Tuesday, October 09, 2007

World War 2 bicycle safety pamphlet

There was a time when husbanding scarce resources was considered the patriotic American thing to do. See more of this WW2 bike safety pamphlet at FixedGear's Flickr stream.

World War 2 bike safety pamphlet - text transcribed below the image.
Before America entered the war, bicycles were largely used as a means of recreation and pleasure, and for riding to and from school by young people. Now they are helping to provide essential wartime transportation as well. More and more people are riding bicycles to and from work, for shopping, for errands, and for other purposes."

4 comments:

Ed W said...

1,100 cyclist deaths with - what? - maybe a total population of 150 million? We have a larger population now and fewer cyclist deaths. Should we infer that cycling is now safer that it was in the 1940s, and if so, what causative factor explains the difference?

Yokota Fritz said...

I noticed that also, Ed. We have more than twice the population and a little more than half the cyclist deaths.

Besides improved traffic safety, maybe there were four or five times as many cyclists?

Peter said...

Hi Richard,

You may be interested in two vintage Times-Call articles from Longmont that I've recently posted:

http://longmontian.blogspot.com/2007/10/vintage-longmont-bicycle-newspaper.html

Yokota Fritz said...

Thanks, Van. Very interesting.