Highly Scientific Cycling Behavior Survey Results

Last Sunday I was thinking to myself how lucky I was that my chain didn’t explode when riding home with some precious cargo from DC Brau – especially since I was riding with one very heavy pannier, and my weight distribution was less then optimal.

pannier conundrum - When riding with only 1, which side do you choose and why? Left for me, makes me wider so cars give more room #bikedc

—
John Roche (@dirteng) January 16, 2012

This quickly spawned a conversation with a few other twitter-types, like @sharrowsDC (Who has a posse).  And a few other questions came about.  Mostly in my head.  Thus a highly scientific endeavor was undertaken.  A survey of cyclists in DC.  I relied heavily on my sophomore college textbook:

The final tally counts 92 DC area cyclists as respondents.  If we were to take the DC bike mode share (2.17%), and our population (599,657) – that would imply that 13,012 people use their bicycles every day for commuting purposes.  I’m guessing (scientifically) that the number of recreational cyclists is at least 7 times greater than commuter cyclists – so the number of cyclists in DC is probably near 100,000 persons.  We successfully captured 0.092% of the DC cycling population (sorry VA and MD, I made up these numbers and didn’t have mode share data for your states).

I owe a bunch of thanks to the twitter world for getting people to take the survey.  Especially @sharrowsDC.  Here is a picture of him helping with the survey:

@sharrowsDC. Using the Twitters

I tried to get as many people as I knew to participate as well.  Mostly by staring them down using my tripod mounted digital viewfinder.

Me. Surveying.

On to the Results….

Age & Gender:

Overall, the results came out to show that 68.5% of respondents were male, while 31.5% were female.  This is pretty comparable with what I expected.  The BikeArlingtonForum recently finished a poll and found a 73/27 male/female split.

Miles Per Week:

I was curious if there would be an obvious spike showing differences that might indicate commuters ride X, while recreational cyclists ride Y.  But that didn’t happen.  From the looks of it, most people crank out a few thousand miles per year.  No small task!

Miles Ridden Per Week

What To Wear?:

Another curiosity of mind was what people wore on these rides.  No real reason for this one – unless somebody seriously prefers to ride around the District in their birthday suit. What I found is that people really like to wear regular street clothes when on the bike.  Many even specifically noted that they buy/wear cycle specific street clothes.  With the exception of a few “curated” boutique shops in Boston and New York, I haven’t seen many shops carry these types of products.  (HINT HINT)

What we wear...

Where we shop:

My favorite answer to the “What is your favorite local bike shop” was “it’s complicated”.  Shops with great service get high marks.  I’ve only used 2 shops here for service and both score highly in my book.  Shops with just the right mix of accessories/gear are also important.  I think I have been to about 6 different shops looking for specific items.  So far, very few (maybe 1 1/2) of the shops had what I thought was a thorough and well stocked selection.  I understand that it is difficult to balance the right mix of products, and to keep them always in stock – but I often wish that places had just a little more.  Friendly people are another important quality.  Of the 6 or so shops I have visited locally, 3 score exceptionally well, one scores medium, and two were dismal.  I’m not going to call out shops that I have had good or bad experiences with, but I will say that your votes closely reflect some of my own personal experiences.

Click to enlarge

The Pannier Question:

This is what started it all, and I was surprised to see that the “towards traffic” option was selected only 64.5% of the time (meaning “towards the curb” was picked 35.5% of the time).  Based on some responses I had heard, reasons for picking the “towards traffic” side were:

• Don’t have it on your drivetrain side (no specifics why)
• Keep on left so cars give wider distance when passing
• Weight balance (presumably to balance drivetrain weight?)

The “right siders”  commented a bit less, but one good reason was that as a righty, it was easier to grab things out when stopped.  And lastly, one commenter also noted that it depends on the bike, as heel strike issues arise on specific models.

I honestly thought that left side made more sense, and don’t have a compelling reason not to continue doing that.

The Foot Down Question:

Here is another question that has left me more puzzled than to start with.  I figured most cyclists would drop their left foot to the ground when stopping.  The bike would lean to the left, and presumably you wouldn’t end up with a chainring grease stain on your calf.  But I have noticed a few people drop their right foot, and always and up with greasy legs.  Either way, the side you pick seems to be engrained in your subconscious mind – which led me to wonder if your dominant hand had any relevance.  I think the results speak for themselves… its complicated..

Stop. Drop. ________________. Roll.

One thing is for sure… us lefties are a small group!

Mixed Signals...

The Hand Signals Question:

Some people signal, some people don’t.  I only asked about right turns because for the left turns, you either do it, or you don’t.  For right turns, there is the traditional “left arm, bent up at 90 degrees”, the “stick right arm out”, and the “no signal” signals. There were a handful of responses that said how they signal right turns depends on the road conditions, traffic, how they feel, and the phase of the moon. 

I tend to agree that signaling can depend on many factors.  Sometimes the road conditions are just too unsafe to take your hand off the bar for a few seconds.  In addition, the traditional right turn signal (arm bent) is so out of use that many people simply don’t understand why a cyclist is waving to oncoming traffic.  Likewise with the “stick right arm straight out” there are pro’s and con’s.  I worry that drivers won’t see my arm depending on where we are positioned relative to each other.  So here are the results.  I think the important thing is that we ought to signal when we can safely do so. 

Signaling a right turn

The Scofflaw Question:

How good (or bad) are we really?  Some rules don’t make sense for cyclists.  Some definitely do.  Justifications for all answers could take a few years… so let’s get to the results!

Fin.  For now.

The last two questions of the survey were really complicated to analyze.  The first question, “What is your favorite ride” had so many responses of varying detail that there is no way to present graphically.  I’ll summarize the results another time and try to give links to the ride information.

The second question was about lighting.  Which, I should have realized, presents about 340935 combinations of set ups.  Some I’ve never even heard of before.  I need to spend some time with the data, maybe take it out for a beer, then I’ll try to wring some sensible results from it.

So there you have it.  I would love to read your thoughts!

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