The blog

When a Minister for Transport said motorways would get fast-moving traffic off local roads

by carltonreid / on January 14, 2013 /

From 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 […]

Why is cycling popular in the Netherlands: infrastructure or 100+ years of history?

by carltonreid / on December 08, 2012 /

Imagine, if you will, War of the Worlds in reverse. Imagine not a destructive alien invasion, but a constructive one. Imagine giant space-ships sucking up all of the wonderful bike paths in the Netherlands and depositing them in the UK, […]

1930s planners wanted to turn Trafalgar Square into a multi-tier car-park

by carltonreid / on November 21, 2012 /

This 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 […]

When motorists feared segregation

by carltonreid / on October 30, 2012 /

The 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 […]

The “Mecca of all good cyclists”: Ripley Road

by carltonreid / on March 02, 2012 /

The War of the Worlds, the pretty Dibble sisters, Occam’s Razor, women’s liberation, and the London Olympics: all are linked by the “most famous cycling highway in the world.” On Saturday, July 29th, 2012, a fast-moving peloton of professional cyclists […]

New York City once had the best bike path in the world

by carltonreid / on January 31, 2012 /

Netherlands schmetherlands, the country with the best riding conditions for cyclists used to be America. Difficult to imagine, but in the 1890s a number of American cities could boast the world’s best bicycle-infrastructure. Part paid for by pushy, influential cyclists, […]

Critical Mass, 1923

by carltonreid / on December 31, 2011 /

A 1923 census of traffic by the UK’s Department of Transport showed there were more bicycles on the road than any other vehicle. Within just a few years the situation was much different. In 1923 there were 383,525 cars on […]

Widest road in Britain, 1936

by carltonreid / on December 15, 2011 /

The Team Valley Trading Estate in Gateshead looks pretty much like any other trading estate in Britain. But it was the first. It cost £2m to build and was meant to reinvigorate this corner of North East England. The road […]

"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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