I looked at some of the stats at Adventure Cycling just to get an idea of what people are doing touring-wise. The resident statistician would warn me of the bias of a voluntary response survey, but that’s ok. I figure that the types of people who voluntarily responded to such questions would have something in common with us.

These statistics come from a ride registry. What is interesting is that there are five times as many men as women who tour. Guess that seems logical if you think of bicycle touring as a manly adventure. I never thought of it as such. I thought touring was a woman thing. It looks as if we will be in the second most popular age range. That isn’t surprising, but it was surprising to see so many younger folks doing the trip. It is definitely something to do either when you are young or older and without lots of obligations.

One of the more interesting stats is the number of people who spent $0 per day. So, even if you free-camped, you would still have to eat. Did they beg for food? Forego food or what? I would love to hear from somebody who had no daily expenses on the trip. A smaller number of people than those who spent nothing also spent 0% of their trip camping. Hmmmm. Almost the same number of people who spent $0 on the trip also had no flats. So, now the plan for us will be to spend no money so that we don’t have any flats. This will save us from carrying all those extra tubes. Now to get into that nonspecified age group since that number is also really close to the number of people who spent $0. Finally, it seems that we shouldn’t cook during the trip because that number is close as well.

Whether the survey is good or not, it still reveals some interesting facts. It definitely would be difficult to come up with a survey that could tell everything about touring cyclists, especially how many did a transcontinental tour.

Well, I have other more important things to worry about like did those 490 people really spend $0 per day or did they just not keep track? Better go order some tubes.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 12th, 2006 at 4:55 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.