Bicycle history as transport history: the cultural turn

Abstract

Compared with railways, shipping, aviation and the automobile, the bicycle has received little attention from transport historians. In his 2003 survey of the field, Gijs Mom observed that the bicycle was among the themes that are ‘virtually non-existent’ in the literature.1 This is remarkable, since few scholars would deny that the bicycle became an important mode of transport in many European cities during the interwar years, significantly enhancing the mobility both of millions of workers and of middle class men and women. European cycle use went into sharp decline during the postwar period, a pattern unchecked until the 1970s. During the 1970s, the Netherlands started to adopt transport policies to facilitate or stimulate cycle use, resulting in renewed growth of cycle traffic : levels between 25 and 40 per cent of urban trips are now reported in many Dutch cities. Similar policies have since then been adopted in other European nations and cities. At the same time interest grew in cycling as sport and recreational activity, particularly with the advent of the mountain bike in the 1980s and a wave of technological innovations which followed it. Although the cycle trade is a global phenomenon, outside of Europe—in North America, Japan and in developing countries—cycle use has followed different patterns and each context requires its own historical treatment. In this review article we focus on Western Europe. To explain differing national and local levels of bicycle use in western countries, experts agree on the relevance of cultural factors, next to or in combination with infrastructure and policies. As we show in this survey of European bicycle historiography, these contemporary analyses are in line with a ‘cultural turn’ in recent publications on the history of bicycles and bicycling. The challenge that remains is to integrate bicycle historiography into general histories of twentieth-century mass mobility.

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