Collaborative mapping resource OpenStreetMap was created in 2004 as the ‘wikipedia of maps’. Much of the early digital mapping was crowdsourced by geek-cyclists. OpenCycleMap, Cyclestreets, and smartphone apps such as the one I commissioned for BikeHub, are initiatives that prove […]
Continue ReadingAA President Edmund King is hot on dispelling the myth that motorists and cyclists come from different planets. In a ‘Two Tribes’ presentation given to a road safety conference he said: “We really must get past this dangerous ‘them and […]
Continue Reading“There are many excellent guide and road books already in existence, but few of these have been issued since touring in motor-cars has become general, and therefore they often lack the special points which are useful in a new form […]
Continue ReadingFrom my file marked well-that-never-happened-did-it?: “If Parliament sees fit to grant the necessary powers, it would be my intention to start on a further number of motor roads where that course is found to be preferable to the widening or […]
Continue ReadingI’ve been hanging out at Tyne and Wear archives recently, requesting to see plans of Newcastle’s streets from the 1830s through to the 1930s. While the Roads Were Not Built For Cars book is international in scope, it’s instructive to […]
Continue ReadingA FORECAST In the spring of 1913 St. John Skinner came back from Africa, after spending nine or ten years somewhere near the Zambesi. He travelled up to Waterloo by the electric train, and the three very stout men who […]
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 ReadingOver on iPayRoadTax.com I dig down into the views of Richard Wellings, the Head of Transport at the libertarian think-tank the Institute of Economic Affairs. Dr Wellings – his PhD is in transport and environmental policy – had tweeted his […]
Continue ReadingThe slow spread of motorcars after the 1896 London to Brighton Emanicipation Run (an event organised by a bicycle builder) wasn’t universally welcomed. Automobilists were “motor fiends”, opined the satirical magazine Punch in 1907, and the motorcar was “an ingenious […]
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