Friday 18 February 2011

A million journeys per hour by bike


A few days ago, I posted some information about statistics on cycle usage in the Netherlands. Based on that blog post, Mark Wagenbuur made the video above illustrating the very same statistics: In the daytime on a normal working day in the Netherlands, more than a million journeys are made by bike every hour.

Remember that the population of the Netherlands is just 16 million. That's only twice the population of New York or London. However, the number of journeys, spread across a whole country is much higher: 16 million Dutch people make more cycle journeys between them than 300 million Americans, 65 million British and 20 million Australians all added together, and they do so with greater safety than cyclists in any of those countries.

4 comments:

Brush-Head said...

Compared with the UK this is idyllic. Are there any statistics about health benefits related to cycling? It seems to me that there could well be an offset here where the infrastructure for cyclists can be set against better health & therefore lower state medical costs.

David Hembrow said...

Brush-Head: There are quite a few posts about health effects of cycling on the blog. In particular, this one is probably of interest.

Slow Factory said...

My dear, the teaser on the homepage says "English-speaking world" (!) Yet herein you leave out not only Canada, New Zealand(!!!), Bermuda and Belize, but Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, South Africa, Singapore, India....

David Hembrow said...

GIF: Of your list of countries, I think only India is likely to make a real difference. People certainly do cycle in India. English is only officially the second official language, though.