High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Bike boom or bicycle craze refers to several different times when, for a period of a few years, many people in many parts of Europe and North America wanted to buy and ride a bicycle. In brief, they occurred in 1819, 1868, the decade of the 1890s, and the 1970s. In North America the term is sometimes used to refer specifically to the last major boom, the one of the 1970s.