"Roads were not built for cars": how cyclists, not drivers, first fought to pave US roads

A League of American Wheelmen chapter in the 1880s, at the start of the cyclist-driven push for paved roads. (Courtesy of Carlton Reid)

Nowadays, it's common to view city streets as largely a place for cars. Bikes, if anything, are seen as a very recent intrusion on them.

But the surprising truth is that back in the 1890s and early 1900s, it was mainly cyclists who first advocated for cities in the US and Europe to pave their streets and build new roads. Then as cars became practical, wealthy, privileged people adopted the car as their leisure toy of choice, and the bicycle's central place in what's now called the Good Roads Movement was largely forgotten.

"The people who were making and promoting bicycles were the same people who later made and promoted cars," says Carlton Reid, who uncovered this history in his fascinating, meticulously researched book Roads Were Not Built for Cars.

In fact, Reid argues, the car's eventual domination was not as inevitable as it might seem today — and the bicycle itself may have been necessary to pave the way for it.

Bicyclists started the push to build and pave roads

A League of American Wheelmen recruiting poster. (Courtesy Carlton Reid)

In the 1880s, the invention of the "safety bicycle" — a new design that incorporated most of the features seen in modern bikes today — made cycling safer and easier than before, and led to a surge of interest in cycling. But there was a problem: in both American cities and in the countryside, most roads were a muddy, rutted mess, suitable for slow-moving horses and carriages but not bicycles.

In these very early days, cycling mainly was a leisure activity for the rich. "It was basically a small number of rich, leisured white guys," Reid says. "Bicycles were expensive, and working-class people didn't have the cash or leisure time for them."

Good Roads magazine often included arguments to farmers about the benefits of paved roads.

This small group included several wealthy bicycle manufacturers — most notably, a Boston businessman named Alfred Pope — and they quickly organized to solve the problem of poor roads, forming an organization called the League of American Wheelmen (LAW).

"Even though they were quite selfish — they wanted good roads for themselves — they knew that to get it funded, they had to say the roads would be for everybody," Reid says. So with pamphlets, magazines, rallies, and advertising campaigns, these cyclists worked to convince farmers, working-class city residents, politicians, and other groups of the many benefits of good roads.

With money from Pope, asphalt manufacturers, and other special interest groups, these cyclist advocates were remarkably successful. Initially, they persuaded legislatures in New Jersey and New York to spend state money on widening and paving roads for the first time. Horatio Earle, a president of the LAW and a bicycle part manufacturer, got elected to the Michigan state Senate, created the State Highway Commission, and pushed for the state to pour the country's first mile of concrete road — leading to him being nicknamed the "Father of Good Roads."

Cyclists ride in a victory parade celebrating the 1898 paving of Market Street in San Francisco. (FoundSF)

Eventually, lobbying by Pope, Earle, and other cyclists at the federal level led to the passage of the 1916 Federal Aid Road Act, in which Congress promised to match state funds for road building for the first time. By then, though, these cyclists had stopped riding bicycles.

Early bicyclists became enthusiastic motorists

"Looking back, you'd think that someone who was a keen cyclist in the 1890s would have wanted to stay a cyclist," Reid says. "But that wasn't the case at all."

These early cyclists loved the independence and speed afforded by bicycles. Their bikes allowed them to explore the countryside on their own schedule — not a railroad's — and show off the fact that they could buy a very expensive gadget. That cycling might be considered a virtuous form of exercise would have probably seemed utterly bizarre to them.

Motorists enjoy the newly completed Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles in 1904. (Automobile Club of Southern California Archives)

"When they discovered there was another form of transport that had the benefits of cycling and didn't make you expend any energy, that was like manna from heaven," Reid says. "In fact, if one of these guys could see us today, he'd probably be totally blown away by the fact that cycling still exists at all when we have cars." Most of them ultimately viewed bikes as an intermediate, obsolete step in the evolution from carriages to cars.

As a consequence, by 1910, the LAW had largely died out — but many of its members filled the rolls of motorist clubs that quickly formed, especially AAA. And most of the people selling cars were former cyclists themselves: Henry Ford, the Dodge brothers, Louis Chevrolet, and the Duryea brothers (founders of the Duryea Motor Wagon Company, the first US company to sell gasoline-powered cars), among others, had all been avid cyclists, bike mechanics, or bicycle manufacturers.

