Who Cycles to Work and Where? A Microdata Analysis of the US and Mexico

Who Cycles to Work and Where? A Comparative Microdata Analysis of Urban Commuters in the United States and Mexico.

This is a research project I did with professor Erick Guerra and other graduate research assistants at the University of Pennsylvania. Please view the poster presented at TRB 2020 here.

Abstract

In this paper, we develop comparable multilevel logistic regressions predicting whether a sample of 5.7 million workers commute by bicycle in the hundred largest urban areas in the US and Mexico. In both contexts, men in relatively poor households are likeliest to cycle. The similarities in cycling commuters generally stop with these two commonalities, however. The archetypal US bike commuter is a recent college graduate, lives by himself in a centrally located apartment in a moderate-to-high density city, like Portland, OR, and commutes to work in a relatively low-paying service sector job for a college graduate, perhaps at restaurant or not-for-profit. The archetypal Mexican bike commuter, by contrast, is in his mid-thirties, has only a few years of formal education, lives with a large family in a house in the suburbs of a large dense metropolitan area, like Mexico City, and commutes to a relatively low-paying agriculture, construction, or manufacturing job. Local context matters and the most effective public policies to promote urban cycling will almost certainly vary across national borders. For example, our analysis suggests that requiring showers and bicycle parking in new office developments will likely do a lot more to support US cyclists than Mexican ones. Last, we conclude that there is a need for studies that include comparable measures of cycling infrastructure, local built environments, and non-work trips in different national contexts.