I like stats, I'm just frustrated I can't find what I'm looking for, for either Canada or Australia.... I want to see what the long term cycling rates were for both countries, and I can't find that. It's easy to find long term serious injury charts, over 30 years etc, and they are some use because you can see the trend.
I want to see if cycling rates were falling well before compulsion was introduced, or if rates just continued to fall after compulsion was introduced.
We know that in the UK (and other countries) cycling miles travelled went off a cliff in 1984, and continued to fall until about 2000.
We need to look at the long term trend to see if compulsion really made any difference, or if the downward trend had already started 10 years earlier
It is no good looking at data for only the years after the event and saying see, look, fell 25%. There is no context to put that drop into, if the previous 10 years had saw a drop of 50%, then actually you could say compulsion slowed the decline dramatically - we can't say that, or the other, and be 100% sure unless we have that long term data.
Show* me that data and I'll eat my flat cap... ;)
*I've tried and can't find it, there may be folk better at googol than me, or have the data to hand...
EDIT - I still think, when you take into account the decline in cycling rates all over the world over that time period, that people just got richer and started using cars, and car ownership stats over that time period seem to sugest people were buying cars