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A landmark global study has revealed that, while we are producing more bikes than cars, they are getting nowhere near the same level of use, opening up the possibility they could play a greater role in the fight against climate change.

There are many positive impacts that come with riding a bike for the individual and society, including improving physical and mental health, curbing greenhouse gas emissions, improving living costs, and so on.

The new study, published in Nature Communications, compares the global levels of bike numbers and ownership, then compares these figures with the level of bike use. The study goes an extra mile by comparing the data to car ownership and use.

Global bike production over the past several decades was actually higher than that of global car production: an annual growth of 3.4% between 1962 and 2015.

Across this period, the world has produced a whopping 4.65 billion bikes, which is 2.4 times that of global car production.

This is understandable in some respects. A bike is a single-person vehicle, so there may be multiple bikes per household and they are more affordable than cars.

However, when it comes to usage, the global observations aren’t clear cut. There is a lot of variation between different countries based on economy, population density, geography, culture and general transport behaviours.

The authors identified 5 ‘types’ of countries with respect to their bike and ownership habits.

Australia, for example, shows a high level of bike ownership (around 1.7 million bikes were purchased in the 2020–21 financial year alone) but the highest level of car ownership. When it comes to bike and car usage, the numbers are wildly different. Nearly 80% of trips in Australia are by car, and fewer than 5% of trips are by bike.

The authors speculate that the reason why bike ownership is so disproportionate with their use in Australia is the public perception that bike riding is a leisure activity rather than a means of transport.

At the global scale, the authors found that, generally speaking, high bicycle ownership does not necessarily lead to high bike use. In fact, bike use for the most part is pretty dismal compared to car use.

If we can reshape this thinking the future could be, literally, life changing. The authors claim that, if everyone in the world rode 1.6 km each day, instead of driving, around 414 million metric tons of carbon emission could be reduced. This is equivalent to Britain’s annual carbon emissions in 2015.

The greatest global barrier in leveraging the power of bikes is the collective will to rethink what our transport system looks like. To rethink our habit of hopping in cars for trips that could otherwise have been made by bike.

Simply put, we have tools for taking climate action but we aren’t properly using them.