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May 21, 2013 by carltonreid

Britain’s first bicycle path – separated and swept to boot – was suggested in 1821


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lewisgompertzThe first cycle paths in the UK were installed (badly) in the 1930s. However, the idea for such dedicated ways – segregated and swept, even – was first proposed in 1821. Given that what we would recognise as a bicycle wasn’t developed until the 1860s, such a proposal seems rather prescient. The proposal was made by Lewis Gompertz, an industrious inventor (thank him for the drill chuck bit), who also happened to be vegetarian and Jewish. His radical vegetarianism led him to campaign against the mistreatment of the animals that were at the heart Victorian street transport: horses.

Gompertz was one of the co-founder’s of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, which later had the Royal added to the front, creating the RSPCA. He preferred walking to riding in a horse-pulled carriage and was therefore much taken with the German machine that meant ‘fast foot’ in Latin. The velocipede running machine – or hobbyhorse, a bicycle without cranks or pedals – was introduced to the world by Baron von Drais. He had created his contraption in 1817 as a horse-substitute because, it is now believed, the price of oats, and everything else, had soared after the planet was plunged into darkness after the volcanic eruption of Indonesia’s Mt. Tambora in 1815. 1816 was known as the Year Without a Summer.

Velocipede riding became all the rage, including in Regency London, where Gompertz lived. However, it was a short-lived mania, and once Regency dandies had tired of it by 1820, velocipede riding was all but extinguished as a form of transport. Undeterred by its precipitous fall from grace, Gombertz wished to revive the velocipede. He came up with some ingenious modifications to the original velocipede, including a hand-crank attached to the front wheel, rowed for forward propulsion.

Gompertz velocipede addition

His addition failed to catch on. For Gompertz, the lack of interest in the two-wheel singletrack vehicle wasn’t due to poor vehicle design but to the surface upon which the vehicle was forced to run. Hobbyhorses, with their wooden wheels, were more usually urban runabouts, not long-distance machines. They were more suited to the smooth block-covered footways in towns rather than the small stone macadamised roads of the countryside. (In 1818, Britain had 114,379 miles of highways, of which 19,275 miles were turnpike roads, many of which were well-surfaced and carried ‘fast’ stagecoach traffic: 10mph was fast).

Not that velocipedes were welcome on footways. “All cyclists ride on the pavement” has been a hate epithet since bicycling’s very beginnings. Milan banned hobby horses from the sidewalk in 1818; London and New York did the same in 1819.

Law enforcement against “cyclists” started early, too. One London newspaper reported that “the crowded state of the metropolis does not admit of this novel mode of exercise, and it has been put down by the Magistrate of police.”

According to Gompertz, writing in 1821, it was…

“chiefly owing to [velocipedes] having been prohibited the use of the footpaths, which, if necessary in some places, should have been accompanied with an Act allowing them three or four feet of the width of the roads for their sole use, and for that to be kept in good repair; this they deserve, and persons while using them would not be exposed to danger where there are many carriages and horses, nor be obliged to wade through mud…”

Gompertz, ahead of his time, added “and it is only by this being adopted that mankind would reap the advantage from machines for this purpose, of being converted from one of the slowest animals in the creation, to one of great continued speed from his own salubrious exertions…”

NOTES
Thanks to Professor Dr Hans Lessing for alerting me to Gompertz’ views on separated velocipede infrastructure, and to Les Bowerman for supplying a copy of ‘Addition to the Velocipede’ in the Register of Arts, Manufacture and Agriculture, 2nd series, no. CCXXIX, June 1821.

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May 20, 2013 by carltonreid

“Copenhagen swarms with riders during all hours of the day”

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CyclingScandanavia19Feb1897TheWheelUSA“No other country has done more for the pleasure and comfort of its wheelmen than Denmark,” said a news piece in The Wheel for February 19th 1897. The American magazine was quoting from an earlier editorial in the New York Sun.

“The construction of pavements takes in consideration what best can serve the interests of cyclists,” added The Wheel. And by pavement it meant ‘road’, the British use of the word pavement for ‘sidewalk’ is apt to confuse.

The magazine continued:

“Cycle paths are provided near all cities, in some instances leading miles away from town into country. The most scrupulous care is taken of the paths, insuring safety to both rider and wheel. Of late years taverns devoted to the special care of wheelmen have spring into existence…

“The Danish farmer has attained international renown for the excellence of his butter, but the chances are that he will soon win fame as an expert on the wheel. It is remarkable, the avidity with which the Scandinavian country folks seized upon the bicycle when its price made it possible to be within their reach.”

