I've always had a hunch that where you live decides how much green laning you get. So I put a number on it. Using the Department for Transport's count of licensed motorcycles and the byway data behind Holloway, I worked out how many kilometres of byway open to all traffic each county has for every 1,000 motorcycles registered there.
The full table, the method and a data download are on the green lane postcode lottery page. Here's what stood out to me.
Northumberland is out on its own
Northumberland comes top with 53.1 km of byway for every 1,000 motorcycles. That's 436 km of BOAT for just over 8,000 bikes. Wiltshire is second at 29.3 and Cambridgeshire third at 17.0. The average across England and Wales is 4.0, so the top three are in a different league from everyone else.
One honest caveat on Northumberland: our figure is more than double what the council reported in a 2014/15 survey. Some of that gap is real, because the council has made a run of new BOAT orders since 2021. If anyone at the council has a more up-to-date total, I'd love to hear it.
The top 12. Most of England and Wales sits well below the 4.0 average.
Most riders live where the byways aren't
The typical county has 3.1 km per 1,000 bikes, and 30 of the 48 areas fall below the average. Hampshire has more licensed motorcycles than any county in the top 12 (54,462) and 5.6 km per 1,000. Bedfordshire, where I do most of my riding, sits 18th at 4.2.
At the bottom are the cities. Greater London has 116,052 motorcycles and 21.8 km of byway between them. Bristol shows as zero, but that's partly a boundary quirk. The City of Bristol council covers the built-up area only. The countryside around it belongs to South Gloucestershire, North Somerset and Bath and North East Somerset, and that's where Bristol riders actually go.
Byways aren't the whole picture
The league only counts BOATs, because their length is on the council Definitive Map and we can check it. Plenty of good lanes are unsurfaced county roads (UCRs) instead, and those sit on a different council register, the List of Streets. Highway authorities reported roughly 6,800 km of them in 2014/15, more than all the BOATs put together.
Devon is the clearest example. It ranks 25th on BOATs alone, with 2.3 km per 1,000 bikes, but anyone who's ridden there knows it isn't short of lanes. Most of Devon's are UCRs. If you want the difference between the types explained properly, our guide to every green lane classification covers it.
More adventure bikes, same lanes
The motorcycle count is every licensed bike, scooters included, and most of those never leave the tarmac. The people on byways are mostly on adventure bikes, dual sports and enduros. The DfT doesn't split its figures by bike type, so I can't rank counties on those alone.
What I can say is that the adventure segment is booming. Adventure bikes were the UK's best-selling new motorcycle type in 2025 (18,904 registered by the end of November, Visordown, from MCIA figures), and they're up about 26% again this year (Visordown). More riders on the same, fairly fixed network of lanes makes the basics matter more: know what's open, check for TROs, and ride considerately so the lanes stay open.
See where your county sits
Every county is in the full league table, with the data free to use if you credit Holloway. If you want to see the lanes themselves, the Holloway map shows every BOAT and the UCRs we've found so far, with the closures we know about. Legal status changes, so always check the signs and current Traffic Regulation Orders before you ride.