The Paper's chief reporter He Liping intern Huang Jinxuan
In 1868, the world's first ever-recorded cycling race was held in the Parc De Saint-Croix in France. 80 years later, Tianjin in 1950 gave birth to the first bicycle independently developed by New China, the "Flying Pigeon Brand" bicycle. With the rapid growth of bicycle ownership worldwide, bicycles have been used for many purposes, from military operations in the First and Second World Wars to leisure and recreation, physical exercise, and have also changed from an expensive luxury to a daily necessity for ordinary people in many countries.
However, with the development of industrialization, the popularity of automobiles has compressed people's demand for bicycle travel. Today, transportation accounts for 1/4 of global fuel-related greenhouse gas emissions, half of which come from private cars, including passenger cars and trucks.
Cycling is thought to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but bicycles make up only a small fraction of transportation in most countries. So, how much carbon is hidden behind the current global bicycle use? How did the development process between bicycles and cars gradually come into being?
The number of bicycles per capita and the number of private cars per capita in the period 1962-2015 are pointed out in the countries of the United States, Denmark, Italy, China and Angola. Figure from the research team
The first global-scale dataset of bicycle ownership and usage
Recently, a team of Chinese scholars and Professor Liu Gang of the University of Southern Denmark published a study in the international academic journal Communications - Earth and Environment, which compiled a global dataset covering bicycle ownership and use in various countries from 1962 to 2015, trying to answer the above questions.
Liu Gang et al. divide different countries into five different types according to the historical development of bicycle ownership and car ownership per capita. Among them, categories 1 and 2 are mainly low- and middle-income countries, and categories 3 to 5 are high-income countries. In group 1 countries such as India and Bolivia, bicycle and car ownership is still below the global average due to lower income levels, despite the gradual increase in motorization rates. Countries such as China and Brazil, which are classified as Category 2, have been rapidly motorized over the past 30 years and have seen a rapid increase in car ownership, but self-owned ownership has generally stabilized or even declined.
Category 3 countries (e.g. Poland, Spain, Italy, etc.) have similar trends to those in Category 2 countries, but their ownership is higher than that of Category 2 countries. Group 4 countries (the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) and Group 5 (industrialized countries in Europe) have the highest car and bicycle ownership, respectively, and have higher levels of motorization.
Historical bicycle ownership per capita from 1962 to 2015 and car ownership per capita. The graph is divided into four colored quadrants (dashed lines in the graph) by the median of the two in 2015. Thus, the first (blue), second (pink), third (yellow), and fourth (green) quadrants represent a combination of high bike ownership and high car ownership, low bike ownership and high car ownership, low bicycle ownership and low car ownership, and high bicycle ownership and low car ownership. The black, blue, orange, red, and green dots, letters, or lines in the inner and outer diagrams represent Category 1, Class 2, Category 3, Category 4, and Category 5 countries, respectively.
In an exclusive interview with the surging news (www.thepaper.cn) reporter, Liu Gang said in an exclusive interview with the surging news (www.thepaper.cn) that in the past, there was no comparable bicycle ownership data between countries on a global scale. "We want to know (apart from bike sharing) exactly how many bikes are in each country, how many of these bikes are in use, whether there are any patterns between ownership and usage, and how this relates to car data."
In fact, Liu Gang's research group has previously focused on the research direction of sustainable transportation transformation, and has conducted research on various transportation subsystems, including electric vehicles and even the automotive field.
However, compared with the acquisition of car-related data, the collection of bicycle data is significantly more difficult. Because in most countries, bicycles do not have a more complete registration system like cars. And, despite the rich literature on bicycle use, research tends to focus on a few cities and regions (e.g., Stockholm in Sweden, London in the UK, etc.).
Therefore, before Liu Gang's team, the historical pattern of global bicycle production, trading volume, inventory and usage has not been well analyzed, and a comprehensive survey of the role of bicycles in sustainable road transportation is impossible to talk about.
What Liu Gang's team has to do is to speculate and excavate approximate data on global bicycle ownership and usage in recent decades through various methods, and consolidate them to the same scale to summarize its characteristics and seek basic laws at the global level. "We're trying to really understand the causal relationship between the two, including the drivers behind bike use and retention."
In this study, in order to obtain more accurate data, the team finally simulated an approximation of bicycle ownership over the years by combining industrial statistics on bicycle production in various countries, import and export trade data, and bicycle life functions.
"We have summarized the historical development trend of various countries. Before there is no data, the development of national bicycle, car ownership and usage may be difficult to empirically verify. But through the data, there is a distinction between developed countries. Countries like the United States, Canada, and Australia show a difference in bicycle usage from European countries. I think this phenomenon itself reflects the novelty of the study. Liu Gang said in an interview.
China: The "Bicycle Kingdom" of yesteryear
Liu Gang's team found through the data that the growth rate of global bicycle production exceeded that of cars in the period from 1962 to 2015. The study shows that global bicycle production increased from 20.7 million units in 1962 to 123.3 million units in 2015, a compound annual growth rate of 3.4%, higher than global automobile production (from 14 million to 68.6 million units, a growth rate of 3.0%). Moreover, from 1962 to 2015, the total global production of bicycles was 4.65 billion units, which is 2.4 times the total global production of automobiles.
a chart shows the historical production of global cars and bicycles from 1962 to 2015, and b chart shows the share of global bicycle production in 1970 and 2015. The country code is based on ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 code. ROW stands for the rest of the world.