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May 3, 2013 by carltonreid

US senator: “[Automobiles are the future but] I cannot conceive our active Americans in carriages moved by any other motor but the horse”

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371px-CMDepew“I imagine that one fine morning we shall wake up with apparatus ready to take us to our offices by an automobile carriage…But…I cannot conceive our active Americans adapting themselves to the pursuit of pleasure in carriages moved…by any other motor but the horse. What has made the bicycle so universally popular but the one fact that it permits of action on the part of the rider, that it affords excitement?”

Chauncey Mitchell Depew
US senator, 1899 to 1911
Quoted in ‘The Horseless Age’ by Henry W. Fischer, Munsey’s Magazine, May 1895.

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April 26, 2013 by carltonreid

Reallocation of roadspace: here’s how Birmingham’s Victoria Square did it

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I’ve just left the stimulating Cycle City conference in Birmingham. 450 delegates from across the UK – and the world, in fact – came together to chew the cycling fat in a number of seminars and talks, some held in Birmingham’s impressive Victorian Council House. I gave a talk on the “Disneyland” cycle-infrastructure of Stevenage, using a lot of source material not used on this earlier posting on the work of Stevenage’s chief designer – and unsung cycling figure – Eric Claxton. During an excellent presentation on roadspace allocation by Mike Davies, the cycling projects leader of Cambridgeshire County Council, it was mentioned that the glorious space in front of the Council House wasn’t always traffic-free.

In the late 19th Century, as can be seen above, it was hectic, but safe for pedestrians, cyclists, carriages and other road users. Victoria Square slowly became dominated by motor-cars. In the 1960s – as this picture shows – the domination wasn’t complete but by the 1970s and 1980s, the streets linking in to the square were chocka with the type of motorised traffic that has come to dominate so many of our cities. Much of Victoria Square was taken up with a roundabout.

I asked the doorman when the roundabout was removed, and replaced with a great looking pedestrian plaza that allows access to cyclists and council vehicles but no access to cars and buses and HGVs.

“Oh, the 1970s, I think” he said. “But take a look outside, there’s a plaque on the wall.”

I looked outside. It wasn’t the 1970s, it was 1994, and the plaque was a recognition for Birmingham City Council winning a design award for “the renaissance of the city.”

Cars in Victoria Square, Birmingham

Take a vote now and nobody but nobody would want to return Victoria Square to a traffic-snarled space. It’s a great example of “roadspace reallocation”, albeit a total one in that the road itself has gone. The public highway has not disappeared, though. The square is still a through route, just not for motorised vehicles. There’s an important legal maxim: “Once a highway, always a highway.” Traffic regulation orders can prevent cars – and, heaven forfend – bicycles from using so-called pedestrian plazas but the highway remains. A highway is not the same as a “road”, it’s both a physical thing and a concept, a right of way.

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Victoria Square is people-friendly. Much of the rest of Birmingham is motor-friendly. Victoria Square shows that getting rid of motors doesn’t kill a city centre, it’s very much the opposite.

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Reallocation of roadspace was a recurring theme at Cycle City. It was a phrase featured in the Get Britain Cycling report public launch, held at the expo, and it was also a phrase I used in my build-it-and-they-may-not-come-unless-lots-of-other-things-are-done-too seminar.

Reallocation of roadspace is a phrase with a long history. The example I chose to show in my talk was from a leaflet produced by the All Change to Bikes campaign of the 1970s. This was an umbrella group comprising organisations such as the Cyclists’ Touring Club, the Bicycle Association, Friends of the Earth and many others.

This PR-led push, long since forgotten, called for segregated cycleways as well as roadspace reallocation. It’s important to remember that such ideas are not new. British cycle organisations – including the CTC – were calling for these radical-for-the-time interventions in the 1970s.

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April 22, 2013 by carltonreid

A gamble or a sure thing? Here’s how to succeed with Kickstarter (& don’t forget the deductions)

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fundedMarket-leading crowd-funder Kickstarter recommends you spend two weeks or so crafting and honing your campaign. I agree, and add that most of those two weeks will be spent in a maelstrom of self-doubt. Or maybe that’s just me? In this stat-packed posting I’d like to explore how I succeeded with my Kickstarter project but I’ve got to be upfront about the doubts. There were many of them and I was genuinely surprised when pledges for my book came in thick and fast, and funding was guaranteed on the first full day of the campaign. I didn’t plan for that, I didn’t expect that. It was a beautiful, warming, touching surprise.

Once the funding was guaranteed, I had a relatively easy month. I didn’t have to badger my Twitter followers or send out increasingly desperate emails to anybody and everybody on my computer’s email client. With hindsight I can now dig down into the stats and analyse how the Kickstarter campaign did so well, so quickly. I can also throw in a few warnings, especially about the amount of money you think you may get after a successful campaign.

