How many bicycle are there in the world?

How Many Bikes Are There in the World?

Nobody knows exactly how many bikes exist in the world, but it is estimated that there are somewhere around 1 billion. It’s a huge number. For comparison, there are around 1.5 billion cars in the world.

At the end of the last century, the numbers were as follows:

China is massively holding the first position. China, India, EU, Taiwan, and Japan are responsible for 87% of global production.

• 364,000 bicycles are produced daily. That’s 15,000 per hour, or 253 a minute, or 4 bikes a second.
• 47 670 bikes are being sold daily. Yes, every two seconds, someone will buy a bike.
  

  Source: Statista

• Every 19th person in the world buys a bike each year.
• The production numbers for bicycles are 2.5x higher than for cars.
  

  Bikes vs Cars

   

• In 2016, Copenhagen announced that for the first time in history there were more bikes than cars on its streets. It has been one of Copenhagen’s top priorities to make the city bicycle-friendly, which proved to be a big success.
• The rise in the past 20 years has been 68%.
• In 2016, almost 20 million bicycles were sold in the European Union.

 

The country with most cycling enthusiasts is Denmark. It’s pretty well known that Danish people love cycling and the numbers prove it:

• Denmark is the most bicycle-friendly country in the world. 9 out of 10 people own a bike, whereas just 4 out of 10 people own a car.
• Together, people in Copenhagen alone bike around the world 35 times a day. That’s because every Copenhagen residents cycles around 3 km every day and half of Danish children ride their bikes to school.
• Moreover, 25% of all the trips in the country shorter than 5 km are completed on a bicycle.
• Most Scandinavian politicians also regularly bike to work. For example, instead of being driven to work in an expensive limousine like his colleagues from other countries, the Danish Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen hops on his bike every morning.

 

However, that also means that the number of bikes that get thrown away is on the rise as well.

• Around 15 million bikes end up discarded by their owners every year, according to gotjunk.com. Unfortunately, a large number of these bikes end up in landfills.
• China has a huge problem with old, discarded bicycles. There are not many recycling facilities around, so people just throw their unused bikes on piles.
  

  Abandoned Sharing-Bikes Create ‘Graveyards’ In China. Source: DesignYouTrust.com