Editor's note: In celebration of the bicentennial of the invention of the bicycle, the Star Tribune's Outdoors Weekend section is publishing brief stories and historical anecdotes each month during the warm weather cycling season that highlight the bicycle’s place in Minnesota history. This is the second story in the occasional series. (Find the first here.)

Public officials have for many years been tantalized by bicyclists as sources of tax revenue. Ask the Minnesota legislators who hope to sell permits for bike lanes. Or the Montanans who proposed a border tax this spring to wring revenue from touring out-of-state cyclists.

But, historically speaking, those lawmakers have nothing on the Minneapolis City Council. Back in the 1890s, the city and much of the urbanized nation were going crazy for bicycles. According to city engineer and assessor reports of the time, about 40,000 people in the city had bicycles by 1900, and the council was building bike paths to accommodate them. The first of Lake Harriet’s paths was paved in 1896. The city claimed in 1901 that it had 43 miles of bike paths of various kinds.

To pay for all that, an inventive council made 50-cent bike tags mandatory for use of the city’s paths. The fine for riding without a tag — that is, a tag “conspicuously affixed to the left front fork of said bicycle” — was $1, the equivalent of about $25 today.

And bike tax revenue poured in. In 1901, the city sold more than 30,000 tags, generating what in today’s dollars would be more than $350,000. But enforcement, and the bike craze, must have waned. Bike tag sales dropped to 5,400 in 1905, and just 701 in 1909. Today, paths and lanes are, of course, considered basic, essential parts of the city’s infrastructure and tax base.

But the council was reacting, perhaps with alarm, at the swarms of new cyclists then rolling across the city. Minnesota History magazine reports that city engineer traffic counts in 1895 found an average daily bicycle count at Fifth Street and Nicollet at about 4,000 bikes — perhaps half the traffic at the time, including horses. On Dec. 20, 1895 — Christmas week — the city counted 1,475 bikes downtown. Compare that to the city’s most recent downtown daily bike traffic count, which occurred 121 years later in 2016: 1,500 bikes on the street and 2,500 on the Cedar Lake Trail.

Good thing, in 1902, that a local minister, the Rev. Isaac Houlgate, published a “Guide to Minneapolis Bicycle Paths,” which is on file at the Minnesota History Center. The guide cost 10 cents, with the reverend writing that he hoped “that I may thereby help my fellow riders to ennoble one of the best, if not the best of the present day pastimes, sports, pleasures and conveniences of this age.”

Tony Brown is a freelance writer. He lives in Minneapolis.