Cycling behaviour in 17 countries across 6 continents: levels of cycling, who cycles, for what purpose, and how far?

ABSTRACT

International comparisons of cycling behaviour have typically been limited to high-income countries and often limited to the prevalence of cycling, with lack of discussions on demographic and trip characteristics. We used a combination of city, regional, and national travel surveys from 17 countries across the six continents, ranging from years 2009 through 2019. We present a descriptive analysis of cycling behaviour including level of cycling, trip purpose and distance, and user demographics, at the city-level for 35 major cities (>1 million population) and in urbanised areas nationwide for 11 countries. The Netherlands, Japan and Germany are among the highest cycling countries and their cities among the highest cycling cities. In cities and countries with high cycling levels, cycling rates tend to be more equal between work and non-work trips, whereas in geographies with low cycling levels, cycling to work is higher than cycling for other trips. In terms of cycling distance, patterns in high- and low-cycling geographies are more similar. We found a strong positive association between the level of cycling and women’s representation among cyclists. In almost all geographies with cycling mode share greater than 7% women made as many cycle trips as men, and sometimes even greater. The share of cycling trips by women is much lower in geographies with cycling mode shares less than 7%. Among the geographies with higher levels of cycling, children (<16 years) are often overrepresented. Older adults (>60 years) remain underrepresented in all geographies but have relatively better representation where levels of cycling are high. In low-cycling settings, females are underrepresented across all the age groups, and more so when older than 16 years. With increasing level of cycling, representation of females improves across all the age groups, and most significantly among children and older adults. Clustering the cities and countries into homogeneous cycling typologies reveals that high cycling levels always coincide with high representation of females and good representations of all age groups. In low-cycling settings, it is the reverse. We recommend that evaluations of cycling policies include usage by gender and age groups as benchmarks in addition to overall use. To achieve representation across different age and gender groups, making neighbourhoods cycling friendly and developing safer routes to school, should be equally high on the agenda as cycling corridors that often cater to commuting traffic.

KEYWORDS:

• cycling
• gender
• age
• distance
• inequality
• low-and-middle income countries
• high-income countries

Acknowledgements

Contributions by RG, JW, LG, MT and LT were funded by TIGTHAT, an MRC Global Challenges Project MR/P024408/1. AG was funded by METAHIT, an MRC Methodology Panel project (MR/ P02663X/1). BZD is supported by an RMIT VC Fellowship. This project (JW, RG, LT) has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 817754). This material reflects only the author's views and the Commission is not liable for any use that may be made of the information contained therein. JW was partly funded by the Global Diet and Activity Research Group. This group was funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) (16/137/64) using UK aid from the UK Government to support global health research. The views expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and not necessarily those of the NIHR or the UK Department of Health and Social Care. We acknowledge Prof Ashish Verma at Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru for providing dataset for Bengaluru city in India. We acknowledge the support of Dr Tolullah Oni from the Global Diet and Activity Research Group and Network (GDAR) who facilitated the acquisition of data for Kisumu (Kenya). This study used the nationwide person trip survey data (2010 and 2015), provided by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism of Japan. The authors alone are responsible for the views expressed in this article and they do not necessarily represent the views, decisions or policies of the institutions with which they are affiliated.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by H2020 European Research Council: [Grant Number 817754]; Medical Research Council: [Grant Number MR/ P02663X/1,MR/P024408/1]; National Institute for Health Research: [Grant Number 16/137/64].