The blog

New York City once had the best bike path in the world

by carltonreid / on January 31, 2012 /

Netherlands schmetherlands, the country with the best riding conditions for cyclists used to be America. Difficult to imagine, but in the 1890s a number of American cities could boast the world’s best bicycle-infrastructure. Part paid for by pushy, influential cyclists, […]

Bike fitting, 1890s: “I am the scorcher”

by carltonreid / on January 26, 2012 /

Cycling has many health benefits, “of the rosy, romping, rollicking kind,” said Dr. Victor Neesen in an 1899 ‘how to cycle’ book. However, the good doctor – a gynaecologist – was a stickler for the proper position to be struck […]

MOTORISTS’ FRONT OF JUDEA: What Have The Cyclists Ever Done for Us?

by carltonreid / on January 20, 2012 /

REG: Cyclists have bled us white, the bastards. They don’t pay road tax, they run red lights. And what have they ever given us in return? XERXES: Pneumatic tyres. REG: What? XERXES: Pneumatic tyres. REG: Oh. Yeah, yeah. They did […]

Bust food, opium, weak women pills and bicycle suits: Sears Roebuck catalogue, 1897

by carltonreid / on January 13, 2012 /

I’m working on a long and detailed posting on the impact of Sears Roebuck & Co on the bicycle retailers of the late 1890s and through until about 1905. I’ll be featuring one or two of the catalogue scans below. […]

Tarmac exec said cyclists were the first to push for improved roads

by carltonreid / on January 12, 2012 /

In his 1968 book Black Top: A History of the British Flexible Roads Industry J. B. F. Earle (a former commercial director of Tarmac Ltd., and first chairman of the Federation of Coated Macadam Industries) wrote: “The first concerted pressure […]

Personal transportation devices need the right to roam, or they die

by carltonreid / on December 21, 2011 /

In December 2001, the “tech world’s most-speculated-about secret” was a personal transportation device. Costing $100m to develop, the inventor said the device – codenamed Ginger – was to be “to the car what the car was to the horse and […]

Santa on a bike, 1896

by carltonreid / on December 19, 2011 /

This crudely-drawn bike-borne Santa was in the December 1896 issue of Cycling Life, one of a number of American bicycle trade magazines. The full ad from Syracuse bicycle manufacturer E. C. Stearns can be seen below. It says: “At this […]

When President’s said cyclists deserved medals

by carltonreid / on December 06, 2011 /

The League of American Wheelmen was a highly influential organisation in the 1890s. It was non-partisan, bestowing its favours on whichever politicians would promise to support its Good Roads campaign, started in the 1880s. In the 1896 Presidential election campaign, […]

"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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