The Encyclopedia of Louisville, University Press of Kentucky. All rights reserved. Bicycles have been widely used in the Louisville area for sport, exercise, recreation, transportation, and law enforcement for well over a century. At the end of 1997 the general-membership Louisville Bicycle Club had six hundred members. A smaller, more specialized mountain bike club the Kentucky Mountain Bike Association had about 175 Louisville members.
Many cyclists ride without affiliating with either group.
Police bicycle patrols, absent since automobiles became practical early in the century, appeared on the streets again in 1992 and soon proved effective for enlarging the area that could be covered by foot patrols, for making arrests in alleys and parking garages, and for patrolling large crowds. More than fifty units were in use by police in 1998, and numerous others were used by private security forces. But the heyday of cycling, for social status and visibility, was in the 1890s, when people from every social level in Louisville as elsewhere in America and Europe made it a fundamental of popular culture for several years. The annual convention and racing meeting of the League of American Wheelmen, a national cycling political and social organization, drew thirty thousand members to Louisville in 1896, according to Louisville newspapers. The gathering dominated the front pages of the Courier-Journal and the Louisville Times for three days.