Over the past decades, historical research on the history of the bicycle has experienced a significant upswing. New questions and methods have extended the previous focus on the development of different technical stages of the bicycle; next to the bicycle itself, users and practices, as well politics and discourse are now taken into account. The long-time dominant focus on the end of the nineteenth century has been supplemented by a reassessment of the entire twentieth century. A new master narrative can be found—either implicitly or explicitly—in many historical accounts of bicycling in Europe: the history of cycling starts off with a period of steady growth up until the 1950s, followed by a period of decline, which lasted until the 1970s, before the "renaissance" of the bicycle started. This classification is based primarily on quantitative material on the use of bicycle in various European countries and analyses of traffic planning and road constructions in the post-World War II period. An older narrative, which hardly plays a role in the current debate, attested the “decline” of the bicycle in the 1950s to the lack of technical innovation. So far, the waning interest of the users in the bicycle has thus been analyzed mainly in an indirect way. If we take a closer look at the bicycle users, the awareness of a "decline" of cycling set in much earlier. In Germany, leading officials of the cyclists’ association pronounced a crisis of cycling as early as the 1920s, even though the number of cyclists still increased further in that period. Numbers, discourses, and practices were not always congruent. This paper will re-examine the "decline of cycling" in Europe in the 1950s and ask the question of how we, as historians, deal with historical phenomena such as the “rise” and “decline” of technical artifacts. What criteria do we apply in order to note the beginning and end of a decline? Which factors and what actors, practices, and discourses must be taken into account in order to assess rise and decline? And how useful is our current time-division into a "Golden Age" of the bicycle in Europe up until the 1950s, a "decline” from the 1950s onwards and a "renaissance,” starting in the 1970s? Arguably, we as historians situate ourselves in the middle of that “renaissance” and “reappraisal” of the bicycle. What does this master narrative imply for our understanding of the history of bicycle use in Europe, especially in light of the current debates about "green cities" and "sustainable transport"?