Roads Were Not Built for Cars: How Cyclists Were the First to Push for Good Roads & Became the Pioneers of Motoring - Softcover

Reid, Carlton

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1610916891 ISBN 13: 9781610916899

Verlag: Island Press, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

In Roads Were Not Built for Cars, Carlton Reid reveals the pivotal—and largely unrecognized—role that bicyclists played in the development of modern roadways. Reid introduces readers to cycling personalities, such as Henry Ford, and the cycling advocacy groups that influenced early road improvements, literally paving the way for the motor car. When the bicycle morphed from the vehicle of rich transport progressives in the 1890s to the “poor man’s transport” in the 1920s, some cyclists became ardent motorists and were all too happy to forget their cycling roots. But, Reid explains, many motor pioneers continued cycling, celebrating the shared links between transport modes that are now seen as worlds apart. In this engaging and meticulously researched book, Carlton Reid encourages us all to celebrate those links once again.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Carlton Reid is the executive editor of trade magazine BikeBiz.com. His travel pieces have appeared in National Geographic Traveller and The Guardian. His previous books include Adventure Mountain Biking (Crowood Press,1990); Complete Book of Cycling (contributor, Hamlyn, 1997); I-Spy Bicycles (Michelin, 1998); Discover Israel (Berlitz, 1993); Lebanon: A Travel Guide (Kindlife, 1995); Classic Mountain Bike Routes of the World (contributor, Quarto Publishing, 2000); Bike to Work Book (Front Page Creations, November 2008) and Family Cycling (Snow Books, 2009).

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Roads Were Not Built for Cars

How Cyclists Were the First to Push for Good Roads & Became the Pioneers of Motoring

By Carlton Reid

ISLAND PRESS

Copyright © 2015 Carlton Reid
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-61091-689-9

Contents

Foreword, 
Preface, 
Introduction, 
1. When Two Tribes Were One, 
2. Pioneers, 
3. Mastodons to Motorways, 
4. Who Owns the Roads?, 
5. Speed, 
6. Width, 
7. Hardtop History, 
8. "What the Bicyclist Did for Roads", 
9. Ripley: "the Mecca of all Good Cyclists", 
10 Good Roads for America, 
11. America's Forgotten Transport Network, 
12. Pedal Power, 
13. Motoring's Bicycling Beginnings, 
14. Without Bicycles Motoring Might Not Exist, 
15. From King of the Road to Cycle Chic, 
Epilogue, 
Acknowledgements, 
Appendix A – History of roads timeline, 
Appendix B – Motor marques with bicycling beginnings, 
Appendix C – Kickstarter supporters, 
Bibliography, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

WHEN TWO TRIBES WERE ONE

The roads you travel so briskly lead out of dim antiquity, and you study the past chiefly because of its bearing on the living present and its promise for the future. Lieutenant General James Harbord, 1946

The improvements made to highways are normally assumed to have been started by motorists. This assumption is mistaken. The "Good Roads" movement was created in the 1880s by cyclists. Many of these cyclists were rich and influential, and would later morph into motorists and continue campaigning for Good Roads. The first motorists drove automobiles that were heavily dependent on technologies developed by the cycle industry, an industry at the cutting edge of industrial design and which pioneered manufacturing processes absorbed by the automobile industry, an industry dependent on former or existing cycle entrepreneurs and technicians.

Many country roads in the 19th century were rutted in winter, dust-bowls in the summer and churned with deep mud at most other times. Urban areas fared better, with macadam roads capped with layers of dust-bound crushed stone. Major thoroughfares in cities were often topped not with setts – don't call 'em cobbles – but with wood. In 1871, Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., "America's Main Street," was laid with hardwoods. Five years later some of the wood blocks were lifted, and a thin asphalte strip laid in their place. This was a test of a tar-and-gravel mix patented by a Civil War cavalry general who had been inspired by a Belgian scientist's mountain-sourced French bitumen. In effect, this was America's first bike path. Asphalte roads spread through the city – there were 45 miles of them by 1882. The District of Columbia's asphalte roads formed a "wheelman's paradise," said Bicycling World. A writer in 1889 asked: "How is it possible for a man or woman to get along in that city of magnificent surfaces without a cycle of some kind?"

