![Man with a bicycle, making his way through a wildflower meadow in the Bernese Oberland. In the background is the Niesen, around 1933.](https://blog.nationalmuseum.ch/app/uploads/mann-mit-fahrrad-300x225.jpg)
When the bicycle was the public’s darling
Cycling is booming, thanks to coronavirus and e-bikes. But the height of the cycling craze was in the early decades of the 20th century. Back then, the bicycle ruled the streets, and in fact in 1913 the view in the Federal Parliament was that: “The world today would not be able to manage without the bicycle.”
![Sewing machines and bicycles were sold in Hermann Moos’ shop in the old Seidenhof in Zurich, around 1905.](https://blog.nationalmuseum.ch/app/uploads/seidenhof-in-zurich-velo-1905-243x300.jpg)
Extensively used in day-to-day life
![Bicycle parking on the main concourse of Zurich railway station, around 1944.](https://blog.nationalmuseum.ch/app/uploads/velos-bahnhofhsalle-zurich-1944-sbb-historic-286x300.jpg)
Enormous social radiance
The battle for legislative regulation
![In 1946, rush-hour traffic on the Kornhausbrücke in Bern is dominated by bicycles.](https://blog.nationalmuseum.ch/app/uploads/kornhausbrucke-1940-218x300.jpg)
Cycle associations capable of launching referendums
Promoting cycling is now a constitutional mandate
![Austrian-Swiss photographic pioneer Johann Barbieri on his bicycle, 1880. "If you hadn’t climbed on it"…](https://blog.nationalmuseum.ch/app/uploads/warst-net-aufi-gstiegn-barbieri-217x300.jpg)
![..."you wouldn’t have fallen off it".](https://blog.nationalmuseum.ch/app/uploads/warst-net-obi-gfolln-barbieri-300x218.jpg)