Originally Posted by Xanti Andia
One thing is unclear though, you ask how many bicycles your own, is that the tandem team or the individual answering?. I assume it is the individual as it is written, but the team might make more sense, so you might not get consistent answers.
It's relative... not all tandem owners have "teams", per se, and some "couples" have different views of ownership when it comes to bicycles.
So, while a married couple might claim to have 9 bicycles (like us, where only one is truly Debbie's and where she is ostensibly the 1/2 owner of the three tandems), an unmarried tandem owner without a steady riding partner would most likely lay claim to only the bikes they actually own. Then again, someone responding who is part of a couple who live together may opt to include their collective bike count.
Again, this is not a scientific survey by any stretch: average response counts are usually around 500 out of what I must assume are about 1,500 members of Hobbes, Double-Forte, and this forum + a few others who get picked up by my website. Therefore, if you assume that on average some 5,000 tandems have been sold annually in North America over the past 20 years (let's call it an even 100,000), we're only looking at an incredibly small and statistically skewed sample. However, despite it's weaknesses, these little surveys so give some insight to the other tandem enthusiasts who lurk on the Internet who post to forums like this and allow folks like yourself to see where you might fall relative to their perspectives and experiences.