm laborers, in particular.) There are not nearly as many folks who work in the bicycle industry.
Yet I think there’s some symbolic value to my little comparison. For whatever reason, farmers occupy a quasi-mythic space in our consciousness in a way that cyclists obviously don’t. And I wonder if a clearer understanding of how widespread and popular bicycling is might help change the persistently anti-bicycling policies that plague communities across the Northwest and across North America.
Some additional context. If we were to add in all the folks who farm as a secondary occupation the number of farmers would more than double. On the other hand, we don’t have comparable data for commuters whose secondary mode of commuting includes a bicyle. But it’s fair to believe that the number of occasional bike commuters is probably much, much higher—well over double, I’d be willing to bet. There are an awful lot of fair-weather cyclists out there (like me) or cyclists who ride only once or twice a week or only ride during the summer.
Interestingly, across the United States, the nation’s 2.2 million farmers far outnumber the roughly 685,000 bicycle commuters. But, on the other hand, according to at least one reasonably credible estimate for 2002, some 57 million American adults are at least occasional bicycle riders. If we assume that the same relationship holds for the Northwest—the ratio between bike commuters and total cyclists—then there are roughly 5.3 million cyclists in the Northwest states. And that doesn’t even count all the kids!
Sources and notes: All commuting data come from the US Census Bureau’s American Community Survey 2008, single year estimates, Table S0801, “Commuting Characteristics by Sex.” I calculated the number of bicycle commuters by multiplying the total number of commuters covered by the survey by the percentage of commuters whose means of transportation to work is bicycle. This figure excludes bicycle commuters whose primary mode of commuting is some other mode (e.g. someone who rides a bike a short distance to a bus stop) and people who commute by bicycle sometimes but commute by some other mode on a greater number of days each week. More information on the census techniques is available here, especially on page 67. All data about farmers comes from the US Department of Agriculture’s 2007 Census for Agriculture, the most recent data available. For each state I used the state profiles and took the count listed for “principle operators by primary occupation.” National figures are here.
eldan
Apparently, in the US as a whole, there are more World of Warcraft players than farmers.http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/10/20/the-real-america/
Clark Williams-Derry
So does that mean that there are more gold farmers than real farmers?
Alan Durning
I do not understand what that means, Clark. Is “gold farming” a World of Warcraft term?The burning question that Eldan’s comment raises in my mind is: Does Cascadia have more bike commuters or more World of Warcraft players?
Scott
What about farmers who might ride a bike on their farm? I wonder if they were double-counted into each category.
IsWUU
Scott, do you mean all 8 of them… 🙂
Danceralamode
Scott, thank you for this insightful comparison! I’m a bicycle commuter, who also takes the bus in bad weather. I would not consider myself a “fair weather cyclist” even though I don’t bike when it’s raining. But I think you’re right, the number of cyclists listed in this report is far too low. If 57 million American adults occasionally ride a bike, you’d think there’d be more sympathy/compassion or at least tolerance for what cyclists put up with. I’m not saying everyone has to give their car, but I think people would enjoy life a lot more if they didn’t always tether themselves to their steering wheels. You miss a lot by imprisoning yourself in a vehicle, and many of us live in a tolerable biking distance to work or at least a major transit stop. Thanks for the great post. I’m linking you into my blog for my readers. It’s really a fascinating comparison. http://lifewithoutwheels.wordpress.com.
Clark Williams-Derry
Alan – From Wikipedia…Gold farming is a general term for an [online game] activity in which a player attempts to acquire (“farm”) items of value which are sold to create stocks of in-game currency (“gold”), usually by exploiting repetitive elements of the game’s mechanics. This is usually accomplished by carrying out in-game actions (such as killing an important creature) repeatedly to maximize gains, sometimes by using a program such as a bot or automatic clicker More broadly, the term “gold farmer” could refer to a player of any type of game who repeats mundane actions over and over in order to collect in-game currency and items.
cold worker
danceralamode: if you don’t bike when it’s raining, make no mistake, you are a fair weather cyclist.
PieChart
Those same farmers received over $368 million in subsidies in 2006 (data from http://farm.ewg.org/farm/index.php?key=nosign). How many transportation dollars did bike commuters receive for bike infrastructure? $36 million? $3.6 million? Wow. Bike commuters need a better congressional lobbyist.
Snapshot
Tossing in another symbolic comparison:There are more farmers who feed bicyclers than bicyclers who feed farmers.
REMZilla
Oh, and, the more commuters use bicycles to get to work, the less pollution will contaminate the food farmers are growing.
Snapshot
But doesn’t pollution cause the global warming that helps all the plants grow faster?