The blog

Lofty women on bicycles, “towering majestically above the thrones of wheel work”

by carltonreid / on April 07, 2015 /

I’ve just come across this wonderful quote from Thomas Hay Sweet, author of the 1897 book Social transformations of the Victorian age: a survey of court and country. Bicycles feature in the book, of course. Sweet – who wrote under […]

Don’t be beaten down, make your way in the world

by carltonreid / on June 23, 2014 /

At the end of the 19th century America had the world’s best cycle infrastructure: the elevated California Cycleway and the Coney Island Cycle Path. I reckon way is a far more powerful and positive word than path. In America and […]

Don’t be beaten down, make your way in the world

by carltonreid / on June 23, 2014 /

The Dutch bike isn’t Dutch it’s English (and proudly not updated since 1911)

by carltonreid / on August 19, 2013 /

The Dutch bike – the omafiets, or grandmother bike – seems to be as Dutch as tulips and clogs. Just as tulips and clogs are not Dutch (tulips were first commercially grown in Persia and wooden shoes are global) the […]

Go Dutch, 1981

by carltonreid / on August 18, 2013 /

Why hasn’t the UK got Dutch-style cycle networks in every town, city and village? Partly it’s down to culture: the Netherlands has had 100+ years of bicycle-based national identification. This is so strong that the Dutch bike – the omafiets, […]

Why is cycling popular in the Netherlands: infrastructure or 100+ years of history?

by carltonreid / on December 08, 2012 /

Imagine, if you will, War of the Worlds in reverse. Imagine not a destructive alien invasion, but a constructive one. Imagine giant space-ships sucking up all of the wonderful bike paths in the Netherlands and depositing them in the UK, […]

"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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