It’s 7 a.m. I’m walking on a sidewalk beside a housing development enjoying the crisp, cool air. It is the ONLY time of the day you can do this during a Texas summer. I almost miss them because they sneak up on me so quietly. In the street, three middle-aged men in helmets and stretchy bikewear zoom by me on their bicycles as if they’re competing for the Tour de France. They are not the only bicyclists I have seen during my walks. People of all types are bicycling — whole families, older adults, teenagers, men, women and, of course, children.
According to Melinda Bryant’s May 13, 2020 article “Cycling ‘explosion’: coronavirus fuels surge in US bike ridership” in The Guardian, the National Association of City Transport Officials said they are seeing an “explosion in cycling” in many American cities. Eco-Counter, which collects bike data, reports that bicycle counts have “significantly increased” across most of North America compared to usual. In the two weeks to May 4, it found the U.S. region with the most growth was the Southwest, which was up by over 100%.
In Philadelphia, ridership on trails nearly doubled in March year-on-year, according to Bicycle Coalition. In Arlington, Virginia, trails have been up to 50% busier, said BikeArlington.
Bikeshare data shows that cycling has also become an open-air — and socially distant — alternative to public transport for essential workers. Although overall use is down, Citi Bike’s most used New York docking station since coronavirus is the one positioned close to three Manhattan hospitals — previously, the busiest were transport hubs such as Grand Central and Penn Station. In Philadelphia, a new scheme connecting essential workers to second-hand bikes immediately attracted hundreds of requests.
For many, bicycles have also become a symbol of freedom in the pandemic — an opportunity for mental as well as physical release from the confines of lockdown life. “You’re moving faster, you’re going further, but you’re not moving so fast that you can’t notice the little things,” said Ken McLeod, policy director at The League of American Bicyclists.
If current trends continue, he predicts America could see a record summer for cycling — especially as more people return to work and start commuting by bike. “Hopefully we’ll see cities and governments embracing that and making sure that it can be done safely by providing infrastructure for the people around there,” he said.
Some cities have taken advantage of the decrease in traffic to close streets to cars during the outbreak, making them less intimidating for cyclists.
Oakland, California, has closed 74 miles of streets to through traffic with its “slow streets” program and New York has pledged to close 100 miles, starting with 40 miles in May. Boston, Minneapolis, Burlington, Philadelphia and San Francisco have also closed roads, and Seattle now plans to permanently shut at least 20 miles of streets.
But post-pandemic, when the cars return and a new normal emerges – will America’s enthusiasm for cycling last?
Jon Orcutt, of Bike New York, says he wants to see more pop-up bike lanes “so that our recent cycling converts can get from A to B with confidence as the city begins to re-open.”
At Elevation Cycles in Denver, co-owner Phillip Brown is confident that bikes are here to stay. Customers are driving from over an hour away and are unearthing old bikes from their long-time hibernation in a garage or loft and bringing them in for repair.
“I’m very optimistic that this was one of the few silver linings,” he says. “That people have found a way to make their lives better.”
According to Christina Goldbaum’s May 18, 2020 article “Thinking of Buying a Bike? Get Ready for a Very Long Wait” in the New York Times, some bicycle shops in Brooklyn are selling twice as many bikes as usual and drawing block-long lines of customers. A chain of shops in Phoenix is selling three times the number of bikes it typically does. A retailer in Washington, D.C., sold all its entry-level bikes by the end of April and has fielded more preorders than ever in its 50-year history. In the photo above, bikes were moving fast from Larry’s Freewheeling bike shop in Manhattan. The owner, Larry Duffus, said the last time he sold bikes this quickly was during a transit strike in 1980.
In March, nationwide sales of bicycles, equipment and repair services nearly doubled compared with the same period last year, according to the N.P.D. Group, a market research company. Sales of commuter and fitness bikes in the same month increased 66 percent, leisure bikes jumped 121 percent, children’s bikes went up 59 percent and electric bikes rose 85 percent.
By the end of April, many stores and distributors had sold out of low-end consumer bikes. Now, the United States is facing a severe bicycle shortage as global supply chains, disrupted by the coronavirus outbreak, scramble to meet the surge in demand.
“I have never seen anything remotely approaching this,” said Ryan Zagata, president of Brooklyn Bicycle Company, where sales have soared by more than 600 percent this year compared with the same period in 2019. “If you went into a store three weeks ago you could find a bike under $1,000. Right now shelves are bare.”
