Here’s What Happens When Countries Use Bikes to Fight Emissions

Half of the world's greenhouse gas emissions come from passenger vehicles. Every plan for future emissions cuts includes at least one variant of getting people out of internal-combustion vehicles. The Netherlands and the Danes both have bicycle-focused transportation that gets a lot of people out of cars altogether.

An international team of researchers decided to look into what factors have enabled these countries to make that shift and what could happen if more countries adopted a similar transportation focus. It's difficult to get reliable data on bicycles, and bicycle focused transportation could eliminate emissions equivalent to that of a decent-sized industrialized country.

What number of bikes are there?

There are good figures on the use of motor vehicles. The researchers had to estimate the number of bikes in most countries because this is almost never the case. They combined figures on manufacturing, imports, and exports to create a model that shows how long bikes last before being junked. The data is out of date due to the Pandemic, as it runs up to 2015. They were able to make estimates for 95 percent of the world's GDP.

There isn't a lot of data on vehicle use in some countries. In some cases, it was estimated using local data from within the country, while in others it was derived from countries with similar demographic makeup.

Since the 1960s, over 4.5 billion bikes have been produced, more than twice the number of cars. China has a quarter of the global bike total, and it's one of five countries that have ended up with half of these. Smaller, wealthier countries have the highest bike-to- body ratios. There are more than one bike per person in many places.

The countries were broken down into five categories. Low-GDP countries have few cars or bikes. Car ownership grew rapidly but from a low level and bicycle ownership grew slowly or not at all. The category started from a higher level of ownership of both types of vehicles. Italy, Poland, and Portugal were included.

Australia, Canada, and the US all had high levels of bike and car ownership, but used the cars more often. The researchers think it's due to their vast land areas. The category consisting of industrialized European countries was characterized as having high bicycle ownership and stable levels of car ownership, but with citizens who actually use their bikes. The basic transport needs are met already, and the pursuit for a more eco-friendly and healthy life has driven the increase of bicycle ownership, according to the authors.

Some cases are not normal. Japan and Switzerland have a lot of cars but a great public transit system. Norway has weather and terrain that discourages cyclists. Some countries with high rates of traffic deaths have low levels of cycling.