I never saw anyone bike commuting until gas doubled and went up to over $2 a gallon, what about 15 years ago.
Then with the stock market crash in 2008, a lot of people just gave up on the cost of cars, and used a bike instead.
Montreal started a great bike share – free bikes for the day – mostly stuff that the police had ended up with. Painted them green (and took your ID for the day) to encourage you to return them when you were done. This has bloomed into bike share programs all over the world. Heck, I even got General Motors to put a bike share on their engineering campus (Zaagster).
Then the hipster generation made biking cool. Partially because 20 somethings are connected to the internet, don’t need a car like teenagers did in the ‘50s, and just decided they didn’t need the expense.
Between hipsters and bike share, the explosion of bike infrastructure has been kind of cool.
Biggest change though – cell phones while driving . Increased commuting danger 100x or more. That is craziness.
But commuting was good in the 1900’s Had it all to myself, and people in cars actually watched the road.