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 […]
Continue ReadingBut there’s no point complaining because the town planner who described cyclists thus is beyond reach – he has been dead since 1978. Britain’s high cycle use in the 1930s and 1940s was not something welcomed by Thomas Sharp, author […]
Continue ReadingSeventy-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). […]
Continue ReadingIn 1948, Britain’s Minister for Transport Alfred Barnes introduced the Special Roads Bill. This would – eventually – lead to the creation of Britain’s motorway network. But where are the cycleways promised in the 1948 plans? Apart from the New […]
Continue ReadingScotland’s Transport Minister Keith Brown has unveiled a “ground-breaking” new campaign aimed at road users. The £500,000 promotional campaign for the ‘Niceway Code’ launches on 5th August and will use posters and TV ads to ask motorists, cyclists and pedestrians […]
Continue Reading“Our weather is such that for at least one quarter of the year we must cycle at home or not at all,” stated a correspondent to the short-lived The Rambler weekly cycling magazine in 1897. “Most of us do not […]
Continue ReadingTransport academics tend to credit the discovery of ‘induced demand in transport’ to J.J. Leeming, a British road-traffic engineer and county surveyor, writing in 1969. He observed that the more roads are built, the more traffic there is to fill […]
Continue ReadingIf the Second World War hadn’t intervened, Britain might now have a dense network of Dutch-style segregated bike paths. Or, at least, such a segregated network was the ardent desire of motoring organisations, leading police officers, the Ministry of Transport, […]
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 ReadingImagine, 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, […]
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