ByeByeBaby
Active Member
I was interested in your question, and googling around found this paper which talks in general about cycling rates. Inspired by it, I grabbed the 2011 Canadian Community Health Survey, which asks three questions about cycling: One thing that the authors of that paper didn't dig into is that the CCHS tracks respondents by health region, which provides a somewhat meaningful sub-provincial geographic breakdown.
- In the last 3 months, did you cycle to commute to work or school?
- In the last 3 months, did you cycle for leisure?
- In the last 12 months, did you cycle?
So youinger people - especially kids - cycle more, no surprise. Two other key things to note, though, is that once you get to adults, there's not really much of a drop from 18 to 49, and even into the 50s and 60s there's still a substantial share; about 2/3 as many people cycling in their 50s as in their 20s, and over 50% as many cycling in their 60s as in their 20s. So the top level answer is that yes, there is a substantial chunk - about 40% of the population - who cycle. And while that doesn't split inner city and suburb, it would be impossible to have a rate that high with only inner city residents cycling, given how large a share of these cities live in suburbs. It also shows how small a share of the cycling population ride to commute -- which is all we get from the bike to work data. The paper I linked does show that leisure cyclists averaged 16 trips, commute only cyclists 25 trips and both leisure & commute made 52 trips in the previous 3 months. That means that while leisure-only cyclists are about 85% of all cyclists in Calgary, they only produce around 65% of the trips.
One good thing, as it happens, is that in Ontario and BC, health districts are smaller than in Alberta, so we can look into this in more detail. Toronto and Vancouver (the cities proper) are both individual health regions, and their suburbs (the rest of Metro Vancouver; Durham, Halton, York and Peel) are also individual health regions, so using this as a definition, we can look at city vs suburb a little more.
As it happens, the last 12 months question wasn't asked in BC, so we can only look at Toronto here.
It's a little mixed. Toronto's suburbs have a slightly higher cycling rate than the city. Vancouver has a higher rate than the suburbs, but this is driven mostly by the younger adult bracket. It also seems like it's more a case of Vancouver being particularly good -- note that their suburbs cycle at similar rates to Toronto and Calgary. We're actually ahead a little bit of both cities.
So yeah, there's pretty good demand for bike parking - about 40% of Calgarians cycle, and the evidence suggests it's as high in the suburbs as in more urban areas. (Even higher if you consider that the highest cycling group - kids under 18 - live disproportionately more in the suburbs; although they also live less in multifamily buildings.) And that doesn't count the people who own bikes that they never use.
