The blog

Full and free – Chapter 11 – AMERICA’S FORGOTTEN TRANSPORT NETWORK

by carltonreid / on November 21, 2015 /

Here’s the Chapter Eleven from Roads Were Not Built For Cars. Every word has been retained from the paid-for book but the illustrations have been replaced with adverts. The print, Kindle and iPad versions of the book are now widely […]

London’s new Embankment cycleway used to be a tram route

by carltonreid / on October 21, 2015 /

In different eras Britain’s roads have been dominated by pedestrians, waggons, bicycles, trams, omnibuses and – latterly – motor vehicles. Researching the past shows us that things change. The hegemony of the car is taken for granted today, but it […]

Why does the Monaco Grand Prix organiser have a bicycle in its logo?

by carltonreid / on May 21, 2015 /

This weekend sees the annual staging of the Monaco grand Prix, one of motor-racing’s blue riband events. This is organised by the Automobile Club de Monaco. Before it was an automobile club it was a bicycle club, one of many […]

Lofty women on bicycles, “towering majestically above the thrones of wheel work”

by carltonreid / on April 07, 2015 /

I’ve just come across this wonderful quote from Thomas Hay Sweet, author of the 1897 book Social transformations of the Victorian age: a survey of court and country. Bicycles feature in the book, of course. Sweet – who wrote under […]

Thames Deckway was first thought of … in 1841

by carltonreid / on December 11, 2014 /

The idea for London’s Skycycle, an elevated cycleway, is nothing new. There was one in Pasadena at the end of the 1890s, with plans for it to slope down to Los Angeles. Similarly, the Thames Deckway, a mooted £600m floating […]

Distracted driving, 1899

by carltonreid / on September 02, 2014 /

What are these (American) chaps being distracted by? Bicycle belles?

When Bianchi made cars and trucks

by carltonreid / on March 27, 2014 /

Seventy-five percent of my book is now written. A pesky 25 percent is still brewing. The book’s first chapter goes through the copy-editing mill next week, via a copy-editor with an interesting history of his own (more on that later). […]

NYC’s yellow cabs are connected to cycling in the 1890s & mountain biking in the 1980s

by carltonreid / on March 17, 2014 /

I’ve finished the cycles-begat-automobiles chapter of the book. It’s 65,000 words long. This “chapter” is really a book and I’ll probably flesh it out even further and bring it out as a standalone e-book: pedalling petrolheads will love it. However, […]

“She bought a bicycle and bloomers instead of the furniture”

by carltonreid / on January 10, 2014 /

How dare she! The scamp. This graphic is from the Illustrated Police News, as are the other two below. There will be more in the book. All three are from the 1890s. Battersea park in London was a favourite haunt […]

California Cycleway was scuppered by cars (street-cars, that is, not motor-cars)

by carltonreid / on December 22, 2013 /

The first elevated highway between Pasadena and Los Angeles was an ambitious toll-road built by one of Pasadena’s richest residents. In the first year of the 20th Century this grade-separated highway towered over train tracks, road junctions and slow-poke users […]

"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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