Comment by wiether 3 days ago
> Even avid cyclists could never hit the kilometres travelled by your average car user in a year.
According to different sources, the average kilometers travelled by motorists are under 25k km/year (including Europe & US).
You'd be surprised by how many amateur cyclists ride more than that each year.
What a strange way of counting 25 k km ;) shouldn't you say 25000km or 24Mm?
25000km/year is ultracycling territory for amateur cyclist. Yes some people do it, a lot definitely not and I don't think many of them have a full time job.
I wrote first "25k" because that's how I usually write on other platforms, and then I remembered that I'm on a US website, so I felt the need to add a unit.
Sorry!
And if I had written 25000, I would have been afraid of people telling me that it should be 25,000 or 25 000
Thousand is frequently written as k or K, at least in polite society (metric).
you never say kk for one million though. k in km stands for 1000meters already.
> You'd be surprised by how many amateur cyclists ride more than that each year.
You wouldn't.
As an 8k km/yr cyclist with a lot of cycling friends, I can tell you that 12.5k/yr is extremely high for an amateur. Sure, there are some, but a truly tiny proportion.
8k/year eats bikes, BTW. I used to wear out rims regularly before I switched to disks and chains/sprockets didn't even last a year (on a fixed gear bike).
First, this is what OP said:
> Even avid cyclists could never hit the kilometres travelled by your average car user in a year.
And you tell it yourself:
> Sure, there are some
So, if OP really thinks that no cyclist can ride more than what an average motorists drive a year, then even "but a truly tiny proportion" would appear as a surprise to them.
Also, just looking at my Strava right now, amongst the 30 friends that I follow (I'm picky on my follows), more than a third are on their way to ride more than 25k this year. The most advanced is going to reach 23k by the end of the day based on his current numbers and habbits.
How, where and when you ride your bike will be a huge factor in how much wear it gets. For instance, my commuter' chain usually get less than half the mileage that my road bike' chain get because city is dirty, I ride no matter the weather, don't clean the chain after each ride and keep putting strong torque since I constantly have to stop and start. Same goes for brake pads: when I commute I hardly do 200m without having to brake, whereas I can go for 20km without having to touch my brakes on my road bike.
> So, if OP really thinks that no cyclist can ride more than what an average motorists drive a year, then even "but a truly tiny proportion" would appear as a surprise to them.
I said an avid cyclist, which is quite undefined so fair enough. What I meant was an enthusiast still, not a sport rider or someone you could consider an amateur athlete (many road riders).
Road riding gets you a lot of KMs and hours in the saddle too, like you said in quite a specific wear pattern. I ride for hours on my MTB and my commuter but would never come close to the hours and KMs of road riding, and I will be replacing my MTB sprocket and brake pads much sooner than my commuter.
I think we're more or less on the same page though, and since all cities and cultures are a bit different we could be talking past eachother without specifics at which point my general comments go out the window anyway.
Just for the sake of disclosure, and to provide one data point, I ride 8 miles per day, 5 days a week, year-round, on two bikes (summer and winter). That's about 2600 km/y. Maybe add a few hundred km for occasional weekend recreational rides, and getting around town.
25000km is 250 100km days per year. That's a lot.
In France for example the average yearly distance travelled by car is closer to 12000km not 25000. More achievable but still a lot.