The spike in sales comes on the heels of stay-at-home orders that have temporarily curtailed daily life, but that may permanently transform the role of bicycles into something more essential, including a safer alternative to public transit as the nation slowly begins to reopen.
Some American cities are already planning for a lasting shift after the pandemic — a significant departure in a society that has favored cars over bikes for decades, even as European cities embraced cycling as a transportation mode as integral as New York City’s subway.
“We are absolutely confident we are going to see more bike commuting in the months ahead,” said Polly Trottenberg, New York City’s transportation commissioner. “We are already seeing people who hadn’t biked before are trying it for the first time. We are going to see a lot more of that as the city starts to come back to life.”
For generations, riding a bike has been a symbol of relaxed summer days and a nostalgic rite-of-passage for children growing up in suburban sprawl. More recently, road biking became a popular hobby in warm-weather cities on the West Coast, while on the other side of the country, hipsters adopted bikes as part of their against-the-grain brand of cool.
Still, relatively few Americans have used bikes as a serious alternative to cars and public transit. Today fewer than one percent of New Yorkers commute by bike. In Portland, which has the highest percentage of cycling commuters of any American city, only 6.3 percent of commuters ride bikes. By comparison, in Copenhagen nearly half of all trips to work and school take place on bicycles.
“The U.S. has been built around cars,” said Sarah M. Kaufman, associate director of New York University’s Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management. “The European model has tended to be more forward-looking in terms of sustainability and safety, which leads them to favor bikes.”
But since the pandemic upended daily life in the United States, cycling has taken on a crucial, sanity-saving role: bikes are a way to exercise while gyms stay closed and an inexpensive means of getting around cities where more than 90 percent of riders have abandoned public transportation. Going for a bike ride has replaced grabbing a drink on first dates and has been used to coax children outside while parents are on conference calls at home. In the photo above, cyclists participate in a solidarity ride to honor the memory of George Floyd on June 5 in San Francisco.
Outside Bicycle Habitat in Brooklyn, the line of customers waiting to buy new bikes or have old ones repaired stretches down the block nearly every day. While bike sales usually increase in warmer months, the recent flood of customers is unheard of said owner Charlie McCorkell.
At first, most customers were buying bikes under $1,000, industry leaders and shop owners say. By the end of April, many stores had sold out of those bikes.
“We’ve never seen a surge like this across a range of products,” said Robert Margevicius, executive vice president of Specialized, one of the largest bicycle companies in the United States. “Everybody is scrambling to get more.”
But the demand could not have come at a worse time.
Most American importers have kept limited inventory since 2018, when President Trump ordered new tariffs on goods produced in China, where some parts used on nearly all bikes sold in the United States are made.
As a result, in 2019 the number of bikes imported into the United States dropped by around 25 percent compared with 2018, according to Margevicius. In the first quarter of this year, imports were down by around 30 percent compared to the same period in 2019.
The pandemic also forced factories in Asia to shut down in January and February, stalling the production of new bikes. Many were not able to bring production back to capacity until April, even as requests from importers swelled.
Taioku Manufacturing Co., a bicycle manufacturer in China and Taiwan, has received double the orders from importers for the first six months of this year compared with the same period last year, according to Kevin Tsu, a general manager. Still, the manufacturer can produce only 20,000 bikes a month — the same maximum production as usual.
“In China, there is still a serious shortage of labor and component parts,” he said, adding that as a result, bicycle manufacturers are two or three months behind in deliveries.
But as some customers wait weeks for new shipments to arrive or scour secondhand sales online, many people who have managed to get bikes have found respite from the public health emergency on two wheels.
Jeremy Payne, who lives in Phoenix, purchased four bikes in the last month: one for him, one for his wife and one for each of his two children. He starts most of his days with a long bike ride, and his wife has taken to riding to the grocery store rather than driving their car.
Even his 75-year-old mother — for whom he bought an electric bike in November — has become an avid cyclist in her neighborhood in Santa Barbara, California.
“She hadn’t been riding that much, but because of the pandemic she’s been cooped up in her house and wanted to get out,” he said. “Now she bikes around the same loop, and her neighbors wave at her when she passes them. For her, in her community it’s like the Tour de France.”
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