Cars might never have made it if it weren't for bikes

From our vantage point in 2015, it seems like the dominance of cars was the natural, inevitable way transportation would evolve. But there are some good reasons to believe that may not be the case, Reid says.

One is that private, powered road vehicles came along and failed several times before they finally took off in the early 20th century. In the 1830s and 1860s, in particular, inventors in Britain, the US, and Canada came out with steam-powered carriages, based largely off the technology developed for railroads, as well as electric vehicles.

An illustration of Goldsworthy Gurney's 1827 steam carriage, which was a commercial failure, partly due to high taxes on rides, lobbied for by horse-drawn carriage operators. (Wikimedia Commons)

But these early cars failed for a few different reasons. There were few roads that were smooth or hard enough for them. But more important, Reid says, "There was no push for them. There was no group of people interested in popularizing them."

"there was no group of people interested in popularizing them"

Without allies, there was no funding for road paving (as would later be won by cyclists). But there was also a bigger problem: legislatures passed laws against powered vehicles on the roads, such as Britain's 1865 Locomotive Act, which restricted all powered road vehicles to a top speed of four miles per hour, and required that a person with a red flag walk 60 yards in front of each car. Most futurists, Reid says, assumed transportation would remain on rails.

When gasoline-powered cars came along in the early 1900s, one big thing was different: "There was a large group of people who saw that independent travel was there for the taking," Reid says. "Very quickly, they latched on to motoring." These cyclists-turned-motorists pushed for the creation of good roads, and they also fought back against laws restricting bicycles and cars from using them.

Finally, a number of technologies that weren't around for the early steam-powered carriages — but had been perfected by use on bicycles — made 20th-century cars a hit.

The Benz Patent-Motorwagen incorporated numerous bicycle parts, including chain, wheels, and gearing. (DaimlerChrysler)

Pneumatic tires, for instance, had been perfected by Scottish inventor John Boyd Dunlop in 1887 for use in bicycle racing. These made it possible for cars to be simultaneously fast and comfortable. Meanwhile, the Benz Patent-Motorwagen — built in 1886 and generally considered to be the first car — used spoked tricycle wheels, a bicycle chain, and a differential gear made by British bicycle creator James Starley. In a very real sense, the Benz (which would lead to the Mercedes-Benz company) was a tricycle with a motor attached.

So how did this surprising history get forgotten?

San Francisco's Bay City Wheelmen, circa 1894. (StreetsblogSF)

The bicycle was written out of most histories of the Good Roads Movement for a few different reasons.

To some degree, it was inadvertent. Because most of these early cyclists quickly became motorists and car advocates, it was easy for historians to overlook the pivotal role of the bicycle in the movement's first few years.

the elimination of the bicycle from this history was partly deliberate

But in some cases, Reid argues, the elimination of the bicycle from this history was quite deliberate. "Eventually, cycling came to be seen as a proletariat activity, something you did if you couldn't afford a car," he says. "So an awful lot of wealthy motorists went out of their way to hide their roots as cyclists." Many of these motorists were the ones who later wrote the history of the Good Roads Movement.

What's more, automobile companies had an interest in retaining control of the roads, and in putting their product at the center of the story. In 1927, for example, the Ford Motor Company's promotional materials said the Model T "started the movement for good roads everywhere." Today, Reid points out, curator Suzanne Fischer of the Henry Ford Museum sets the record straight: "It wasn't car owners that first demanded better roads," she says in a museum video, "it was bicycle riders":

Just a few decades after the birth of the Good Roads Movement, the bicycle's place in it was largely forgotten. In his 1929 autobiography, Horatio Earle — the creator of Michigan's State Highway Commission and one of the first people to propose the idea of the interstate highway system — described this irony:

"I often hear now-a-days, the automobile instigated good roads; that the automobile is the parent of good roads. Well, the truth is, the bicycle is the father of the good roads movement in this country," he wrote. "The bicycle is to be given credit, not only as the pioneer of the good roads movement but also as the parent of the automobile."

Read more: The forgotten history of how automakers invented the crime of "jaywalking"

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