You lift a hand off the bars. The rider coming the other way looks straight through you and is gone.
And you feel a little foolish for bothering.
It isn’t you, and cyclists didn’t suddenly get ruder. The cyclist’s wave faded for reasons that are far more interesting than bad manners.
There Are Simply More of Us Now
The wave didn’t lose an argument. It lost a numbers game.
In 2024, 112 million Americans rode a bike at least once, 35% of everyone aged three and up. That’s the highest share since the study began in 2014, up from 98 million six years earlier.
Most of that growth came from casual riders who ride fewer than 50 times a year. Nobody handed them a rulebook, because the wave was never written down anywhere.
The paths got busier too. Protected bike lanes went from around 800 directional miles in 2020 to about 4,400 by 2025.
A wave works beautifully on an empty road where another cyclist is an event. On a packed Saturday bike path it becomes a part-time job.
Sociologist Erving Goffman named what takes over instead: civil inattention, the quick glance and look away we all use to keep crowded places livable.
The Wave Never Died. It Moved.
Ride a mountain bike trail and you’ll get waved at. Same on gravel. Same on a quiet country road at seven in the morning.
It’s the busy road where the wave thins out. A rider who has ridden both road and mountain since the late ’80s figures mountain bikers are friendlier, and more recently gravel riders too, than most road riders.
Then he complicates his own point. Those same road riders will pull over and hand a stranger their last spare tube.
It isn’t warmth that differs between the groups. It’s the setting. Trails and gravel roads are slower, quieter, and full of encounters rare enough to be worth marking.
One writer found the boundary. Waving at every rider inside a town is impractical, so even devoted wavers quietly switch off at the town line.
The wave always had a border. It just keeps sliding outward.
We Stopped Looking Like One Tribe
The wave was never really about politeness. It was recognition, a signal that you were one of a small and slightly odd group, and it worked when riders broadly looked alike.
Look at a bike path now. Drop bars, flat bars, fat tires, cargo bikes, kids’ bikes, e-bikes.
E-bikes made up about 7% of US bike sales by unit volume in 2024, roughly 920,000 against 12.1 million other bikes. Call it one bike in fourteen, but close to a third of the money spent. In one North American owner survey, more than 80% of e-bike owners were 55 or over.
So you’re as likely to be on the e-bike as deciding whether to wave at one. And nobody waves at every cyclist anyway, as even the committed wavers admit.
If you’re unsure whether someone counts, they count.
It’s Usually Not a Snub
It stings a bit. That’s a fair reaction, and most of the time it’s misplaced.
Most often, they genuinely did not see you. Helmet, sunglasses, low sun, 40 miles an hour of closing speed. That same writer has spent years being accused of snubbing riders he never saw.
Or their hands were staying put. On a descent, over rough pavement, or tucked in a group where sitting on a wheel cuts your effort by a quarter or more, letting go is unwise.
A California bike shop owner adds a theory worth airing. Riders who learned before 1990 reached down to the downtube to shift constantly, so a hand off the bars was routine.
Shimano’s integrated levers landed in 1990, Campagnolo’s in 1992. After that a rider could go a season without moving a hand. His theory, not fact, but the timing fits.
None of that is about you. Treat a returned wave as a small gift and the whole thing stops stinging.
🙂 There could be some truth to this. I often give a little smile or head nod, instead of a wave – it’s rare that it’s not reciprocated
Wave First Anyway
The same bike shop owner noticed something useful. When he doesn’t go first, the rider coming the other way essentially never does.
Initiating is the whole ballgame. Somebody has to go first, and it may as well be you.
The second trick is recalibrating what counts as a reply. Two fingers lifted off the hoods counts. So does a chin nod, or eyebrows raised behind the glasses.
Start counting those and your return rate climbs sharply. Plenty of riders who looked like they ignored you actually answered, just quietly.
Motorcyclists never let their version slip, partly because they still teach it to newcomers out loud.
The wave survives by being offered first, not by being owed.
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