Well, let's go to the data: this table would indicate that the worldwide boom might be now:

http://www.earthpolicy.org/Indicator...ata.htm#table1

Neal

My Dad was in the bike business from 1952 until 1979. There were 2 Bike Booms: 1971-72 and 1978-9. The first one was the bike craze in which everyone had to have a 10 speed. The second one was when the price of gas skyrocketed and people bought bikes to use to commute (That did not last long). Interesting question and points about if there was a bike boom in the rest of the world. Never thought about it. We sold Schwinn, Raleigh, Fuji, Vista, Dawes and a smattering of other stuff. The Raleighs and Fujis were starting to eat Schwinn's lunch because you could buy a 28 pound bike for the same price as a 40+ pound Schwinn Varsity. This forced Schwinn to have lightweight bikes manufactured for them by Panasonic/National . The quality was there but they were really missing the boat whne all the lightweight European models begain invading the states (i.e. - Motobecane, Atala, Gitane, Fuji, Takara, Sekine, etc.) From a business point of view, the booms helped my Dad make a real living for the first time in decades. We sold everything that we could get our hands on. The inventory turnover was absolutely incredible. Seems these days that the bike business is just crawling along and it is very difficult for an independent dealer to make a decent living; just like in the 60's.

Del Rio: Not that big (30,000). Which makes the amount of clueless/careless/beligerent drivers a greater percentage of the population. I've had more "incidents" here than I did back in Salt Lake. It's also far and away the WORST rodes I've ever biked on. I imagine roads to be like this after they've been mortared.

San Antonio: I spent 4 months there for PIT...and that was pretty awful, on a "big city" scale. Poor bike infrastructure, very car centered, teeming with motorists who view driving as a form of "survival of the fittest". That was my big "welcome to Texas".

Not to turn this thread into a Texas or any other state bashing thread...and nothing personal intended. I just had to pile onto the previous comment.

Pardon my rude threadjack...we now return you to your regularly scheduled programming. :D

Maybe in total numbers but I think you'd have to corrolate that to total world population and filter out bikes being sold in China and India as they become more afluent to get an apples to apples comparison. 6+ billion people in the world today and 2+ billion Chinese and Indians will skew the results if even a small percentage of them start buying bikes as they no doubt are.

There are quite a few bike shops here in town but with Performance, Colorado Cyclist, and Bicycle Village here in town and all the Internet sales, I don't know how the independant dealers stay in business at all. Seems like a loosing proposition.

Yes I am sure that it is quite a losing proposition. Your expenses keep going up. You sell a low profit item.You would like to make higher profits by selling accessories, but they can be purchased more cheaply on the internet . Labor rates are so-so, not what they should be for technical work performed. Self satisfaction levels are probably high. This is not a business for everyone. Those that are in it are there for the long run. It is similar to running the neighborhood hardware store when you have a Home Depot down the road.

Colorado Springs is not too bad - bicycles are a common site on the roads here and people are used to it and generally respectful. And the buses have bike racks although this city is small enough that I can't think of too many reasons to need to carry your bike on a bus. I would be faster to ride. Not surprising it's always teenage boys, usually in Jeeps, who feel the need to act the fool and yell something or cut you off. Funny thing here though - you do see a few bikes doing the morning/evening commute like me but the roads are crawling with bikes at lunch as everybody gets out for some fresh air. They must haul their bikes into work.

I rode my bike through the bike boom. I was stationed for a good part of that at Scott AFB in Illinois. We did two self-supported multi-day tours through the general area (Illinois, Missouri) and I don't recall ever seeing another cyclist outside of a few college towns that we passed through. I also commuted to college from the base, round trip of about 25 miles. I don't recall ever seeing another cyclist on one of those rides, either. It was weird...that the bikes were flying out of the shops, and I suppose they were popping up on people's walls or something, ala seinfeld.

I was a consumer/participant in the first bike boom. Bought my Raleigh after my college girlfriend got her Peugot.

Around 1970 it was kind of an American Youth Hostel, Whole Earth Catalog, self-sufficiency kind of thing, along with backpacking, rock climbing, yoga, and traversing the Appalachian Trail. Many of us were high on Siddhartha and Jack Kerouac's The Dharma Bums. AYH had been simmering through the 60s and it looked like it would finally take off. This was well before OPEC shut off the oil supply.

It didn't last too long because it was too much hard work. My sister rode with a 10-speed pack in high school. She had a lovely powder blue Mercier, and they used to ride to a park for lunch and get stoned.

I bunged up my knees pushing heavy loads and big gears as a tourist--nobody taught us about spinning in those days. For a couple of years I just used my bike to commute to class, and then I took up racing in 1974, just as gasoline was going over 50 cents a gallon. We were almost too broke to drive to races.

Like when I went to the Boulder, CO vintage bike swap - I figured "10-speeds" of one variety or other sold by the millions in the early 70's and would be plentiful. Instead, out of a couple hundred bikes there was one lonely Schwinn Varsity and something French that might have been a low end Peugeot or Gitane or something at one time. Everything else was a balloon tired cruiser or Stingray chopper style bike, most from the 50's and 60's. It's like the 70's never happened. The coolest bikes there were a couple of imaculate Peugeot touring models (maybe UE-18's or something similar) that this old couple had purchased in Paris in the 70's and road to the swap meet on and those were not for sale.

Wouldn't increased affluence for Asian countries mean buying fewer bikes and more cars? That's pretty much what this 2004 article says in regard to China: http://www.thestandard.com.hk/stdn/s.../FK12Ad04.html

At any rate, the world population has less than doubled from 1970 to 2005: 3.7b to 6.5b. Yet the number of bikes sold over that time (or to 2003) has just about tripled: 36mil to 105mil. That, of course, doesn't include used bikes. Just seems like a some sort of boom to me.

