The blog

Email your interest in attending

by carltonreid / on April 02, 2015 /

Please email me to let me know you’re interested in attending. And hit the RSVP button, too. Thanks.

Where have all the articles gone?

by carltonreid / on September 12, 2014 /

Now that the book is nearly out I’m taking a rest from writing feature articles on this site. The blog archive is still intact and all of the URLs still work. Here are some of the most read articles on […]

Info changes or upgrades

by carltonreid / on September 10, 2014 /

Sorry, it’s no longer possible to make changes.

21-page index

by carltonreid / on August 12, 2014 /

Pro indexer Nicola King has produced this rather superb index for the book. It’s split into an index of names and a general index. Click to make the pages bigger, or download a PDF. Dropping in the index is the […]

I made a Mormon missionary’s eyes glaze over

by carltonreid / on August 06, 2014 /

My book is a niche one but hopefully it will appeal to cyclists and motorists who like their history. Oh, and those interested in how we got our silkily surfaced roads, too. I’m happy to bore anybody silly with the […]

Probably the best illustration of God on a bike you’ll see today

by carltonreid / on August 03, 2014 /

I’ve not yet done anything with it but I own the domain christona.bike. However, this is the first time I’ve seen God pictured on a bike. It’s from La Vie Électrique, a French science-fiction novel written and illustrated in 1892 […]

Sample spreads

by carltonreid / on July 29, 2014 /

The book is now being designed. The covers are below, here are a couple of sample spreads. Click to take a closer look. The book will be 246 x 189mm and have getting on for 400 pages. (In short, it’s […]

64 motor marques have bicycling backgrounds

by carltonreid / on July 27, 2014 /

Cyclists and cycle manufacturers played a major part in the manufacturing, design and sale of the first motor cars in France, America and Germany – and in Great Britain, too: “[A] large number of men who, having made their names […]

Front and back covers

by carltonreid / on July 23, 2014 /

The book is now in the design stage. A few sample spreads will be uploaded soon but, for now, here are the front and back covers. If you want to be notified when the book is available for sale pop […]

The votes have been counted & verified…the results are…

by carltonreid / on July 08, 2014 /

623 of you lovely people voted for the cover you prefer. Thanks for your input. Here are the results: Cover 2 got the most votes (295); cover 3 got the least (122); cover 1 came in second with 206 votes. […]

"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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