In light of the fact that more people are riding AATA buses that ever before, some of you might be wondering if the number of people putting their bikes on the buses is also increasing.

Well it is.

According to the AATA, the number of people boarding an AATA bus and putting their bikes on the bus has been increasing for the last several years.

In May 2008, there were 3,056 bus boardings with bikes.  This is up 18% from 2,593 bike boardings for May 2007.

What might account for this increase?  Well it makes sense that as more people ride the bus, more people will bring their bikes on the bus.  But I also wonder if some of the reason is that people are biking from further away to catch the bus.  Or perhaps more people are just biking in general, and that is leading to more bikes on the bus.

Another interesting stat that I just came across is how many people in the downtown report commuting by bike:

In a 2001 UM study, 2.2% of people surveyed reported commuting by bike to the downtown.
In a 2005 UM study, the percentage increased to 4.2%
And in a study conducted last year (October 2007) by getDowntown (which had similar numbers of survey respondents), the bike commuting percentage was 7.4%

So according to the data at hand, there definitely seems to be an increase in the numbers of people bike commuting, as I surmised in yesterday’s post.