What 🚴 means
Neither — the plain one leaves gender open. The man and woman riders exist for when that detail matters; otherwise the bare character works as a general cycling sign, even for a group when the context makes that clear.
If it looks male on an older phone, that is old artwork: before platforms moved to neutral default drawings in the late 2010s, most vendors drew plain 🚴 as a man. The character itself never changed, so the same message may simply look different on an older device.
It came from phone emoji and a European transport proposal
In January 2009, Unicode proposed encoding the emoji held in separate Japanese mobile-carrier sets so they would display across systems. In April 2009, standards bodies from Ireland and Germany proposed a bicyclist and a mountain bicyclist — filed under transport and map symbols, not under their sports symbols.
Every form of this symbol
18Don't confuse it with
2Combination ideas
3Worth knowing
- June 3 is World Bicycle Day, declared by the UN in April 2018 — a natural date for this rider.
Questions people ask
1Should I use 🚴 or 🚲 for my commute?
🚴. Use it when you are the one riding; 🚲 when you mean the bike itself.
How to type 🚴
:bicyclist:the common shortcode; support varies by platform.🚴Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.

