Walking vs cycling by country

We are regularly asked whether cycling is more popular than walking on RouteYou. That is certainly not the case, and it varies greatly from country to country.

To investigate this, we looked at all visitors who used RouteYou in the last 12 months. We counted how many of those visitors used cycling routes or walking routes, per country. We expressed the relationship between the two in walking/cycling dominance. You can see the results in the figure. In addition to cycling and walking, there is also use of, for example, motorcycle routes, inline skating, sailing routes, etc. But this is a minority and we have left it out of this graph for simplicity.

Take into account the fact that RouteYou is mainly used for recreational activities. So these figures mainly say something about the recreational activity of cycling and walking and not about how many users functionally cycle or walk!

Some interpretations of the graph:

• The dominance of walking is greatest in Luxembourg
• Cycling dominance is greatest in France
• Austria has an almost perfect cycling-walking balance
• To walk:
  • In Belgium, the US and the Netherlands , walking is slightly more dominant than cycling.
  • In the UK, Portugal and Luxembourg, walking is much more dominant than cycling.
• Misuse:
  • In Spain & Germany, cycling is slightly more dominant than walking
  • In Ireland, Canada, Switzerland , Italy and France, cycling is significantly more dominant than walking