Qriously measures sentiment on smartphones

75% of the Qriously Team in London is using the bike to travel around the city. From our CEO who is nearly obsessed with his single speed to our EVP of Ops and Finance who uses his Brompton as well as a train on his commute. This made me wonder how other people in London get around and whether there are differences in other large cities around the world.

Metropolitans in Motion

I chose a few cities around the world and asked the simple question “Which mode of transportation do you use the most” (translated into the local language) and gave users three answer options: bike, public and car. Not surprisingly, Qriously is exceptionally green in their choice of transport compared to the rest of London where only 21% uses a bike.

I’ve never driven in New York but it seems it is even worse than in London as only 44% prefer the car compared to 50% in London.

From the sheer number of them I saw in Shanghai, it came as a surprise that only 25% use bikes, which is not much higher than the London number. At 27%, the city with the most cyclist seems to be Berlin. I’ve never lived there so please comment if that matches your experience or not.

While this is empirical information that you could find through other data sources, this post highlights the fact that obtaining data like this is a pain and methods might have varied. Obtaining virgin data of this sort would be far cheaper and quicker with Qriously, as well as allow you to do periodic analyses (for example, measuring the real-time effects of  a campaign such as this safe cycling initiative by the Times).