Spending on bikes in Europe

Bike Europe and Colibi provide various statistics on bicycle sales across Europe. I've combined their numbers with some Eurostat figures on population and GDP, to investigate differences between the countries we have been visiting over the last couple of weeks.

In proportion to the size of the economy, the Netherlands spends more than anyone else on bicycles. We in the UK spend less than the European average. We didn't visit Italy, but I imagine that the cycling culture is similar to France. In that light, their expenditure on bicycles seems surprisingly low.

Part of the reason that the Netherlands spends so much is that they buy expensive bicycles. The average price of a bicycle in Germany is fairly high. In Italy it is close to the European average, but we in the UK tend to buy cheap bikes.

We in the UK do buy quite a lot of bikes though. More than the European average, and about the same as Germany and France. But not as many as in Denmark or the Netherlands. The Netherlands spends most because they buy lot of bikes, and spend a lot on them. While Italy buys bikes at close to the average European price, they do not buy many of them. In France they pay less than average for a bike, but buy a lot of them. In Germany they buy quite a lot of fairly expensive bikes. In Poland, as in most "new" EU member states, they buy quite small numbers of relatively inexpensive bikes.