Prompted by a query about Florida bike sales from Palm Beach County coordinator Bil Phillips, on-staff Web retrievers found the following figures for population and specialty bicycle dealers:
| State | Pop. (1.July.98 est.) | Dealers | Residents/dealer |
| California | 32.667 million | 1027 | 31,808 |
| New York | 18.175 million | 441 | 41,213 |
| Florida | 14.916 million | 369 | 40,423 |
| Texas | 19.760 million | <369 | >53,550 |
(Sources: US Census Bureau, http://www.census.gov/population/estimates/state/st-98-1.txt National Bicycle Dealers Association, http://www.nbda.com/Statpak/links.htm)
Dealer counts include only specialty bicycle retailers (i.e., no mass merchants or sporting goods stores), and only counts for the top three states were quoted on NBDA's site. There are more bike shop locations than dealers, since 13 percent of dealers have at least two locations.
But although specialty bicycle dealers account for just 30 percent of the US bicycle market in terms of unit sales, they dominate the market in the price range above $250. If adult cycling activity is proportional to number of bike dealers, as seems plausible, then Floridians do less cycling than Californians, about the same as New Yorkers, and more than Texans.
The average specialty bicycle dealer sells about 500 bicycles per year. If Florida follows the national average, then about 184,000 bicycles are sold per year by Florida bike shops. If Florida's market division among mass merchants, sporting goods stores, and bike shops follows the national pattern, then about 615,000 bikes would be sold per year in Florida.
This would be 5.54 percent of total US sales in 1998 (11.1 million), about what would be expected from our population share (5.52 percent).