World Bicycle Day
Next: June 3, 2027
Two wheels, two centuries, one good ride.
The story
Where it comes from
The UN General Assembly declared 3 June World Bicycle Day on 12 April 2018, in resolution 72/272, adopted by consensus. The idea came from Leszek Sibilski, a former member of Poland's national cycling team who became a sociology professor in the United States; he made the case in blog posts in 2015 and 2016 and campaigned with his students at Montgomery College in Maryland. Turkmenistan took the proposal to the UN, and some 56 countries co-sponsored it. The resolution celebrates a machine in use for two centuries: simple, affordable, reliable and clean.
How it's celebrated
The resolution welcomes bicycle rides at national and local level and asks countries to make roads safer for people who walk and cycle. On the first World Bicycle Day, people rode out in Taiwan, Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Nepal, Germany, France and Zambia, among other places. The simplest way to join is to ride to work, school or the shops, or to take a friend for a spin.
Did you know
- The bicycle's ancestor, Karl Drais's wooden 'running machine', had no pedals; on 12 June 1817 he pushed it along with his feet from Mannheim to a post house on the road to Schwetzingen and back in about an hour.
- Drais's machine weighed only about 22 kilograms and averaged about 15 kilometres an hour, a sensation at the time.
- Sibilski first presented the case for a World Bicycle Day at a 'Scientists for Cycling' colloquium in Taipei in 2016.
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