The blog

Notes & References

by carltonreid / on August 17, 2014 /

…be distributed upon this side among our own people.” He thinks Congress should come to the rescue of the hat trade and “pass a law compelling every bicycle fiend to…

The “Mecca of all good cyclists”: Ripley Road

by carltonreid / on March 02, 2012 /

…the suffragette movement. Part of the fight for women’s rights was featured in The Wheels of Chance, a comic novel by author and noted cyclist H. G. Wells. His hero…

Where driving is easy, Brits drive

by carltonreid / on February 25, 2013 /

…used by just 2.7 percent of residents. There are safe cycle routes from homes to schools, but only a tiny proportion of Stevenage’s children cycle to school. Many are ferried…

The Human Hen

by carltonreid / on December 06, 2014 /

…noise to tell the man, woman, child, nursemaid, dog, or hen to get out of the way. The old woman, child, nursemaid, dog, or hen are then expected to proceed…

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

by carltonreid / on January 20, 2012 /

…business together as the Rouse-Duryea Cycle Company. This company – via gun and sword maker Ames Manufacturing of Chicopee, Massachusetts – made the Sylph ‘comfort’ bike for men and women….

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…

Roads Were Not Built For Cars

by carltonreid / on November 29, 2011 /

…of sorts) but it had been the bicycle which had given women their first true taste of freedom. Bicycles required no fare, no feed; bicycles didn’t have timetables; bicycles could…

Newcastle’s Nürburgring: my part in its downfall

by carltonreid / on October 16, 2015 /

…road knowing there would be no cars coming along the other way. This made me very happy. Roads are for people, not just for people in motor cars. A chapter…

A gamble or a sure thing? Here’s how to succeed with Kickstarter (& don’t forget the deductions)

by carltonreid / on April 22, 2013 /

…easy month. I didn’t have to badger my Twitter followers or send out increasingly desperate emails to anybody and everybody on my computer’s email client. With hindsight I can now…

Will today’s motorways suffer a similar fate to the railway lines that are now rail-trails?

by carltonreid / on November 03, 2015 /

…to die in one,” said H. G. Wells in 1901.[1] When the use of stagecoaches tailed off thanks to competition from railways, Britain’s expensive turnpikes went through a period of…

"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.