The blog

Britain’s first bicycle path – separated and swept to boot – was suggested in 1821

by carltonreid / on May 21, 2013 /

The first cycle paths in the UK were installed (badly) in the 1930s. However, the idea for such dedicated ways – segregated and swept, even – was first proposed in 1821. Given that what we would recognise as a bicycle […]

Roads were not built for cars, this one was built for the width of Lord Balloon’s stately home

by carltonreid / on March 08, 2013 /

Portland Place in London is now crammed with cars and could be easily turned into a genuinely multi-use street. It’s certainly wide enough, and has been this wide since it was built in the 1770s. Lots of London’s streets are […]

Horse shit, steam power and crap cycling

by carltonreid / on December 20, 2011 /

Satirical artist William Heath produced this fascinating depiction of transport of the future in 1829, a year before the first passenger steam train service, and while horse-drawn stage coaches still ruled the road (they plied their trade on turnpikes, the […]

"How cyclists were the first to push for good roads & became the pioneers of motoring." ROADS WERE NOT BUILT FOR CARS is a print, Kindle, iPad and free e-book about roads history.

The coming of the railways in the 1830s killed off the stage-coach trade; almost all rural roads reverted to low-level local use. Cyclists were the first group in a generation to use roads and were the first to push for high-quality sealed surfaces and were the first to lobby for national funding and leadership for roads. They were also the first promoters of motoring; the first motoring journalists had first been cycling journalists; and there was a transfer of technology from cycling to motoring without which cars as we know them wouldn't exist! Nearly seventy car marques – including Rolls-Royce, Aston Martin, Chevrolet, Cadillac and GMC – had bicycling beginnings.

'Roads Were Not Built for Cars' is a history book, focussing on a time when cyclists had political clout, in Britain and especially in America. The book researches the Roads Improvement Association - a lobbying group created by the Cyclists' Touring Club in 1886 - and the Good Roads movement organised by the League of American Wheelmen in the same period.

The book was published in a Kickstarter limited-edition in September 2014. Island Press of Washington, D.C. published a revised second-edition in April 2015.

Thanks to research grants and advertising support, text-only PDF chapters from the book are slowly being made available for free to read online. The free distribution model is being used in order to get the book seen by as many eyes as possible. The paid-for publications are richly illustrated; the free versions have had the pix stripped out and replaced with adverts.

To get notification of the paid-for and free publications subscribe to the (infrequent) email newsletter. See below or in the sidebars.

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MOTORISTS' FRONT OF JUDEA: Apart from the pneumatic tyre, ball bearings, differential gears, roads, motoring, car ads, and aviation, what have the cyclists ever done for us?

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