Transportation produces about a quarter of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, and passenger cars are responsible for more than half of that figure. As such, almost every plan for future emissions reductions includes some variant of getting people out of internal combustion engine vehicles — usually into electric versions of the same vehicle. But a few countries have found an alternative route to reduce emissions: Denmark and the Netherlands both have bicycle-oriented transport that takes many people out of the car entirely.
An international team of researchers decided to investigate what factors enabled these countries to make that shift and what could happen if more countries took a similar focus on transportation. Two conclusions are clear: it is difficult to get reliable data on bicycles, and bicycle-oriented transport could eliminate emissions comparable to those of a decent industrialized country.
How many bicycles are there?
We have very good figures on the use of motor vehicles through government required licensing and registration data. For bicycles, this is almost never the case, so the researchers had to estimate how many bicycles were present in most countries. To do this, they took production, import and export figures and combined them in a model with information about how long bikes typically last before being thrown away. The data runs as far as 2015, so is already a bit outdated, as the pandemic has boosted cycling in many countries, but the countries they can estimate cover 95 percent of global GDP.
Vehicle usage data is not available in every country. In some cases, it was estimated from local data from the country; in other countries, the estimate was derived from countries with similar demographics.
Bicycles, at least in numbers, are much more common than cars, with more than 4.5 billion bicycles produced since the 1960s, about 2.4 times the number of cars. More than half of these have ended up in just five countries: China, the US, India, Japan and Germany, with China accounting for nearly a quarter of the global bicycle total. Per capita, however, the numbers were very different, with smaller, wealthier countries having the highest bike-to-body ratios. Places such as Denmark, the Netherlands and Norway all have more than one bicycle per person.
In general, the researchers divided countries into five categories. One of these categories included low GDP countries with few cars or bicycles. Another category, including China, Chile and Brazil, includes car ownership that grew rapidly but from a low level, and bicycle ownership that grew slowly or not at all. A similar category included the same pattern, but assumed a higher level of ownership of both types of vehicles. This included places like Italy, Poland and Portugal.
The category that included countries like Australia, Canada, and the US had a high level of ownership for both bicycles and cars, but used the cars much more frequently. The researchers attributed this in part to their ‘extensive land areas’. Finally, the category of industrialized European countries was characterized by very high bicycle ownership and stable car ownership, but with citizens actually using their bicycle. Here, the authors suggest, “basic transportation needs have already been met, and the pursuit of a more environmentally friendly and healthier life has led to an increase in bicycle ownership.”
There are some odd ducks in here. Some affluent societies, such as Japan and Switzerland, have many cars, but a spectacular public transportation system that lowers their use. Some rich European countries, such as Norway, have weather and terrain that discourages widespread bicycle use. And in a number of countries with a lot of road deaths, such as Brazil, Russia and Thailand, there is little cycling.
All in all, the conclusion of the basic analysis of ownership and use is that wealth and the right geography are both prerequisites for a bicycle-oriented culture. But there are no guarantees that someone will develop. That seems to require a societal-level choice to adopt it, along with a government willing to create the necessary infrastructure.