Neal

Sounds like hunting VLW's in Ohio. Everything seems to be a balooner or some Schwinn boat anchor, How they managed to sell so many Varsity's is beyond me! I have seen a scant few real lightweights in the wild, I wonder if they are still hiding in rafters and on garage walls......

Interesting article. I'm sure that is happening in Bejing. I'm more sceptical about it happening outside the major cities where I believe the majority of the Chinese people still live. If the bicycle represents "a cheap machine used mainly by the poor" I suspect that still represents a few hundred million people buying bikes today that were probably walking in 1970. Same situation in India I suspect. Interestingly, some of my Indian co-workers and I were discussing bicycle commuting as I bike to work every day and they felt that no one who had achieved any level of success in India would ride a bike to work even if they owned a nice bike and rode it recreationally. It would be looked at as a sort of reverse status symbol. That might be true in China too amoung the newly affluent middleclass of the cities.

Not so sure the boom isn't now...
{Downunder]
This is the 4th year in a row where a 1,000,000,000 have been sold
Not bad with only about 20millon people
Yeah I know a lot of them are grap K-mart bikes but still that is a lot of bikes
I know I'm not holding up my end with only 10bikes to my name but I'll keep working at it.

That looks like too many zeros. Or you Ozzies ride a lot of bikes. Or is that metric counting or something ;) :D

To paraphrase Ev Dirkson, "A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon your talking real money!"

Maybe this is a no-brainer conclusion, but I'd certainly think that a difference between today's "boom" in sales and ones previously is that worldwide it's department or big-box stores that are selling bikes, rather than Ma and Pa LBS. Or maybe that was pretty much always true given how Sears and the like have always been major players.

Neal

Sears no longer sells bikes though? Not here in Houston anyway. Been at least a decade, maybe longer? The sad thing is there are no longer any nice bikes incognito like Sears used to sell. The ted Williams 531, the decent Puchs, and even the Shimano 600 equipped Suteki(Made by Panasonic). I found one of those at the thrift store not long ago.,,,,BD


http://www.touringonbikes.us/suteki.htm

I'm not sure if not seeing other cyclists on the road is an indicator that no one is riding bikes. I used to commute in to Naval Station Norfolk with only one road leading into gate two and I rarely ever saw another cyclist, but the guards told me that they saw a lot of bikes come through every morning. I ride on TOSRV each year where 3,000 cyclists start at the same time, take the same road, and arrive at the same destination; and it's not unusual to see no one else on the road in front of you. In the 90's this wasn't true. From this I can deduce that to fill up 105 miles of road so that you always see other cyclists you need 6,000 bikes.

I was a witness to, and participant, in the early 70's bike boom and it was something to behold. Old bike clubs run be sportingly dressed men who ran small century rides for themselves suddenly had hundreds of teenagers like me show up for their rides wearing cutoff jeans and t-shirts. The following year there would be more than a thousand.

A lot of credit has to be given to these older men and women that carried the torch for cycling through the car crazy 50's and 60's and were there ready to help us when the road apple hit the spokes in 1971. Even small towns had bike clubs. We, of the pimply set, used to follow Chuck Harris (of bike mirror fame) around like he was the Pied Piper of Knox County.

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

Actually the large places don't really carry anything for older bicycles. So some of the smaller older shops earn business by catering to people who're not out to buy a brand new bike. Cycle Analysts of Denver is a good case in point, they carry lots of parts for older and American made bikes. They usually have several used bikes chained up for sale outside.

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?

That's true but there are a lot of small shops here that don't specifically cater to older bike's either. Brian's Bicycle Repair Shop would probably be the exception especially since he doesn't sell new bikes. There's nothing here like Cycle Analysts or Vecchio's. I wish there were but the Denver/Boulder area seems to be better off in that regard.

Your latter fact is very intriguing. One does not think of the US as a place that outdoes the world in the consumption of bicycles, of all things. Beer, sausage, televisions, cars, sure; but, bicycles?

I think they're like pornography ... you know it when you see it.

In 1970, my dad bought bikes for the family. He was influenced by the advice of his Czech emigre friend Vlad, who advised him on what entry-level bikes to look at. I'm not sure why my parents decided to buy bikes, but they did. Part of a fad? Concern for health? A wholesome family activity? Probably all of the above. Anyway, my dad, mom, and sister got entry-level Gitane Grand Sport Deluxes, I got an entry-level Raleigh Record (and I still remember being in the bike shops-- especially the smell of all those new bikes...). I was 15. My parents went riding a few times with us, but I was the only one who stuck with it. My sister's bike was stolen when she moved to her own apartment a few years later. My parents' bikes are still in my mother's attic (and I WILL get my hands on my dad's Gitane, one day. :D ). My Raleigh?

By 1977, I was fed up with the poor shifting on my Raleigh, which I had endured over the course of 7 years, so, in June of 1977, I bought a Motobecane Grand Touring for $250, which seemed like a fortune to me at the time. It was the sweetest-riding bike i had ever been on. I still remember the test ride, and being fitted to the bike. The Raleigh? I sold it to a friend at work for $20. At the time, I was glad to be rid of it, but today...well, I wish I still had it, for sentiment's sake. It was a beautiful bronze green, and would be an excellent candidate for a fixed-gear conversion, being a uniquely beautiful vintage frame, but utterly useless for any other purpose.

And it's true...In 1977, perched atop that beautiful Motobecane, which is still with me, hanging on the wall in my living room, I was the only cyclist on the roads. No other cyclists, no motorists harassing me. I was riding a fast, sleek, efficient French machine wherever I went, with unlimited miles per gallon.

Yep, I'm still the only one who rides, although my sister does have a bike, and my mom did buy a Trek hybrid a few years ago, which has been ridden about as much as her Gitane.