In the 1980s and 1990s, China's bicycle boom led to a significant increase in the global share of the top five countries in bicycle inventory (China, the United States, India, Japan and Germany) from 62% in 1980 to 68% in 1999. But then it declined due to China's rapid motorization. Despite this, by 2015, China was the country with the largest production and ownership of bicycles in the world, accounting for 65.7% and 24% of the global total, respectively.
However, researchers have also found that high bicycle ownership does not necessarily equal high bicycle use – cycling accounts for less than 5% of daily travel in most countries in the world.
In China, with the development of the economy in recent decades, the rapid increase in automobiles, at the same time, the frequency of people's bicycle use has gradually decreased, and the number of bicycle ownership has stabilized or even declined.
In an attempt to explain the relationship, Liu Gang mentioned to reporters several factors that he believes are currently affecting China's bicycle ownership. First of all, in his view, although the bicycle currently has more leisure and entertainment functions, at the national level, the bicycle is still more to meet the travel needs of the people. When the mobility function is replaced by the car, the decline in demand for bicycles is inevitable.
Second, he believes that China's urban development methods are often car-oriented, which also means that in terms of road design, convenient cars should take precedence over convenient bicycles and pedestrians. In terms of road construction and storage of bicycles, the infrastructure of bicycles is not as perfect as that of cars.
But at the same time, Liu Gang also added, "In recent years, some cities in China have begun to have some changes, which is a very good trend." ”
In addition, the emergence of shared bicycles has rapidly reduced the market share of ordinary bicycles, and has also greatly affected the ownership of private ordinary bicycles in China. However, Liu Gang believes that from a macro level, the convenient, environmentally friendly and healthy characteristics of sharing bicycles have intuitive benefits for the public.
In another study on bike-sharing, he mentioned that the advent of bike-sharing solved the "last mile" problem for city dwellers (such as commuting between homes, workplaces and public transport stations), dragged some city dwellers back to two-wheeler life, and led to a slight increase in bicycle stocks for the first time since 1995. The study shows that in 2017, there were about 23 million DSBs (pileless shared bicycles) in China, using 29.9 billion kilometers in kilometers, which means that the inventory efficiency of DSBs (3.6 km/bike/day) is much higher than that of conventional bicycles in industrialized countries such as the Netherlands (2.5 km/bike/day), Denmark (1.8 km/bike/day) and the United Kingdom (0.3 km/bike/day).
Therefore, although shared bicycles also face problems such as short life and high saturation, in the long run, it will bring about a considerable increase in carbon revenue.
Denmark and the Netherlands – a "bicycle culture" in the blood
As the two countries with the highest bicycle ownership in the world, the Netherlands and Denmark have a strong "bicycle culture". Their capitals, Amsterdam and Copenhagen, are also known as the two "cycling capitals" of Europe.
Liu Gang, who has worked and lived in Denmark for many years, has a profound experience of Danish "bicycle culture". He said it was something that the Danes "put in their blood." In the capital Copenhagen, everything about bicycles permeates the details everywhere, "the garbage cans next to the bike lanes are all sloping, making it easy for people to throw garbage when riding; Because the bicycle does not have brake lights, the cyclist needs to make gestures to indicate a turn; Take care to wear a helmet when riding." In the eyes of the Danes, green and healthy travel is their habitual way of life.
In the study, the researchers calculated a set of data that could eventually avert about 620,000 deaths from obesity if cycling patterns in Denmark and the Netherlands were followed globally. If people follow the Danish bicycle usage model, that is, riding 1.6 kilometers a day, they may reduce carbon emissions by 414 million tons per year, equivalent to the annual carbon emissions of the United Kingdom in 2015; if they follow the Dutch bicycle use model, cycling 2.6 kilometers a day may reduce carbon emissions by 686 million tons per year. That is to say, if the global implementation of cycling policies and infrastructure development similar to those in Denmark and the Netherlands, it may release huge climate benefits.
The potential benefits of increasing bike use in both experimental scenarios. Assuming that current bicycle use patterns in Denmark and the Netherlands are followed globally, assume that the carbon reductions used in the scenarios (a) and the health benefits (b), where benefits are measured in preventing death. c Chart shows current bike ownership, mode of transport share and obesity rates across countries in 2015. The bubble size in the c graph represents the inventory efficiency of bicycles (defined as the number of kilometers served per bike), and the color indicates the obesity rate nationwide.
The research team concluded that there is an urgent need for sustainable cycling through global policy planning and infrastructure construction, including using tax policies to guide less driving, encouraging cycling education and promoting cycling culture, and effective cycling lane planning and construction.
However, Liu Gang also pointed out that "the reality is unlikely to be as extreme as in the article, and the situation in various countries cannot be consistent with the small Denmark and the Netherlands." There are differences and commonalities between countries. ”
Nevertheless, how to build a good bicycle infrastructure and carry out publicity and guidance may be the experience that countries can learn from Denmark and the Netherlands.
Editor-in-Charge: Li Yuequn Photo Editor: Hu Mengxi
Proofreader: Ding Xiao