Erstellt am: 1. 5. 2013 - 10:54 Uhr

"Roads Were Not Built For Cars"

Cars vs. bicycles - could the balance be tipping? A new book claims that "cars may not always be around for all sorts of reasons".

Did you know that Henry Ford, the man whose name is synonymous with rise to dominance of the automobile, was a keen cyclist who pedalled to work every day? This is one of the nuggets of information contained in Carlton Reid`s book Roads Were Not Built For Cars.

"The belief that roads were made for motorists is almost as old as motoring," writes Reid, but he points out the rather obvious fact that road systems pre-date the advent of the car by centuries. He writes about intricate Roman and Napoleonic road systems, and describes the pioneer work of cyclists in the 1880s and 1890s:

"Basically 20 years before cars came along, cyclists were there getting surfaces on roads and creating road administrations in several countries."

chris cummins

Reid points out that in his home country, the UK, The Roads Improvement Association was created in 1885 by the Cyclists' Touring Club "ten years before the first motor car was imported into the country." The cyclists were, he explains, worried about the dust on the roads partly because of its great concentration of horse shit.

So what`s the point of this history lesson that Reid, a keen cyclist, describes as a polemic?

The author projects that just as roads predated the car they might outlive the dominance of the automobile: "Cars weren`t always around. They may not always be around for all sorts of reasons."

He points to the concept of Peak Car - the theory that after a certain point car usage will begin to dwindle. Car use in the UK is already on the wane. "We think of car usage going on forever but in fact you can point to several cities where the peak usage of cars was probably 15 years ago."

In London, he says, car drivers are "incredibly in the minority and yet they get all that space. Why is a minority given that much space?"

Perhaps because they have a very powerful and effective lobby that, Reid claims, helped "airbrush out history" the role that cyclists had played in shaping our road systems. He says the disparate lobbyists of motorised traffic come together to argue their common cause in the corridors of power and are "incredibly successful in doing so."

chris cummins

Reid is not a fan of the de-personalising effect of car usage. "When you are in a car, and I think we all recognise this, your personality changes. You become, in effect, a bully because you have this massive amount of power under your foot. Basically you want everyone else to get out of the way."

But they won`t get out of the way, and that is why Reid is optimistic that, in busy city centres at least, cycle usage will continue to boom:

"In cities around the world more and more people are cycling because it is simply quicker. Cars are great when they are on their own on the open road but, when there are tens of thousands of them in a cramped urban environment; they cease to be any use. People are switching to bikes because they are more convenient and I don`t see that boom slowing down anytime soon."

Roads Were Not Built For Cars is a free download. Reid wants to use the book to get his message out. "By giving it away free, I'm hoping a few of the salient facts make it into the mainstream," he says, "This mainstream is a motoring mainstream right now. The future could be one where bikes rule the road, just as they did in the 1890s."