I read in George’s article that, “On a continuum of various cycling endeavors, muni isn’t very high, with only 3,500 riders or so worldwide.”
That means muni riders make up only about 0.00005% of the population!
Does anyone have any idea of roughly how many unicyclists there are worldwide (not only muni)?
Thanks,
Andrew
Re: Number of unicyclists worldwide?
Is there, to anyone’s knowledge any official or unofficial body including the IUF that actually makes an attempt to collect this data? Does “unicyclist” mean someone who can ride a unicycle or only those who do so with some frequency?
Personally I believe that any guesses at these numbers are only slightly more reliable than official police estimates of the attendees of peace demonstrations. (Oh and for those who will crack wise at this, let’s say attempts to gather these numbers are only slightly more effective than the peace demonstrations themselves as well.) 
Peace,
Raphael Lasar
Matawan, NJ
I estemated 8.5 million people can ride in a recent paper I wrote. That guess was completly made up but concidering Unicycle.com sold about a million unicycles last year I dont think its that far off.
My deffenition of riding was simply someone that was able to get on and ride 10 feet unassisted.
Now that I think about it I think it might even be higher than that 6 billion people on earth. Japanese schools teach childern to ride so there are going to be alot of people there that can ride presumably. And there are tons of people that say to me I tried one of thoes for a while or I used to ride a bit when I was younger…
Its hard to say how many people are actually out there with so many of us still in the closet so to speak.
Just make up numbers like me its fun and if you act like you may know what your talking about people will believe you.
Mike
There might actually be close to 8.5 million unicyclists in Japan alone. I would guess that as a very optimistic estimate, but there are unicycles in over 1000 schools there. I don’t know that unicycling is taught per se; at the school I visited (in 1987) the unicycles were just playground equipment. Kids came out for recess (in bare feet), and started riding all over the place, or trying to ride. The school the JUA officials took me to was one of the original schools in the Tokyo area to get unicycles, and they had about 50 of 'em. That was then.
So to answer the question of how many mountain unicyclists there are, you really need to define your criteria. 3500 may have been accurate a few years ago, but is probably a low number now, especially with the continuing rise in the popularity of off-roading.
BTW, Unicycle.com has not sold a million unicycles yet. But give them time… 
Even with a million sold, this does not mean one million riders. I have at least two, and some people won’t learn to ride the ones they have. But counting unicycle sales is probably the most realistic way to get a handle on the number of “unicyclists” out there. It doesn’t work as well for MUni in particular, which can be done on any unicycle but is not done on most. But it gets us in the ballpark. Now. How to get the bike companies to share that data… ?
I’m sorry I goofed bigtime, what I ment to say is what John Drummond told me, they sold between 3-4000 unicycles last year and have been arround for 2.5 years so the number is getting close to a million over all.
Sorry for any confusion that I caused thanks for catching me on that Mr Foss.
This is the kinda thing you dont notice till later when you post at 3am…
Mike
yeah,beer thirty sucks eh?
You’re still off by two orders of magnitude. If they’re selling 3000 to 4000 unicycles per year for 2.5 years then they are getting close to selling 10,000 unicycles total. That’s a long ways from 1,000,000.