Total revenue of Germany's bike sector in 2022: 7 bn €

Employees: 5300

Total revenue of Germany's car sector in 2022: 400 bn €

Employees: 780'000

Ah yes, the immense lobbying power of “big bike”

@SpiceDealer my guess is the bike companies don't have as much profit for lobbying, but I like the direction of this. I'd love to see a grassroots movement demanding infrastructure for active travel.

Not just the car companies, but oil companies as well.

And it was not just lobbing. Standard Oil purchased the LA tram network, and shut it down.

The scale of the car lobby and the money behind them is 100s of times larger than the bicycle industry.

If I bought them both new my bike would've cost $850 and my car $34k. Somebody made a fuckload more money.

Edit: just thought of this but it's kind of funny in context, my bike is from a small town Nebraska police department that sold off all their bikes upon realizing they don't have the kind of pedestrian infrastructure that justifies bicycle cops.

If you are serious your first step is to weaponize bikes and subcontract to the military (NO NO /S)

Many people have mentioned good reasons in this thread, but another thing too is that Oil and car companies are still making a bunch of money now, they would and probably continue to lobby against better walking and biking infrastructure. Bike companies would need to get a bunch of support to overcome them.

In Washington DC there is

WABA

Washington Area Bicyclists Association

the bicycling movement and community and infrastructure are all pretty excellent over there.

There are very few 'bike companies.' Schwinn bikes in the US is owned by a Dutch company with numerous other interests. Most other makers are the same, a company name that is a small cog in a much bigger enterprise. Lobbying is incredibly expensive and these corporations have other irons in the fire.

Bike companies sell a much less expensive product and don't, I would assume, sell that much more of it than car companies do. Thus they have a lot less money to spend on lobbying efforts. Also, they don't tend to be well-known. My assumption is that having a base of support or popularity in the population, or at least having politicians be aware of your brand and your market share is important to have your voice heard in lobbying.

It also helps car companies that, as someone else mentioned, oil companies lobby with them. For many of the reasons we like the idea of bikes - they don't use oil, they are generally easy to fix, sustainable, last a while, etc., they are harder to lobby for, because they don't lobby with anyone and they'd have to lobby against the profit motive.

As for shoe companies, I'm not sure they would benefit from better walkability of cities. My feeling is, they make money mostly for aesthetic reasons or explicitly for gym shoes - neither of which would change much if people walked more. Their money is probably better spent on advertising.

I like the direction of your thinking in the sense of "Hey, there's a power imbalance here, how do we tip it in our favor?" Others have pointed out good reasons why bike manufacturers probably aren't going to move the needle. I do think it's worth thinking about how we build power.

A basic boring answer might be better democracy - eliminate gerrymandering, prohibit lobbying, prohibit legalized bribery, ranked choice voting/proportional representation.

My experience working on anti gerrymandering campaigns is they can be demoralizing because as individuals we really don't have much power and any change is slow. In terms of gaining more tangible power there's also unionizing and worker cooperatives. Basically any kind of organized group is going to be more effective.