Passes & Canyons Blog

Is anyone surprised that South Dakota ranks first in terms of people per motorcycle?

I saw an interesting chart the other day showing motorcycle ownership per person in each state. It’s not really information you can do much of anything with, it’s just interesting.

Colorado, for instance, ranks 14th with 173,120 bikes spread among 5,047,692 people. That comes out to one motorcycle for every 29 people. Of course, with people like me owning multiple bikes the actual number of motorcycle owners is necessarily lower. Still, the figures give you a general indication of the level of motorcycle interest per state. And it should not be a surprise that Colorado ranks high considering our weather and all the great places there are to ride in the state.

First on the list is South Dakota, with 69,284 bikes spread among 816,598 people, for a total of only 12 people per bike. It would be interesting to know how the bikes are concentrated across the state. Does the Sturgis area have, say, 3 people for each bike, while the eastern part of the state has something like 20 people per bike? There’s an awful lot of flat, wide-open country in South Dakota once you go east from the Black Hills.

At the other end of the listing, the District of Columbia has only 3,523 bikes for 604,912 people, leaving them with 172 people for every bike. I’m not at all sure how to interpret that. Is it just that a dense population with decent public transportation discourages people from owning their own vehicles? Who knows; surely I don’t.

In case you presume that more southerly states have more motorcycles simply because they have better weather for riding more of the year you would be wrong. The number 2 state with the most bikes per person is New Hampshire. There, they have 79,266 bikes amongst 1,316,807 people, for a ratio of one bike to 17 people. Is that related in some way to the Laconia Rally?

Filling out the top 10 are (rank, state, # of bikes, population, people per bike:
#3 Iowa: 173,929; 3,050,202; 18
#4 Wisconsin: 317,276; 5,691,659; 18
#5 Wyoming: 30,351; 564,554; 19
#6 North Dakota: 32,654; 674,629; 21
#7 Vermont: 30,070; 625,909; 21
#8 Montana: 46,996; 990,958; 21
#9 Minnesota: 240,288; 5,310,658; 22
#10 Alaska: 30,983; 714,146; 23

On the bottom end, leading to DC, we have these states:
#41 Kentucky: 98,475; 4,347,223; 44
#42 Hawaii: 30,098; 1,363,359; 45
#43 California: 801,803; 37,338,198; 47
#44 Utah: 59,355; 2,775,479; 47
#45 Maryland: 120,069; 5,785,681; 48
#46 Georgia: 199,586; 9,712,157; 49
#47 New York: 345,816; 19,395,206; 56
#48 Texas: 438,551; 25,253,466; 58
#49 Louisiana: 67,486; 4,545,343; 67
#50 Mississippi: 28,067; 2,970,072; 106

Does it surprise you to see states like Kentucky, California, Utah, Georgia and Texas so low in the ranking? I’d love to see some information explaining what factors lead to that result. I don’t think we’re likely to see that kind of info though so we’ll just take it for what it is.

Biker Quote for Today

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Tags: state motorcycle ranking

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 7th, 2024 at 11:24 am and is filed under Miscellaneous, motorcycle talk, Motorcycles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.