The blog

Don’t be rude on the road (or, how Governments have very short memories)

by carltonreid / on July 30, 2013 /

Scotland’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 […]

“You wouldn’t put Mark Cavendish on a penny-farthing…”

by carltonreid / on March 07, 2013 /

EE is trying to sell folks its 4G service by using fast athletes on slow modes of transport. “You wouldn’t put Steve Redgrave on a pedalo” is one of the treatments, the other is this take on “penny-farthings” (purists prefer […]

“Fat is folly” & other 19th Century adverts for bicycles, guns and various patent cures

by carltonreid / on January 04, 2013 /

Chain smoking: when bicycling was sponsored by baccy

by carltonreid / on December 18, 2012 /

In the late 1890s, Britain’s biggest tobacco company was the main sponsor of a chain of Cyclists’ Chalets. There were plans to build a chain of 500 such chalets, all part sponsored by W.D. & H.O. Wills. Only 40 are […]

“I fear no tramp”: when cyclists carried pistols

by carltonreid / on March 27, 2012 /

Inflator. Check. Spare tube. Check. Pistol. Check. Bicycle magazines of the 1890s carried adverts for guns “designed especially for cyclists.” Sears Roebuck sold mail-order “bicycle rifles”. Round-the-world bicycle tourists carried guns for obvious reasons, ditto for members of the City […]

How the two are related: Pantene shampoo, 2012; Cycles Gladiator, 1895

by carltonreid / on February 02, 2012 /

Pantene, the shampoo brand, has started an advertising campaign using the flowing locks of champion cyclist Victoria Pendleton. However, she’s wearing a UCI-compliant sparkly go-faster jersey. Clothes? Who needs clothes? The flowing locks on the nude Cycles Gladiator woman from […]

Puzzle-time, 1914. Or is it?

by carltonreid / on February 01, 2012 /

This is a puzzle. In more ways than one. It was published in a puzzle-book from 1914 but the dress and the subject matter don’t ring true for such a date. The League of American Wheelmen had morphed into the […]

Oldest bike shops in the world survived challenge from ‘the internet’ of the 1890s

by carltonreid / on January 18, 2012 / tags 1840s

I’m writing a book about the US and UK cyclist organisations of the 1880s and 1890s which lobbied for good roads – and got them – before the motorcar came along and stole their thunder. ‘Roads Were Not Built For […]

icanhascheezburger, 1889

by carltonreid / on January 18, 2012 /

Long before there was icanhazcheezburger, cute boys with cats or cashcats.biz, there was a cat-themed advert for a thread company. J&P Coats Sewing Threads is still in existence. In the late 1880s the company advertised its threads with the technological […]

Hanging from a railway bridge with one hand, carrying a heavy bicycle in the other

by carltonreid / on January 17, 2012 /

In the early years of the 20th Century, Sears Roebuck & Co. sold a device “popular with railroad and telegraph employees, both male and female.” The Harris 20th Century Railroad Attachment promised to make a “regular railroad velocipede out of […]

"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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