More and more cities around the world are waking up to the fact that it’s people who shop, not cars. Designing streets for cars, and not people, can therefore reduce retail takings. Take Regent Street in London, for example. It’s […]
Continue ReadingThirteen years before the start of the Great War, British author and futurist H. G. Wells predicted the European Union, tarmac roads, wind farms, tanks, motorways, sexual liberation and not just the internet but specific parts of the internet, including […]
Continue ReadingThe Twitter account @cyclehatred offers up a daily digest of spite and spittle aimed at the goodly, wonderful creatures who gad about on a benign form of unpowered transport. Such hatred is nothing new. The first two-wheeler users were also […]
Continue ReadingOops. We’re not quite there yet. But this was the prediction of geologist, Earl Cook, writing in Scientific American in 1971. He was ahead of his time in other ways, too. Cook (1920-1983) was an expert on resource depletion and […]
Continue ReadingThis monstrosity never got off the drawing board but, before we count our blessings, motormyopia allowed much of the rest of London to become car-centric. Perhaps today’s report from the transport committee of the London Assembly will be a turning […]
Continue ReadingGiven society’s addiction to cars it’s highly appropriate that the world’s first filling station was a drugstore. And it’s still standing. Stadt-Apotheke – or Town Pharmacy – in Wiesloch, south of Heidelberg, Germany, was where Bertha Benz first refuelled her […]
Continue ReadingWe tend to think of roads in the pre-motoring age as meandering rural backwaters. In some ways they were (and it was cycling organisations who first organised for improvements to roads) but these changing conduits were also conduits for change, […]
Continue ReadingThe US opened the first ‘controlled-access highway’ in 1908 (it was a bike path by 1938); Italy opened the first autostrada in 1924; Nazi Germany built the first autobahn in 1932. Motorways came late to Britain. The first motorway to […]
Continue ReadingAutomobile magazine, in October 1908, lauded the Long Island Motor Parkway as “the world’s first road designed and built for daily use of the automobile.” By 1938, a section of the two lane highway for exclusive use of “pleasure automobiles” […]
Continue ReadingBack in July, Michael Bloomberg, Mayor of New York City, cut the ribbon on a new 20mph ‘slow zone’ in New York and said: “Our roads are not here for automobiles. Our roads are here for people to get around.” […]
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