Originally Posted by
Roll-Monroe-Co
Here's Earth Policy Institute's car and bike production data as a proportion of world population. All this does is take some of the upward slope out of the curves. Car production as a proportion of population has been basically flat since 1974, while bike production actually took off about that time. Ah, 1988. In absolute terms (see EPI's graph here
http://www.earthpolicy.org/Indicators/Bike/BikeAuto.gif), there was a bike boom that started in 1969 and continued almost unabated until 1988, with no bust. In population-relative terms, the dip from 1973 to 1975 is a bustlet (bike production loses a quarter of its value), but then proceeds to double from 1975 to 1988, and now looks like it's stabilizing.
Either way, there was a world-wide "bike boom" from 1969 to 1988, with more or less no major bust, in which bike production quadrupled in absolute terms and trebled in population-relative terms.
Hmm. 1988. Isn't that about the year that it started getting hard to buy anything new at a reasonable price except a hideous, cheapo mountain bike with a sloping top tube?
Eric
Very interesting. Thxs for generating and posting the graph. The early 1970s boom is still readily apparent, though the bust has been softened (in the USA it was a 50% drop in sales). The 1975 to 1988 increase is also twice the sales rate seen in the USA and the unlike the world, the USA continued to see an uptrend in sales through to 2000.
Are boom and bust relative terms or is there a defined threshold in terms of % increase and decrease? Or is any increase technically a boom while any decrease is a bust?