The Tragedy of the Unmet Demand for Walking and Biking

In the 2003 and 2005 surveys, Porter Novelli gauged market preferences for a variety of "smart growth" attributes including, for our purposes, the extent to which people believe it is important or very important to be able to walk or bike to work and shopping.9 The surveys are quite large, with 5,873 respondents in 2003 and 4,943 respondents in 2005.10 By contrast, other surveys we use range in sample size from about 1,000 to about 2,000. Because Porter Novelli asked the same questions in those years, our total sample size is 10,816.n Given this large sample size, we are able to parse respondents based on a number of key demographic indicators such as age, income, and household composition. Because the future demographic make-up of the U.S. will be different from 2005, we need to decompose the Porter Novelli survey into demographic subgroups.