I had been looking around for a new bike for weeks already and today I finally bought one. And to prevent some confusion right away, with bike I don’t mean such a thing that has an engine, but a bicycle. Now that spring is coming around again, I am looking forward to take the bicycle to my work again. Hopefully the weather will be good enough already in two weeks time when my current monthly train ticket ends.

For those people from abroad where it might not be so common to use a bicycle, I tried to find some statistics. Here in the Netherlands we have around 18 million bicycle (for 16 million people), so I guess you can say that they are very common here. Giving the fact that the country is so flat, they are a perfect way to travel for short distances of course. Yearly about 14 billion kilometers are travelled by bicycle, so that is around 900 km per person per year.

Personally I guess I am helping to keep the figures up. Including my new bicycle I own three now for example. I have one racing bicycle I use to make trips with during the weekend (you know, the kind of bicycles they drive the Tour de France with as well). And I have two normal bicycles now, as I will keep my old one as a spare. I use these to go to work in the summer and most other local travel.

Also for the amount of kilometers I help to keep the statistics up a little bit. Last year I drove around 3000 km, which does not even include all short visits to the local shop, etc. Let’s see if I can improve on that this year. Given the fact that from home to work is already 20 km, so 40 km a day, it should be possible to get a nice amount of kilometers again this year. Hopefully the weather will be fine this spring/summer/autumn, so that I can cycle to work often. At least I find it a very good method to combine a bit of sports with the travelling that I have to do to get to work anyway.