Percentage of Commuters who Bike to Work in Austin, TX

Last update:  December 24, 2025

The “Larger Central City” is 78701, 78705, 78751, 78722, 78702, 78704.

From Census data as per below.

The takeaway

Despite the city making a valiant effort to install bike lanes, protected bike lanes, and other facilities over the past 25 years, the percentage of Austinites who bike to work has remained flat at around 1%.  There has been a modest 25% increase since 2000 (0.96% to 1.2%), but that is hardly cause for celebration.

In the central city it’s even worse, with bike share falling.  This could be an artifact of the margin of error for not enough data.

The actual data

How most other reporting has gotten it wrong

1. “The percentage of workers who commute by bike in Austin” misses important nuance.  We can expect people to bike to work only for shorter commutes and where the facilities are the best, which means the central city.  Measuring for the whole city misses the huge split between the central vs. outer areas.  Most other media reports misses this crucial distinction.  KUT (2023) published a hoverable map showing the bike share % being higher in central areas, but didn’t publish a graph, and the map was for only a point in time, so trends couldn’t be seen. In my own chart above, I separate out central core, central, and Austin city, and show the change over time.
2. Austin CITY is different from Austin METRO.  Even worse than not looking at the central city, some media outlets look at the entire metro area (including at least Round Rock), and yet even worse again, they don’t tell you that’s what they’re doing, possibly because they don’t even realize that’s what they’re doing.  For example, KUT in 2023 reported the % of bike commuters in “Austin” (which suggests the City of Austin), when their figure was actually for the whole metro area.
3. Including work-from-home skews the results.  Pretty much every other media report uses Total Workers as the denominator, which is the wrong denominator because it includes people who work from home.  To measure the percentage of bike commuters (not bike workers), we have to first subtract out the work-from-home people from the total.  I’m likely the only one who did this in when reporting bike share figures.

Notes and limitations on the Census data

Local planners have complained that their sensors can’t distinguish between scooters and bikes.  Solution: Use Census surveys.

1. For 1990, I used a third-party reference to the Census data (p. 9), since I couldn’t locate the data on Census.gov.  I got as far as finding that the relevant tables are in STF3, tables P049I1 (Total Workers), P049I13 (Worked from Home), and P049I10 (Bicycled to Work).
2. For 2000, I used FHTA’s reference to Census data: (2555 male bicyclists + 725 female bicyclists) ÷ (197,675 male workers + 155,435 female workers - 5940 male worked from home - 6090 female worked from home) = 0.96%.  FWIW, the original data is supposed to be in STF3, Table P030, “Means of Transportation to Work".
3. For 2006-24, I use Table B08301, “Means of Transportation to Work”.  Yearly data effectively started in 2006.
4. No data for 2020, probably because of COVID.
5. Zip-code-level data isn’t available in the yearly reports, only in the 5Y reports, though those are published every year.  The 5Y reports are called “American Community Survey”, or ACS.
6. Zip-code-level data not available for 2024 in 2025.  As of 2025, the most recent 5Y report was published in 2023, so I don’t have zip-code data for 2024.
7. The 78701 data for 2023 is suspect, because it’s a tiny >0.2% (not 2%, but 0.2%), quite far from the figures for all other years, so I’m excluding that cell from the results.
8. The Census.gov UI is broken and zip code-level data isn’t findable on the web.  There are direct links to get zip code data for specific ACS 5Y reports, e.g. 78705 for 2023.