In 1994, four cyclists met up to discuss the potential of bike transportation in Tel Aviv.

“It’s a flat, compact city with hardly any snowy days (if at all), terrible parking problems and a huge traffic overload.”

 

At a meeting with a senior official at City Hall, they did their best to market their strategy to transform Tel Aviv into a cycling city.

“You’re completely confused”, came the answer. Tel-Aviv\Jaffa is a modern city, the metropolitan heart and the business center of the State of Israel. You are delightful tree-huggers, but we’ll never go back to the days of the carefree cavemen. We face forward, and, as long as China and the rest of the Third World use bicycles, we will push for advanced transportation. Don’t you read the newspapers? Any day now we’ll have a subway here….”

 

But the four were not dejected. They fixed another meeting, with another City Hall official, this time one whom they knew to be a cyclist. He listened intently to their idea, but replied tiredly: “I so appreciate your initiative, but these kinds of ideas are successful in the European countries that support sustainable transportation. We, in contrast, are a Middle Eastern country, with Israelis attached to their cars or to camels…. It’s a shame to waste your time.”

 

To cut a long story short, after their failed attempts to get City Hall to take the lead, the four added some more people of the same vision to their group, and in 1995 Tel Aviv bicycle association was founded. Its aims – to encourage the use of, culture of and transportation by bikes in Tel Aviv

In 2008 the NGO expanded its activities to a national level and changed its name to Israel bicycle association.