In 1887 Karl Kron published Thousand Miles on a Bicycle thanks to book pledges from cyclists as he pedalled his penny farthing around America. In 2013, Carlton Reid used crowdfunding website Kickstarter to do much the same thing. Roads Were Not Built For Cars is a fascinating account of how cyclists were the first to push for good roads and became the pioneers of motoring.
Win your own copy
The first print run of the book sold out in hours, but we have a copy to give away. To enter the prize draw simply leave a comment at the bottom of this page and we’ll pick a name next week.
You can pre-order print versions of the book, as well as the Kindle and iPad versions here
| “despaired and neglected roads”
How many miles of road would you guess crisscross this little island of ours? 100,000? 200,000? According to the Department for Transport there are 245,000 miles of roads in Britain; a distance equivalent to circumnavigating the earth 10 times.
Even more surprising than the size of our road network is the relatively tiny proportion of it that was designed and built for cars and lorries; for every one mile of motorway, there are 95 miles of roads conceived originally for non-motorised traffic.
After the railway killed off stage-coach traffic in the 1830s, it was another 50 years before cyclists took to the roads and pushed for high-quality sealed surfaces and were the first to lobby for national funding and leadership for roads.
Rees Jeffreys might have been an early advocate for motorways, but he started his career campaigning on behalf of cyclists for the improvement of what he referred to as “despaired and neglected roads”, lobbying for the of spreading tar on Britain’s roads long before cars became a form of mass transport.
The bicycle is not only entwined with the earliest days of the motor car, it literally paved the way for its widespread uptake. Cyclists were to be written out of highway history in the 1920s and 1930s by the all-powerful motor lobby but even the venerable Automobile Association had been formed by a group that broke away from the Cyclists Touring Club.
This fascinating period in history period from 1880-1905, which witnessed the first cycling boom and the start of our global obsession with motoring is explored in a gratifying degree of detail in a new book about roads history.
The book brings the history of our roads up to date by delving into the psychology of road users today. The following extract is from one of a number of sample pages available to view here
Social scientists theorise that humans believe in three kinds of territorial space. One is personal territory, like home. The second involves space that is only temporarily available, such as a gym locker. The third kind is public territory, such as roads.
“Territoriality is hard-wired into our ancestors,” believes Paul Bell, co-author of a study on road rage. “Animals are territorial because it had survival value. If you could keep others away from your hunting groups, you had more game to spear, it becomes part of the biology.”
When they are on the road, some motorists forget they are in public territory because the cues surrounding them – personal music, fluffy dice, protective shells – suggest they are in private space.
“If you are in a vehicle that you identify as primary territory, you would defend that against other people whom you perceive as being disrespectful of your space,” added Bell. “What you ignore is that you are on a public roadway – and you don’t own the road.”
Phil Parker
Tarmacadam was originally used on roads for the comfort of a growing road user group and to support the fashion of the time – the bicycle! A pity that the car has usurped this initiative over the past 100 years. The car like any pest given perfect conditions has thrived and multiplied and made the space its own. Time to have the balance restored in the design of our public spaces in favour of bikes and people.
Toby Harling
How much I would like to cycle on the road network before cars were invented on a modern mountain bike!
Sarah Thomson
This sounds like a fascinating book. I am a cyclist (and cycle instructor) and often find myself trying to convince people that the roads are for sharing, not dominating in one vehicle or another. I love the idea that roads were NOT built for cars. I wonder how many car drivers will buy this book….
Al Reed
It would be nice if people remembered that the road is public space, we should be on the look out for each other!
julie pritchard
cycling is great fun till certain car and lorry drivers pass too close to you.most though are very obliging.it certainly would be great without cars,but that will never happen now i suppose they pay for the upkeep of the road through taxes.cyclists get a free ride,thankfully!!
Emerson Roberts
No, Julie. No, no, no!
This is precisely what drives so much of the entitled, often dangerous, behaviour we see on our roads; an erroneous belief that motorists pay for those roads through their taxes and that cyclists get a free ride.
We all pay for our roads through general taxation; road taxes were abolished in the mid-1930s.
You are presumably referring to Vehicle Excise Duty (VED), sometimes referred to by its physical manifestation as “the tax disk” and often erroneously referred to as “road tax”. As its real name implies, it is a duty charged on the nature of the vehicle, specifically its polluting impact. One thing the VED absolutely does not do is pay for the roads, let alone allow me to claim any sense of ownership of those roads, or a higher ranking in the traffic pecking order over cyclists, horse-riders or drivers of low-emission cars (whose VED is £0).
