The blog

Estimated time of arrival for the book (ETA shifts again)

by carltonreid / on January 05, 2013 /

When is the book due to be published? I’m plumping for sometime in Spring Summer this year. Most of the research has now been completed I keep finding great new avenues of research but I’m nearly done with my exploring, […]

Roads Were Not Built For Cars

by carltonreid / on December 09, 2011 /

Many motorists assume roads were built for them; that asphalt is a relatively recent creation designed to speed them along; and that non-motorised road users have lesser rights. None of this is true. Motorists are the johny-come-latelies of highway history. […]

Cyclists’ road rights history book due in 2012

by carltonreid / on November 29, 2011 /

I’m writing a book about roads history. I’m focussing on the period 1880-1905, which saw the Bicycling Boom and then – pop – the start of Motoring Mania. You can learn more about this e-book in the eight-page pitch below. […]

"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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