The pandemic bike boom is petering out, but more Americans are biking than ever before, signaling a need for cities to keep improving bike infrastructure and make roads safer for cyclists.
The pandemic-era rise in biking in the United States is starting to peter out, reports Kea Wilson in Streetsblog.
While bike trips surged by 37 percent across the country during the early part of the pandemic, “bike trip volumes actually declined slightly in 2022 when compared to the year prior,” according to a report from Streetlight. “And while the authors of the report speculated that cities' removal of quarantine-era quick-build bike infrastructure may have played a role in the decline, they weren't totally sure what else caused it.”
Regardless, Americans are still biking more than they did before the pandemic. But “Without the robust investments in safety necessarily to support that rising tide, though, trip numbers are already beginning to wane — and it's happening at the exact moment when the twin challenges of climate change and the national traffic violence epidemic demand that we do everything we can to get more folks out of their cars and into the saddle.”
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