I am sorry to bang on, but this is so fundamental to overturning the culture of entitlement among too many road users in the UK.
Neil
The idea of roads as shared public space; the key to so much in road safety and more….
Tim Sinclair
…except where there’s residents-only parking! If I’ve paid for the roads in general taxation, the local authority has stolen that space.
Damian
Let’s learn from the Dutch about bikes and roads – they managed to change from being car-focused to bike-focused in over the last few decades…
Francis Blake
Well, that’s one up for the bicycle!
Gavin
This book is a timely reminder that the motoring fraternity came along after the cyclists. I hope that there’s mention also that there is no such issue as “Road Tax” too – another misconception that is allowed to fester, and is seldom corrected, by Government spokespersons and their media lackeys. Well done Carlton Reid for putting this book together.
I tried to order the first run of it – but as the article says it sold out in a matter of hours.
Anne
So cyclists originally improved the road system, to everyone’s benefit. But then motorists came along an disimproved it.
Lesly hunter
BIKE IT.BEST BEFORE CAR
George
In 1894, it was reported that 20,000 bicycles passed through Ripley on one day. The Portsmouth Road was described as the best cycling highway in the world at that time.
It was truely a golden age for cycling then, but today Ripley is once again becoming accustomed to bicycles as more and more recreational cyclists head through the village towards the challenge of the Surrey Hills each weekend.
Perhaps that golden age will one day return.
Michael Potter
‘Every time I see an adult on a bicycle I still have hope for the human race’ – never a truer word said. As we cyclists zoom past the motorists trapped in traffic carmageddon, look into their eyes and see the despair their cars have brought them to. My tip for them? Get on your bike!
Mary Fisher
I’ve ridden a bike for almost seventy years, both touring and racing, but in the last few months I’ve become too nervous – frightened even – to ride on anything but local streets and then only on a Sunday morning. It’s very sad but the fear is because of drivers exceeding the speed limit and even jeering at older cyclists. It would be cheering to learn that cyclists have as much right as motorists to use the roads.
As a motorist I’m always courteous to other road users and give plenty of room to cyclists. It’s very sad to see so many two wheel pedalers abusing road traffic regulations though, they give all the others a bad name.
Dave Mann
All motorists should have to ride a bike on a busy road as part of passing their driving test. (And perhaps repeat every few years). This would make a real difference to getting them to think of other road users. Great book which I would love to give to my 75 year old keen cyclist father
Richard
I fantasise about the oil running out an cycling up to London on the M4, pushed by a westerly and aided by a small touring sail above my handlebars!
Michael Davis
There can be no excuse for motorists forcing cyclists to the gutter or otherwise trying to hound them off the road, but some cyclists unfortunately do not help themselves. Why are they riding at night with no lights?
Such amazingly stupid behaviour does the whole cycling community no good at all. Also, some cyclists do not even have the two working brakes required by law – OK, not counting fixies here!
Phillipa
The rural lane outside my house has been here for hundreds of years. On a quite autumn day, I can almost hear the swish of tyres from cyclists long since gone and I am happy to bet that cyclists will still be using it for centuries after I’ve left and cars have become rusting hulks in the scrapyards!
All good things come to he who waits! Lets all keep on cycling and supporting those great groups out there helping to make cycling, once again, a favored form of transport.
Richard Newman
It seems somewhat ironic that we are now having to adapt and make additions to roads to accommodate the users for which those roads were originally conceived.
Mark Bobbitt
I wonder if they might consider making the reading of this book part of the theory test?!
edmund white
All very good comments so far, particularly Mary Fisher & Al Reed. For my twopence worth, I just hope one day soon we cyclists will reclaim what we helped to create, or at least our fair share, and that we can all travel with out constant hassle. I too have been cycling 60+ years, seen a lot of changes, but not many for the good, more’s the pity
Richard
I propose a new priority of rights giving all road users a the respect they require to be safe.
1st is the pedestrian. All other road users give way to them irrespective of where they are.
2nd are the cyclist, unpowered but only if riding with due regard for the safety of pedestrians
3rd are the electric powered cyclist. They must conform to the prevailing rules regarding power and speed limits.
4th are our colleagues in invalid carriages. Although access to shops must be handled with care and only respected when appropriate.
5th are motor cycles of any capacity assuming they are being ridden with appropriate care amongst other road users.
