Roads Were Not Built for Cars by Carlton Reid

Author:Carlton Reid
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Island Press

AS EARLY as the 1860s, Charles Anderson Dana, the velocipede-riding editor of the New York Sun, advocated the building of “an elevated railway from Harlem to the Battery – from one end of New York to the other – for the use of riders of velocipedes only.” This was “to be thirty feet wide, on an iron framework, and the flooring of hard pine.”

The structure remained a dream but 30 years later the call for dedicated cycling infrastructure had become louder and more insistent. An elevated bike path between Harlem and the Battery was again considered, with cyclists dreaming of a “delightful tour” on a midsummer night “catching glimpses of the Hudson at the cross streets, until the moonlit bay bursts upon the view in all its silvery glory!” (Of course, the reality would have been far different, with cyclists in close proximity to dirty, smelly trains, and facing the not inconsiderable difficulty of how to get a bicycle onto a trestle without long, shallow and space-hungry ramps.) There were also proposals for cross-country cycle-path trestles. In 1895, one newspaper reported that “it is proposed to construct an elevated cycle roadway, 16ft wide, of wood paved with asphalt, between Chicago and Milwaukee, a distance of 85 miles …”

During the Klondike Gold Rush of 1896–9 an American entrepreneur proposed building the “greatest bicycle roadway in the world” in order to help those would-be prospectors setting out to reach Canada’s Yukon region on bicycles. Many miners-to-be set off from Seattle on beefed-up “Klondike-special” bicycles but they never got the “Klondike bicycle track.”

These particular elevated bicycle roadways literally never got off the ground, but simpler, cheaper ones did get built. Today, the concept of a city-to-city grid of bicycle paths would be considered for recreational use only (outside of the Netherlands, that is). In the 1890s, city-to-city bicycle paths were built for day-to-day use. A significant number of cycle paths were created in upstate New York, Denver, Minneapolis, Portland and California. In 1900, cyclists believed long-distance cycle paths would enable them to “go from New York to any point in Maine, Florida or California on smooth roads made especially for them.”

While bicycle-only paths were the fervent desire of many cyclists (to get away from pesky teamsters, and at least have a well-surfaced path, even if it was a narrow one), this desire was not shared by all. The building of bicycle-specific routes became a divisive issue for the cyclists of the day. There were arguments over whether or not the provision of paths diverted attention from the need to improve roads for all users. Officials in the League of American Wheelmen were torn – some felt that their 20-year push for Good Roads had achieved little in the way of tangible improvements and that, despite a great deal of cajoling, it had been shown that farmers had no real interest in joining with them in demanding better highways; others believed victory was in sight and that to create bicycle-only routes would detract from the we-are-all-in-this-together message.

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