Since 2001, the Portland Business Alliance has surveyed downtown employers to capture the business climate and quantify the issues and opportunities of doing business in the state's largest employment center.  One of the questions PBA asks employers each year is how employees get to work.

You might think that commute data is easy to get a hold of, but its surprisingly rare.  The US Census Bureau asks how people get to work, but it's broken down by origin not destination.  While that's important, its also important to know how our employment and regional centers function. 

While we know there's been phenomenal growth in bicycle traffic across the Hawthorne, Burnside, Steel, and Broadway Bridges, we don't know exactly where those bikes are ending up. 

But PBA's data is helping us to learn more about regional commuting patterns and one of the most impressive is the increase in bicycle commuting downtown.

Click here for a link to the PBA's report.

And we've also seen a significant decline in people driving to downtown, 13% 9% fewer drive alone trips since 2001 according to PBA's survey.

These trends are echoed in other data, such as the City Auditor's SEA report and the census data.  I'm looking forward to the 2011 bicycle count report, too.