The blog

Lesbians and Cycling: an Illustrated History

by carltonreid / on January 06, 2012 /

Last month I ran a posting featuring the group photograph below. I suggested that one of the men pictured looked rather feminine and, perhaps, was a woman impersonating a man. A 19th Century woman muscling in on a man’s world […]

Bicycle aerobars, 1896

by carltonreid / on December 29, 2011 /

The cyclists of the 1890s were a pushy lot, demanding better roads on which to ride their “wheels” (this was the US term for bicycles, hence League of American Wheelmen) and they were also an inventive bunch. While refinements such […]

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 […]

Lady, that handlebar ‘tache ain’t fooling no-one

by carltonreid / on December 14, 2011 /

This group of cyclists was photographed in the 1880s and shows a fine party from a chapter of the League of American Wheelmen. Note there’s a new-fangled Safety bicycle underneath one of the riders on the ground. And check out […]

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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