We exhibit a bijection between 132-avoiding permutations and Dyck paths. Using this bijection, it is shown that all the recently discovered results on generating functions for 132-avoiding permutations with a given number of occurrences of the pattern $12... k$ follow directly from old results on the enumeration of Motzkin paths, among which is a continued fraction result due to Flajolet. As a bonus, we use these observations to derive further results and a precise asymptotic estimate for the number of 132-avoiding permutations of $\{1,2,...,n\}$ with exactly $r$ occurrences of the pattern $12... k$. Second, we exhibit a bijection between 123-avoiding permutations and Dyck paths. When combined with a result of Roblet and Viennot, this bijection allows us to express the generating function for 123-avoiding permutations with a given number of occurrences of the pattern $(k-1)(k-2)... 1k$ in form of a continued fraction and to derive further results for these permutations.

17 pages, AmS-TeX