no one believes me about the bicycling housewives

[walkitout]

I want to be clear here: I'm not asserting that women were riding long distances. I think they were doing <1 mile - 2 miles max trips, often with children on their own bicycles. Sometimes they had a kids seat on their bikes.

Women took good care of their bicycles. They tended not to expect to replace them (ever) and since they were low mileage, they survived a long long time. The bike industry thus never expected to sell very many of them at a time, and the used market for women's bicycles kept prices low.

http://www.jims59.com/vintageschwinns/

Because they were invisible on the road (sticking to their own, quiet, local subdivision, riding exclusively during the work day and primarily in the summer), to the bike industry (buying more bikes for their kids than for themselves), and to cycling enthusiasts (they didn't race or tour), there are few records of this activity. But the bikes exist (enough that the prices are depressed as a result). Who was riding them?

http://bicycling.about.com/od/thebikelife/ig/Stars-on-bikes/Audrey-Hepburn-on-a-bike.-06j.htm

Love the tray Audrey. A lot like the Electra front tray.

ETA: Wow. John Forester is _crazy_:

http://books.google.com/books?id=Qz4kAulpimgC&pg=PA18&lpg=PA18&dq=suburban+cycling+1960s&source=bl&ots=uzPWqMnkcN&sig=TkiOqfJo69yy5asuOywPaY0xXn8&hl=en&ei=sMBLSoa1GJCy8AS6w-TyBw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=6

Sorry about that. It's pages 18 and 19 from _Bicycle Transportation_ on google books. Here's the offensive portion:

"Then the economic boom of the 1950s changed society drastically. People strove f
or cars and avoided the bicycle as a "cheap" item. Even expensive bicycles could
be left around college campuses" (well, duh, anyone at college had a ton of mon
ey at that point)...Cycling was sneered at, not for being lower-class (which it
was not, because blue-collar families owned cars)..."

Blue-collar families owned plural cars? In the 1950s? Really, John?

That statistics don't really support that thesis.
~

Comments

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

I just found a book (_The National Road_)that says US automobile ownership doubled between 1950 and 1970, and that by the early 1970s there was one automobile for every two people in the US, which suggests that somewhere around 1950 or 1955 there would have been one car for every four people. I don't think that's high enough to make it likely that blue-collar families typically owned multiple cars, though probably some did.

I do wonder how many cars were only intermittently licensed. I remember reading a lot of stories about teenage boys fixing up beaters and saving up for registration fees and what not (and of course driving them illegally shows up as a plot point ...). That suggests there were a certain number of old cars that wouldn't show up in the stats. Not saying this would be enough to change your argument, I just thought it was interesting.

definition of people?

[walkitout]

Was that including children too young to drive or was that adults of driving age or ...? Because if there was one for every two people in 1970, then every adult of driving age probably had a car at that point. (If it is Raitz book, I can look pages up on google.)

Re: definition of people?

[walkitout]

http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/statistics/2007/mv1.cfm

Motor vehicles in the US, public, private, cars, trucks, buses, including a handy total column and then a ratio for the population as a whole.

Dunno where the historical version of this is, and these, of course, are only the registered ones and as you note, not all (working) vehicles are registered.

ETA: We're at under 1 for every 2 people right now, if you just look at autos; trucks brings it up and I suspect trucks includes SUVS so they do need to be included. We're _still_ not at 1-1 tho, altho we now exceed 1 for every legal driver.