Originally Posted by tjspiel

I'm not sure such a statistic exists or if it would be useful. You're comparing one European city to a largish, non-homogeneous country.

Here's something:

"The Dutch own 18 million bikes, a little more than 1 bike per man, woman and child in the country. Around half the population rides a bike once a day. The average distance traveled by bike PER PERSON PER DAY was 2.5 kilometers (1.5 miles) in 2006, according to the Central Bureau for Statistics."

If I understand that correctly, the 2.5 k per day per person also includes the 50% of population that don't ride at all on a given day, so obviously 2.5 is a bit short. It also doesn't separate commutes from other trips and includes the whole country, -not just Amsterdam.


Other relevant statistics (to me anyway) would be population density. Chicago is a bit more densely populated than Amsterdam while Minneapolis is only about half as densely populated. Houston has about half the density of Minneapolis.

My theory is that in general, places with higher population densities (people less spread out) would have shorter commutes on average. But there are a whole lot of other variables of course including how the cities are laid out. I've worked in downtown Minneapolis at several locations for a couple of different organizations. In any office I've worked in, the majority of employees don't live in Minneapolis. How true is this in Amsterdam? I have no idea.

In my office, there's one regular commuter who commutes less than 3 miles. The rest of us regulars (about 9) are in the 5 to 10 mile range. A couple of folks who live in nearby suburbs (or St. Paul) commute once in a while and their commutes are in the 8 to 15 mile range.

Also worth noting is that there are plenty (a majority in fact) of people in Minneapolis who don't commute in spandex. In my office anyway the ones that do are the ones who ride the longer distances.

Sorry, I know a lot of that is anecdotal, but it's all I've got.