6th are small cars – definition to be determined
7th are light vans used for local trading and other business
8th are larger cars that have unrealistic big engines and take up a lots of space.
9th are lorries which will be restricted to special roads for out of town access to reloading bays onto smaller vehicles, i.e. the light vans.
10th is the irrelevant large 4X4. Restricted access and special parking facilities. Only allowed as far as out of town park and ride parks and taxed each year at 100 % of the purchase price of the vehicle when new.
The will be no need for traffic sign, road markings, priority routes or traffic lights.
We’ll all get on together like Ant and Dec.
Anna
Sounds like a good read. I’m fascinated to learn that the AA was a splinter group of the CTC!
Angela
On returning from France the other day I was struck by the terrible state of the roads in this country – not only in towns but also in the country. People say “it’s the greater density of traffic” – but hardly cycle traffic!
Darren C
Looks like an interesting read, but could we make it compulsory reading for everyone learning to drive (and anyone convicted of driving offenses)?
Tony Williams
“Cyclists were the first to push for good roads”….but were “written out of highway history in the 1920s and 1930s…” That piece of tosh has just tried to write out of history the development of turnpike roads during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
The badly-informed writer of the blurb about the book may find it “surprising” that a relatively tiny proportion of the road network was designed for cars and lorries, but the development of motorways is well within living memory, and certainly within mine.
Mary Fisher’s comment above is brilliant, because instead of pretending “cyclists good, motorists bad” she acknowledges that some cyclists behave just as badly as some of the motorists some members of the cycling lobby love to vilify.
Chris Payne
Perhaps you’ll win the book and become better informed yourself…
Ned Prideaux
The reality is we share the roads, although some drives Definately believe they belong to the car, the same is true of some cyclists.
I always try do what I can to foster good relationships. Highlights include being threatened with ‘obstructing an officer’ when, on a bike, I was signalling to cars that there was a sipped trap around the corner (the cars slowed down which we are told is the idea!), and being thanked by a taxi driver for having lights and stopping at a red light. I was so taken aback I failed to point out to him he was stopped in a bike refuge at the front of the queue!
Carlton Reid
Thanks for the review, Yannick. A correction for you, though. The AA had cycling scouts to spot speed traps but it was the (Royal) Automobile Club – i.e., RAC – with the strong cycling connections. The Automobile Club shared officials with the Cyclists’ Touring Club – in the 1890s and early 1900s, being the secretary of a bicycle organisation was no bar to being on the steering committee of the main motoring organisation, cyclists and pioneer motorists were often the exact same people.
@ Tony Williams As you would see from the website of the book – linked in the piece – there’s a chapter about general roads history, starting with animals padding out paths and, yes, including info on turnpikes, too. The book has 170,000 words, with 90,000 words of notes and references already online.
And, just in case you lump my book in with the “cycling lobby” – whatever that may be, unless you mean the spoof twitter account from America – the book’s foreword was written by Edmund King, president of the Automobile Association.
Should you wish to comment further on my four years’ worth of research perhaps you’d like to ask your local library to get a copy of the book so you can read it first?
Pam
Living in York, you only have to cycle down the cobbles of Micklegate to realise many roads weren’t built for cyclists either…. but I’m prepared to put up with the uncomfortable surface for the history it represents.
John S
Drivers are trying to steal the term ‘road user’. It’s as if cyclists, pedestrians, horse-riders just don’t exist.
http://pedestrianliberation.org/2014/09/22/reclaiming-the-term-road-user-from-the-motoring-lobby/
Bish
We all pay “road tax” from the cradle to the grave!
The price of everything we buy includes the cost of its transportation from factory to wholesaler to shop – and all the costs (including taxes) are passed on to the customer! Taxes are not hypothecated. It would make the administration of the exchequer too complicated.
Ann Wakeling
I think the suggestion from Dave Mann that riding a bike should be part of the driving test, is an extremely good one. It might make aspirant motorists realise how vulnerable a person on a bike feels when a car/lorry/bus whizzes past just by her elbow. Maybe they would give cyclists more ‘room to ride’.
I too have cycled for 70 years, but fear the speed and lack of respect of some motorists will make me give up.
Eric Ludlow
Roads are sadly neglected when it comes to transport history. There are many transport museuems, but I have yet to see one that traces the history of road building. What I’d like it so be able to ‘walk through’ time’ along reconstructed roads from earliest times to modern motorways, to get a feel for what it would have been like to use them. And well done Mr Reid by the way!
Tim Steele
A wonderful book and a true labour of love.