Comparisons of cycling have often been made between different cities and different countries but very little work has examined variations in cycling across metropolitan areas. The reinvigorated interest in cycling for urban transport, from policy makers and the public, means there is an urgent need to improve our understanding of cycling within Australian cities. To this end, the current paper explores intra-urban differences in cycling across the metropolitan areas of Adelaide and Melbourne. The research reported on in this paper is the first part of a much larger study into the factors which influence cycling, how these factors interact with each other and whether their degree of importance varies in different localities. Existing research shows there are five headline variables which impact on who cycles and how often: urban context; cycling context; local government policies and programs; culture of travel; and socio-economic and demographic characteristics. The current research focuses on socio-economic and demographic characteristics and it involved mapping the journey-to-work by bicycle using Statistical Local Areas then testing the relationship between socio-economic and demographic variables and levels of cycling. The results show a higher concentration of cycling in the central city and inner suburbs but this pattern is not straightforward especially when disaggregated by gender. The spatial differences in cycling frequently reported at an international and inter-city scale are also evident at an intra-urban scale. Further, differences found across Adelaide and Melbourne are only partially accounted for by socio-economic and demographic variables leaving considerable room for contextual, cultural and local area policies to explain the difference.
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