The blog

AA was founded as ‘speed trap’ foiler; spotters were cyclists

by carltonreid / on September 06, 2013 /

Today we tend to think of the Automobile Association as a roadside rescue organisation with a penchant for pro-car PR. However, for much of its early history it was a radical campaigning organisation, a thorn in the side of the […]

Which road users cause congestion? (Clue: it’s not cyclists, not in 1919 and not now)

by carltonreid / on July 19, 2013 /

From Modern Roads, of 1919, by Henry Percy Boulnois, city surveyor of Exeter and Liverpool, and later a member of the Government’s Road Board in 1909. In the 1920s, Boulnois was chairman of the council of the Roads Improvement Association. […]

US senator: “[Automobiles are the future but] I cannot conceive our active Americans in carriages moved by any other motor but the horse”

by carltonreid / on May 03, 2013 /

“I imagine that one fine morning we shall wake up with apparatus ready to take us to our offices by an automobile carriage…But…I cannot conceive our active Americans adapting themselves to the pursuit of pleasure in carriages moved…by any other […]

Road users should “take care owing to the children who make the road their playground”

by carltonreid / on April 11, 2013 /

Arthur T. Poyser of the Cyclists’ Touring Club wrote a series of itinerary-style touring books for the organisation he worked for. The British Road Book, produced in 1897, came in five volumes, covering the whole of Great Britain. Scotland was […]

Motorists and cyclists are not two tribes, historically they’re from the same tribe

by carltonreid / on March 25, 2013 /

AA 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 […]

Farewell, my bicycle, I’ve got a motor-car

by carltonreid / on February 17, 2013 /

This poem seems to show that the late Victorian middle-class bicycle boom was well and truly over by 1897. In fact, cycling continued to be a popular form of leisure and transport for some of the moneyed classes through to […]

“The motorist nearly always resents delay…”, 1907 motor-car touring advice

by carltonreid / on January 25, 2013 /

“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 […]

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 […]

Chicago aims to be a world-class cycling city (you know, like it was in the 1890s)

by carltonreid / on December 21, 2012 /

Thirty miles of protected bike lanes have been opened in Chicago, part of a planned, 645-mile network of joined-up on-street bikeways. This is impressive, but it’s not new. Chicago was once certifiably bicycle-mad. For a few brief years in the […]

MOTOROBESITY, Punch magazine, 1902

by carltonreid / on December 12, 2012 /

A 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 […]

"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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