Cyclists may have loved the pioneer blacktop, but it soon rippled and popped, and within a decade the asphalte roads had been grubbed up; the perfect road surface was still some years away. However, Gilded Age cyclists had seen the future – a future of hard, smooth roads. In the late 1880s the pushiest of these well-heeled cyclists created an influential highways improvement campaign. The Good Roads movement would go on to achieve much of what it wanted: Federal funding for roads, a national plan, and the start of the world-reshaping American highway system. The Federal Aid Road Act of 1916 was signed by President Woodrow Wilson. When a law professor, Wilson had spent much time in Europe, touring on his bicycle. The roads of France and England were far superior to the ones in America and Wilson became an advocate of Good Roads, an interest he kept as he became a motorist. By his side at the signing of the Federal Aid Road Act was Amos G. Batchelder, Executive Secretary of the American Automobile Association. By 1916, the Good Roads movement was no longer led by bicycle riders, but by motorists. However, Batchelder had first been a cycling official. A member of the League of American Wheelmen since 1888 he had been the L.A.W.'s official handicapper, and was also chairman of the National Cycling Association's racing board. A great many other motoring officials, journalists, promoters, and manufacturers had also been heavily involved in cycling but in 1916 cycling's contribution to the improvement of America's highways was becoming obscured, partly by design.

The hiding was so successful that, by 1927, the Ford Motor Company could boldly claim that the "Ford car ... started the movement for good roads." The record was set straight in 2011 by Suzanne Fischer, curator of The Henry Ford museum in Dearborn, Michigan. "It might surprise you," she said, in a video, "but it wasn't car owners that first demanded better roads – it was bicycle riders."

America's Good Roads movement was modelled on Britain's Roads Improvement Association, created by cycling organisations in 1886. "Cyclists were the class first to take a national interest in the conditions of the roads," said William Rees Jeffreys in 1949. In the early 1900s, Rees Jeffreys led the influential Roads Improvement Association via his role as a council member of the Cyclists' Touring Club, one of the two cycling organisations which had established the pioneering roads lobbying organisation.

That it was bicyclists who first pushed for improved highways is today surprising, but it was clear and obvious in the 1890s. "The bicycle has done more for good roads, and will do more for good roads in the future, than any other form of vehicle," remarked Brooklyn's Mayor in 1896. An American newspaper said in 1899 that the reason bicyclists were "such advocates of good roads is that, having to furnish the motive power by the use of their own muscles, they learn at once what a mighty difference there is in the energy required to move the same load on a smooth, hard road or an uneven and muddy one." Another newspaper, in the same year, stated that cyclists had at first been despised because many thought they were demanding "that others should, without cost to him, smooth the roads that he alone might have more pleasure." When faced with rough or muddy highways, American farmers had acquiesced: "For years the farmer drives behind his horse with many a bumpety-bump, and the horse became stalled without ever swearing about it or writing a long protest to the county paper."

Cyclists, on the other hand, didn't keep quiet: "Here were people who could swear and write, pushing their vehicles by main strength on wretched paths when a [smooth] street ... permitted them to glide along almost without effort."

Spreading the "Gospel of Good Roads," cyclists cajoled, leafleted and sued, and flexed their political muscles. The campaigning continued when these moneyed cyclists morphed into motorists. Motoring pioneers were successful at – finally! – getting roads improved because they either benefited from the earlier lobbying work of cyclists or, just as likely, had started to lobby for Good Roads when, back in the day, they were cyclists.

Cycling's role in highway history started to be obscured when cycling became proletarian and when, even though cyclists were still the overwhelming majority on the roads, most of the money spent on highways was devoted to the needs of motorists alone. Motoring was modern; motoring was thrusting; motoring, thought almost...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Island Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1610916891
• ISBN 13: 9781610916899
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 331
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland