Hawaii Leads, Oregon Slides: America's Bike Commuting Winners and Losers Revealed

When Americans decide how to get to work, their choices reveal something bigger than convenience. They signal how infrastructure, culture, and everyday practicality shape the way people move through their cities and towns. Increasingly, a growing number of workers are choosing to skip the car and reach for the handlebars. But the shift isn't happening everywhere, and it isn't happening equally.

A new analysis of U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey data, comparing bicycle commute share across all 50 states from 2019 to 2023, shows a divided country. While some states have seen dramatic increases in the share of commuters biking to work, others have lost ground in meaningful ways, even as the push to reduce car dependence in American cities has never been louder.

The split raises an urgent question: what's actually driving people to get on, or off, their bikes?

Key Findings

Hawaii Shows That Small Gains Can Mean Big Momentum

It might seem counterintuitive that an island state, with its limited road networks and year-round heat, would top a list of rising bike commuters. But Hawaii's climb to first place in share growth shows what happens when geography, weather, and local culture align.

Between 2019 and 2023, the share of Hawaiian workers biking to work rose from 0.58% to 0.85%, a 47% relative increase. That kind of growth isn't accidental. Honolulu has invested heavily in protected bike lanes and multi-use paths over the past decade, and compact urban geography makes short-distance cycling genuinely practical for many commuters. When a city makes biking feel safe and logical, people show up.

The Hawaii example is a reminder that cycling growth rarely happens in a vacuum. Infrastructure investment, land use patterns, and cultural familiarity with outdoor activity create conditions where people feel ready to try commuting differently.

Oregon's Fall from the Top: A Cautionary Tale for Cycling-Friendly States

For decades, Oregon, and Portland in particular, has been held up as the gold standard for American cycling culture. Bike lanes etched into every neighborhood plan, a thriving bike-share network, and a commuter culture that made cycling feel like a civic identity. That's what makes the state's data so striking.

Oregon posted the steepest drop of any state in the country, with bicycle commute share falling by -0.63 percentage points between 2019 and 2023, shedding nearly 12,000 bike commuters in raw terms. The state went from a 1.95% bike commute share to 1.32%.

What happened? The pandemic years reshaped commuting in ways that hit cycling-heavy cities hard. Remote work disproportionately reduced commuting in dense, tech-adjacent metros, exactly the kind of workers who had been driving Oregon's cycling numbers. Research from economists at the University of Chicago and Georgetown found that commuting in the largest U.S. cities has stabilized at just 60% of pre-pandemic levels, a pattern most pronounced in metros with high concentrations of knowledge-economy workers. When the office became optional, many of the state's most habitual bike commuters simply stopped commuting altogether. The question now is whether they'll come back.

New England's Unexpected Cycling Surge

Massachusetts and Vermont are perhaps the most surprising stories in the data. Both states climbed into the top three nationally for bicycle commute share growth, and neither is a state most people would associate with year-round cycling culture.

Massachusetts grew its bike commuter share by +0.21 percentage points, adding more than 8,100 bike commuters to reach a total share of nearly 1.1% of all workers. Vermont isn't far behind, with a +0.22 percentage point jump that pushed its share from 0.50% to 0.72%.

The pattern reflects what's been happening in Boston and Burlington: sustained investment in protected cycling infrastructure, a younger workforce moving into urban neighborhoods, and a post-pandemic appetite for active commuting that health-conscious New Englanders have embraced. Boston's Bluebikes expansion and the completion of key protected lane corridors during this period likely played a role. The data suggests that even states with cold winters aren't immune to cycling momentum when the conditions are right.

The Sun Belt Paradox: More People, Fewer Bike Commuters

Texas presents one of the more paradoxical data points in the analysis. Between 2019 and 2023, the state added more than a million workers to its labor force, one of the largest workforce expansions in the country. Yet in that same window, the number of people biking to work fell by nearly 4,800, and the bicycle commute share dropped from 0.23% to 0.18%.

Florida tells a similar story. Its workforce grew by roughly 760,000 workers, yet it lost more than 6,100 bike commuters and saw its share fall by -0.10 percentage points.

This is what demographers call a composition effect: when massive in-migration brings workers whose commuting habits don't include cycling, the share can fall regardless of whether raw cycling numbers collapse. Both states drew millions of new residents during the post-pandemic migration boom, and faster-growing workforces don't automatically bring cycling culture with them.

For cycling advocates, it's a signal that infrastructure needs to keep pace with population growth, not just trail behind it.

Nebraska and New Jersey: Cycling's Unlikely New Recruits

One of the most refreshing findings in this dataset is the performance of two states that rarely make it into cycling media: Nebraska and New Jersey. Both cracked the top six nationally for bicycle commute share growth, posting gains of +0.10 percentage points each.

Nebraska's rise, bringing its share from 0.31% to 0.41%, is partly a story about Lincoln and Omaha, where city planners have quietly been building out trail networks and protected lanes. Nebraska also has a strong cycling safety culture rooted in its recreational riding tradition, and that ethos appears to be crossing over into commuting habits.

New Jersey's story is more urban. With its proximity to New York City and Philadelphia, New Jersey has benefited from major metropolitan bike-share programs and an influx of younger commuters who increasingly treat cycling as a legitimate alternative to trains and buses. The state added more than 5,500 bike commuters in raw numbers, a 43% relative increase, suggesting the shift isn't a rounding error.

These aren't states building cycling utopias. They're states where practical, everyday biking is becoming slightly more normal, which may be the more durable form of progress.

Colorado's Decline: When Cycling Culture Meets Remote Work

Colorado entered 2019 with the highest bicycle commute share in the contiguous United States, at 1.13%, more than double the national average. By 2023, that share had fallen to 0.84%, a drop of nearly -0.29 percentage points and the third-largest decline in the country.

The mechanics here look similar to Oregon's slide. Colorado's cycling culture is concentrated in cities like Denver, Boulder, and Fort Collins, places with high concentrations of tech and knowledge-economy workers who rapidly shifted to remote and hybrid work after 2020. When the general commute disappears, so does the bike commuter. The state didn't lose its cycling culture. Trails, recreational riding, and bike advocacy remain strong. But cycling as a daily commute took a significant hit.

Colorado's data points to a broader tension that cycling advocates will need to grapple with: the rise of hybrid work is good for quality of life but potentially corrosive to the commute-based cycling numbers that have historically defined success in this space. Commute share has long been the primary measure cities use to justify cycling infrastructure spending. When that number falls, funding often follows.

The National Picture: A Divided Map

Zoom out, and the overall picture is sobering for cycling advocates: 31 of 50 states saw bicycle commute share decline between 2019 and 2023. That's a clear majority of the country moving in the wrong direction, even as investment in cycling infrastructure has accelerated in many places.

The divide is partly geographic, with coastal and Mountain West states that built their cycling identities in the pre-pandemic era now struggling to hold share, while some traditionally car-centric states in the Midwest and Northeast quietly gained ground. It's partly demographic too, shaped by where people moved during the pandemic years and what commuting habits they brought with them.

The states that grew bike commuting share tend to share a few characteristics: compact, walkable urban cores; sustained infrastructure investment; and diverse commuter populations who haven't fully settled into car dependence. The states that fell tend to be either remote-work hubs that lost their daily commuter base or fast-growing Sun Belt states where infrastructure hasn't kept pace with population.

Summary

The 2019-to-2023 window was one of the most disruptive periods in American commuting history, and bicycle commuting absorbed those disruptions unevenly. Some states used the moment to grow a new cycling habit among a broader slice of their workforce. Others watched years of progress erode as remote work, migration, and shifting urban dynamics changed who was commuting and how.

What the data tells us is that cycling momentum isn't self-sustaining. It requires the right combination of infrastructure, density, and daily habit, and when any one of those shifts, the numbers follow. Hawaii's rise and Oregon's fall aren't opposites so much as two expressions of the same truth: where you make cycling feel practical and safe, people ride. Where conditions change, they don't.

For the states climbing the rankings, the challenge now is building the kind of everyday cycling infrastructure that turns a trend into a permanent shift in how people think about getting to work. For the states that fell, the opportunity is just as real, because commuter habits, like commuter routes, can always be redesigned.

Methodology

Data is drawn from the U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey (ACS) 1-Year Estimates, Table B08301 (Means of Transportation to Work), for 2019 and 2023. The ranking metric is change in bicycle commute share expressed in percentage points (2023 share minus 2019 share). Share is calculated as bicycle commuters divided by total workers age 16 and older who commute. The 2020 ACS 1-year estimates are excluded because the Census Bureau classified them as experimental following pandemic-related non-response. District of Columbia and Puerto Rico are excluded; all 50 states are included.

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