The blog

Parliamentary talk with All-Party motoring and cycling groups

by carltonreid / on November 05, 2014 /

…been updated and is due to be updated again – it will always have the most up-to-date info. It’s not as easy to nudge Amazon into notifying Kindle-version buyers of…

Why does the Monaco Grand Prix organiser have a bicycle in its logo?

by carltonreid / on May 21, 2015 /

…and is nestled on the French Riviera, close to Nice. Since its Monte Carlo casino opened in 1863 it has been a magnet for high-society and well-to-do ne’er do wells….

Sherlock Holmes and the real-life mystery of London’s forgotten Australian wooden roads

by carltonreid / on June 26, 2013 /

…blocks for use as fire-lighters: “In the late fifties the roads in [Hackney] were being resurfaced…The removal of the old road surface uncovered a base layer of wooden blocks set…

Here’s an English arterial road with a very wide lane for cyclists

by carltonreid / on September 05, 2013 /

…with its punt and chain. While he would be later applauded for his campaigns to save old buildings, especially Victorian ones, such as St Pancras station, the bicycle-riding Betjeman was…

Today calling 1948: oi, where are our cycleways?

by carltonreid / on November 30, 2013 /

…1960s before motorway-mania took hold, with many trunk roads also being built or old roads widened, straightened and made less friendly for cyclists. None of the new arterial roads had…

Judge: “The motor-car should in law be regarded as a wild beast”

by carltonreid / on December 05, 2014 /

…the wild beast, as we hold this motor-car to be, is liable for the consequences of his rash act. In any case we find nothing of the sort here. Mr….

"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.

+++++++++

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?

+++++++++

Fill out my online form.