Bicycle commuters: The hardy one-percenters

May 15 is a day when we are all encouraged to “ride our bike to work.” Canadians could use some encouraging. In 2025, 244,000 Canadians or 1.4% of commuters mainly depended on their bicycle to get to work, a rate that has barely budged in years.

Before the outcry begins among cycling enthusiasts, the key word to remember here is “mainly”—that is, what was the primary method commuters used to get to work over the course of the full year.

Over three in four Canadian households reported participating in outdoor activities close to home in 2023 (77%) such as birdwatching, jogging, shooting hoops and bicycling, among many others.

Bicycling overall is catching on. In 2023, almost one in three (32%) households that participated in outdoor activities close to home reported bicycling, up from 22% a decade earlier.

This suggests that there are underlying reasons why Canada’s hardcore bicycle commuting community is so small.

For most of Canada, late fall, all winter and early spring are prone to sleet, snow, ice, blizzards, deep freezes and sudden thaws, dimming enthusiasm for bicycling to work for all save a hardy few.

But in those rare places where bicycling is more feasible year-round, commuting by bicycle rates are considerably higher than the national average.

For example, in Victoria, approximately 1 in 20 commuters (5.3%) regularly biked to work in 2021—by far the highest rate among Canada’s 41 largest cities, and perhaps not unexpected given Victoria’s compact urban environment, relatively flat topography, and mild winters.

Conversely, in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, one of Canada’s snowiest cities, 0.2% of people biked as their main method of getting to work.

Meanwhile, a special salute goes out to the 625 brave souls of Whitehorse, Yellowknife and Nunavut who reported the bicycle as their main mode of commuting in 2021.

An important consideration when looking at bicycle commuting patterns is distance to work. In 2021, 11 million Canadians commuted to work by car, truck or van, spending on average 22.8 minutes on their commute while a further 1 million took public transit, taking an average of 42.9 minutes to get to work.

A person cycling these distances would take considerably longer and very few bicycle commuters spend an hour or more getting to work. In 2021, just over three in four bicycle commuters (75.8%) got to work in less than 30 minutes, while 2.4% took an hour or more.

For some Canadians living in low income, bicycling to work may not be done out of a love of bicycling, but rather out of financial necessity.

Indeed, Canadians aged 25 and older living in low income were much more likely to walk or bicycle to work compared with higher-income Canadians in the same age group.

Of those who were in low income in 2020, 10.4% walked or biked to work in 2021, compared with 5.5% of all other commuters.

Statistics Canada tracks commuting patterns through two collection methods. The most detailed data come from the one in four Canadian households who fill out the long-form census every five years. Statistics Canada also conducts a smaller annual supplementary survey to keep tabs on commuting patterns in the years between each census.

Commuting data from the 2026 Census of Population will be released in the late fall of 2027.