Bike Boom goes international

From a Washington Post Foreign Service report

The number of cyclists has doubled in a decade in cities as disparate as Berlin and Bogota. Global bicycle production has increased for six consecutive years, according to a report by the Earth Policy Institute. Sales at Giant have doubled since 2002 and continue to accelerate, up 24 percent in the first half of this year.

While Northern Europe and Japan have figured out how to make bicycle commuting a safe, cheap alternative to driving, the United States, Canada, Australia and Britain have not. And the world's two most populous nations, China and India, are discarding bicycles in favor of cars.

Commuters in Northern Europe have been lured out of their cars by bike lanes, secure bike parking and easy access to mass transportation

Germans are 10 times more likely than Americans to ride a bike and three times less likely to get hurt while doing so. On any given workday, more commuters park their bikes at train and subway stations in Tokyo (704,000) than cycle to work in the entire United States (535,000), according to the Tokyo government and the U.S. Census.

In 2003, [London] imposed a steep "congestion charge" of about $16 for cars driving into the city center. Within a year, inner-city cycling had increased by about 25 percent.

In Berlin, biking now accounts for 12 percent of all transportation. The city has 3.4 million residents, and the city estimates that they use their bicycles a million times a day.

There's a lot more in the article and a video of Tokyo's robotic bike storage attached to the online version. With bike friendly stairs.

Since April, when robots went to work parking bicycles at Edogawa's Kasai station, there has been a 20 percent spike in commuting by bike.

From the same day, there's an article about how approachable Mexico City's mayor is and how riding a bike is part of what makes him so.

He blasts past the palm-tree shaded park and the early-morning taco vendors -- trailed by his entourage of a dozen cycling bodyguards and city officials. B-list bureaucrats position themselves along the route, knowing this may be their only chance at face time with "El Jefe," Mexico City Mayor Marcelo Ebrard.

Comments

[Joel]

I didn't see it in the article, but are the numbers for Germany normalized (that is, did they figure out that Germans are 1/3 as likely to get hurt per person-hour of cycling) or raw? If it is raw (which I suspect) that is even more impressive.

(Sorry to go all stats geek on you, but with there being ~ 10 times as many cyclists the number of potential injuries/accidents is massive)

[washcycle]

I'm not sure how they got those numbers. Sorry. But I did see a study stating the more cyclists that there are, the more that accidents go down.