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 […]
Continue ReadingThe cartoonist in the League of American Wheelman’s weekly magazine didn’t pull any punches, in 1889, when he imagined the punishment that ought be meted out to those horse-and-carriage drivers who were less than kind to cyclists. They should be […]
Continue ReadingThe 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 […]
Continue ReadingIn the July 1900 US edition of the mass-circulation Pearson’s Magazine, journalist W.L. Alden wrote of a grandiose plan to construct a long-distance “asphalt cycle track” between Damascus and a Red Sea port, possibly Aqaba. “An enterprising American engineer…proposes to […]
Continue ReadingColonel John Jacob Astor was an interesting chap. Stinking rich, too. He was one of the wealthiest men of America’s Gilded Age. Educated at Harvard, he thought highly enough of his own literary talents to write a science fiction novel. […]
Continue Reading1893 advert, Good Roads magazine, published by the League of American Wheelmen. Trivia: Hollywood’s bawdy actress Mae West is popularly thought to have said “Is that a gun [or pistol] in your pocket, or are you just glad to see […]
Continue ReadingHistory books have long said that Thomas Woodrow Wilson, the President of the United States during and three years after the First World War, was a huge fan of the automobile. “No more ardent motorist ever occupied the White House […]
Continue ReadingThe following is from A Treatise on Roads and Pavements of 1903 by Ira Osborn Baker, Professor of Civil Engineering at the University of Illinois. A bicycle in the eyes of the law is a vehicle and is entitled to […]
Continue ReadingThe rosy cheeks may have been the result of imagined exertion along this improved, macadamised road in Detroit but the mascara and the lipstick seem to suggest the artist wanted to portray this fictional young rider as a confident, independent […]
Continue ReadingIn June 1905, a car carrying US president Theodore Roosevelt was stopped for speeding, by two policemen on bicycles. The car was a Columbia, made by the same company that, in 1877, had brought the first high wheel bicycle to […]
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