TTechnical innovations such as the development of electric cars, lightweight construction methods and improved fuel efficiency are popular approaches to reducing road traffic emissions. But in order to achieve the desired climate goals, it probably also requires a rethinking of the way we move. How much CO2 A study by a team led by ecologist Gang Liu from the University of Southern Denmark shows that savings can be made if we leave the car at home and jump on our bicycles, especially over short distances. The scientists collected worldwide data on bicycle production, ownership and use from 1962 to 2015 and analyzed global relationships. They found that cycling, as the Dutch are showing us, saves around 686 million tons of CO2 can be saved each year. Like in Journal Communication Earth & Environment described, every person worldwide would only have to cycle 2.6 kilometers a day instead of driving a car. In 2015, this corresponded to 85 percent of Germany’s emissions. But even 1.6 kilometers per day – the Danish average – would already 414 million tons of CO2 are saved – this corresponds to the total CO2– Released by the UK in 2015.
It has long been debated that switching from car to bicycle has a significant impact on the environment, but bicycles play a central role in road transport in only a few countries. To explore this, the team generated an overview of bicycle production and inventory in 60 countries and compared this to that of cars. They found that the number of bicycles produced increased by an average of about 3.4 percent annually from 1970 to 2015, which exceeded the number of cars and their growth rate at all times. Bicycles were most frequently manufactured in China – in 2015 at 65.7 percent, followed by Brazil with 5 percent, India with 4 percent and Italy and Germany with 2 percent each.
More wheels than cars
But it was not only in production that bicycles were ahead of cars: more people in most countries – especially in industrialized countries – owned a bicycle. The Netherlands and Denmark are front runners, with theoretically every person there owning at least one bicycle over the entire period. The scientists suspect that the reasons for this are the widely available information and the bicycle-friendly infrastructure. On the other hand, low- to middle-income countries – such as Africa and Asia – had significantly lower bicycle ownership per capita compared to the global average.