New Website Notice for Edinburgh Bicycle

Please note that the Edinburgh Bicycle Co-Operative now has a new website. To visit the new website, please follow this link.

If you have bookmarked a page from the old website, please update your bookmarked page so that you can go straight to our new website. Thank you.

The Edinburgh Bicycle website team.
                 

 


CYCLING SNIPPETS TO BORE PEOPLE WITH AT PARTIES

Each year Britons cycle about 5 billion kilometres. But this is less than 1% of total distance travelled by other means.

There are around 21 million bicycles in Britain today. This almost equals car ownership.

Cycle use in the UK is relatively low: only 2.3% of journeys are currently made by bicycle. This compares with 9.8% in Germany, 18.4% in Denmark, and 27.3% in Holland.

Nearly three quarters of all journeys made are local trips under 5 miles - even 60% of car trips are under 5 miles. Half of all journeys are less than two miles, but most trips between 1 and 2 miles are still done by car!

Cycling at least 20 miles a week reduces the risk of coronary heart disease to less than half that for non-cyclists. If one-third of all short car journeys were made by bike, national heart disease rates would fall by between five and ten per cent.

Choke Choke
Traffic in Britain has increased by 50% in the last 10 years. The Government is expecting a further increase of up to 143% in the next 25 years.

The car uses 3 megajoules per passenger mile.
The bike uses only 0.1 megajoule per passenger mile.

Cycling is two-and-a-half times more energy efficient than walking.

The worlds largest bicycle was made by Californian Dave Moore. Called the Frankencycle, its wheels were 3.05 metres in diameter.

Over 80 million bicycles are made in the world every year, 75 percent of them in the Far East.

The modern day bicycle was invented by a SCOT - Kirkpatrick Macmillan. He put pedals on a bicycle in about 1840 and was subsequently arrested (in about 1842) and fined for knocking a child over when riding on the pavement.