A Spontaneous Market in a Boomtown: The Indispensable Bicycles of Interwar Tel Aviv

Dror Goldberg, The Open University of Israel

In 1919, ten-years-old Tel Aviv was a suburb of ancient Jaffa, with a population of 2000 people. Twenty years later, under the auspices of the British Mandate for Palestine, it was home to 150,000 people. A little known fact, registered only in Tel Aviv traffic censuses, is that the bicycle quickly became more common than all other modes of transportation combined. The absence of mountains, ice, and wealth was ideal for widespread bicycle adoption. The city flattened dunes and paved roads, allowing bicycles to move and connect new neighborhoods to the city. The bicycle was the mainstay of blue-collar commute, as bus lines were slow to adapt to the city’s rapid expansion. The boomtown’s engine was construction of new apartment buildings for refugees from Europe, and many construction workers reached construction sites on bicycles. This symbiosis between bicycles and city was a powerful driver of the bicycle boom in the boomtown. Moreover, milkmen, mailmen, messengers, policemen, and other professions used bicycles for work itself. Supplying these bicycles required a complete supply chain that spontaneously sprang out of nowhere, with much entry and exit in the confusing first decade. A couple dozens of small entrepreneurs, themselves recent immigrants, became producers, importers, wholesalers, retailers, repairmen, second-hand dealers, and leasers. Their background in Europe was related to bicycles or other durable, complex household items such as sewing machines. Other than traffic censuses, there is little intentional contemporary documentation of the bicycle’s prevalence, probably because it was less noisy and destructive than other vehicles. Most of the evidence and details on the supply of bicycles and the demand for bicycles comes from hundreds of items in newspapers. Advertisements by wholesalers and retailers tell the supply story; short news items on accidents and thefts incidentally reveal considerable information on who used bicycles, where, and why.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 64. Cities and Industrialization