What's the most popular type of bicycle?

Photo by richermcm. Courtesy of Stock.Xchng

Road bikes, mountain bikes, beach cruisers, BMX bikes, cyclocross bikes, track bikes, trial bikes, downhill bikes, folding bikes, electric bikes, recumbent bikes, snow bikes, even polo bikes and clown bikes. There’s no shortage of specialties.

But which is the most popular?

Tandem bikes, naturally.

What? Did he say tandem bikes? That’s right, tandem bicycles are red hot! How, you ask, did I come to such a seemingly ridiculous conclusion?

I recently read Career Renegade: How to Make a Great Living Doing What You Love by lawyer-turned-fitness-entrepreneur Jonathan Fields. This book is packed with so many useful web resources I found myself trying to click the pages of the book.  Does that mean it’s time to buy a Kindle? Maybe. Anyway, Fields introduced me to SEOBook.com’s Keyword Tool, an internet resource that gives statistics on keyword search trends.  What a convenient way to settle the bicycle popularity contest debate, I thought; instead of using some fanciful blend of cycling experience, philosophical reasoning and barebones logic, I can just let the internet decide for me. Me likey internet, make people smartly.

So I searched SEOBook for the keyword bicycle. And there it was, the proverbial proof in the pudding. Average daily Google searches for the keyword “bicycle?” 1168 per day. Average daily Google searches for “tandem bicycles?” A whopping 5,205 searches per day.

That’s no small number. That means tandem bicycles are more frequently searched on the internet than exercise (3213), yoga (3720), and Lance Armstrong (1593). Heck, tandem bicycles are even more popular than Brittany Spears, who only receives an average 3266 searches per day.

In fact, among the keywords I checked, only weight loss (11,429) and Barack Obama (23,928) were more popular than tandem bicycles.

So what gives?  There are eight bicycles (nine if you count my toddler’s trike) in my garage but none of them seat two.  I rarely see tandems on the bike path.  My wife and I rented a tandem bike only once, in San Diego after a home-building trip in Ensenada, Mexico and I’ve certainly jumped at the chance to ride every odd two-seater I’ve ever seen at New Belgium’s Tour de Fat or Boulder’s Thursday Night Cruiser Ride, but my interest goes only that far—for now.

So what gives? Is it the romantic notion of two people pedaling together that drives this internet phenomenon? Are cyclists all somehow overlooking the biggest actual trend in bicycling? Or is this just a fluke?