France: Interesting Statistics On Motorcycle Usage In Paris from Bikes in the Fast Lane

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France: Interesting Statistics On Motorcycle Usage In Paris

March
2013

  File under France Statistics
  Author: Mike Werner
  Location: Normandy, France

With all the troubling issues coming from the Mayor of Paris, and the upcoming 2014 Mayor elections and their moto-phobic candidates (link

), it's interesting to see some statistics about the usage of motorcycles and scooters in Paris. The number crunching was done by the DRIEA (Direction Regionale et Interdepartementale de l'Equipement et de l'Amenagement).

First of all, the stats aren't for just Paris, but what is called "Ile-de-France", or more accurately the Greater Parisian Area, which is Paris and its suburbs. If the candidate politicians ever read these statistics, maybe they'll change their minds about motorcycles, but somehow I doubt it.

Every day there are 570,000 PTW moving around and through Paris. That's half a million per day! Between 2001 and 2010, there was an increase of 34% in the number of daily PTW movements.

Households
In Ile-de-France, 9% of the households have a PTW, while 1% of the households have more than 1 PTW. 15% of the PTWs are smaller than 50cc (usually 49cc), 38% are 50 to 125cc and 47% are bigger than 125cc. 51% are motorcycles, 43% are scooters and 6% are "other", usually vehicles like trikes.

Trips
Daily, the motorized two-wheelers do 2.9 trips per day, with an average total length of 65 minutes. 38% of the daily trips are home-work, 18% are business related (like visiting customers), 5% for buying things/shopping, 4% home-school/studies and the remainder is for personnel trips.

Population
87% of the people riding these motorcycles & scooters are male, 80% are under the age of 50 years and 83% are employed. 12% of the riders are independents/CEOs/shop keepers/farmers, 15% are in management, 26% in lower management or supervisory roles, 37% are employees and 10% are laborers/factory workers.

The average trip length is 6.5 kilometers, with 14% doing less than 1 km, 25% between 1 and 3 kms, 18% between 3 and 5 kms, 23% between 5 and 10 kms, 14% between 10 and 20 kms and 6% more than 20 kms.

So impressive numbers. That's a lot of motorcycles & scooters circulating in the greater Paris area, and increasing. With more roads being closed down in Paris, with less lanes open to cars, more bus & tram lanes, less parking and all this resulting in bigger traffic jams, more and more Parisians are turning to PTW to get to work. Public transportation is full of problems, with many strikes and technical problems, so they have proven to be inadequate to get people to work.

Click here to read the whole report from DRIEA