Originally Posted by
Kapusta
That would make sense as that is where the largest share of people are.
Some skimming of street photos from China and India yielded me almost no RDs on bikes that I could make out if there was one. Also, consider the incredible number of bike share bikes there. I have never seem an RD on one.
Now maybe these are mostly SS? Maybe. But if even a fraction are geared, that is a lot of bikes.
This should not be surprising. Again, consider why bike share bikes are mostly (if not all) IGH. Most bikes in the world are left outside, see next to zero maintenance, and are ridden by people who are as interested in the mechanics of the bike as they are about the buses they ride. They don’t spend time on Bike Forum learning how to diagnose and fix shifting issues.
OK, but a good SS can be had for less than the cost of an IGH by itself, so I think it's quite likely that the vast majority of the bikes are SS.
That said, I think there'd have to be some definitions of "IGH bikes in the world". Right now, I suspect there's a very large percentage of that number laying in bicycle graveyards in China due to bikeshare tulipomania. If most of those are IGH, then the numbers get skewed by a bunch of rotting bikes.