TESTING, TESTING, 1, 2, 3
Before hitting the ‘launch’ button I shared the campaign with a number of trusted friends and associates. They helped me fine-tune the text, the video and the pledge amounts. Most of them said I’d easily reach my total but I wasn’t so sure. When I first broached the idea of launching on Kickstarter I got five or six comments and tweets to “go for it” and that these folks would pledge. Great, that’s an indication there could be some life in a funding campaign but, in reality, the five or six comments only accounts for five or six pledges. To go out on a limb, I felt, was risky. Asking for angel investor cash is done in private; Kickstarter is a very public place. Fail, and it’s noticed, and thanks to Google, it’ll be noticed for ever and a day.

kickstarterembedI asked for £4000 and eventually got £17,407 from 648 backers. Only one pledge was from family, and that was three weeks into the campaign.

I pressed the ‘launch campaign’ button via my iPad while sat on an evening train to Coventry. I then emailed the 2000 or so names on an opt-in list placed on this blog-of-the-book. Within seconds of the email going out (it might have been minutes, time telescopes these things) I started to receive pledges. The first was from a lawyer in the US, for £65. The project was now real to me. People were pledging cold, hard cash. More pledges started to come in. The Kickstarter app on my iPhone started going crazy fast, updating me with pledges. I went to sleep in a Coventry hotel knowing I was a quarter of the way to my target already. The next day I was researching the book at the National Cycle Archives at Warwick University and had to turn off my connectivity because of the pledge pinging. I have to say, it’s rather nice doing research in an archive room knowing the book you’re researching is being so actively and wonderfully supported.

My project reached its funding total while I was sat in a coffee shop chewing the fat with a Coventry cycle campaigner, waiting for my train back to Newcastle. Twenty hours had elapsed. Naturally, I was elated.

But how and why did my campaign work? Let’s look at some stats, taken from the admin section of my Kickstarter project.

Funding was guaranteed within 20 hours. The next spike was when Kickstarter.com plugged the project in a global email.

Funding was guaranteed within 20 hours. The next spike was when Kickstarter.com plugged the project in a global email on March 27/28th.

HOT LIST
The early success of the campaign wasn’t down to the video or the images I placed on the Kickstarter campaign page or the finely-honed text. It was due to trust. I got pledges before people had a chance to read the copy or watch the video. There were people out there (lovely, intelligent people, people with impeccable taste) who wanted to back the project no matter what the Kickstarter campaign said. This has to be due to my email list of 2000 names. These are people who trusted me enough to pop their email addresses in a digital opt-in box. Many will be happy to wait for the free version of the book but a large number were clearly primed and ready for my announcement – I’d plugged it on the blog and on Twitter – and pounced as soon as the campaign went live. I wasn’t expecting this level of support, I wasn’t ready for this. It’s a history book FFS, it’s not a flashy digital doo-dah, of the type that seem to do so well on Kickstarter (I should know, I’ve bought two of ‘em: an iPhone thermometer and a Bluetooth amp) or a smartphone accessory such as the Millimount.

PERSONALISED VIDEO
Kickstarter School says the video is the cornerstone of any successful campaign.

“A video is by far the best way to get a feel for the emotions, motivations, and character of a project. It’s a demonstration of effort and a good predictor of success. Projects with videos succeed at a much higher rate than those without (50% vs. 30%).”

I enjoyed making the video and spent a long time fine tuning the edit, choosing the music, and generally faffing about. Was it worth it? I’m not so sure. I invested time, effort and money in that video (the 1.5 second appearance from the Roman Centurion cost me sixty five quid) and yet not everybody clicked into the video, and even those who did, didn’t make it all the way through. Which is a shame because, in my opinion, the best bit is at the end, with me riding an 1890s bike around an architect’s office.

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However, later in the campaign, when I was reaching out to those who didn’t know me from Adam, perhaps the flaky pieces-to-camera helped persuade pledgers I was real? It’s hard to tell from the stats.

BACK OTHER PROJECTS
When I look at which projects to back on Kickstarter I’m influenced by whether that project is a Kickstarter pro or just a crowd-funding beginner. I’m much more likely to back a project if they too have backed projects. It’s not just a karma thing, it’s about being part of a community. I’ve bought e-books on Kickstarter; and real, letter-press printed books, too; I’ve pledged for LED-lit pot plants. Before you set out your Kickstarter stall I think you should become part of the crowd. Fund some stuff.

30 DAYS TOPS
My project lasted a month. Any longer than this and you risk boring folks to death. I limited the amount of tweets I did for the Kickstarter project; to keep them going for longer than a month would be punishing for any social media audience you may have. More time does not mean more time to pledge, it means more time to potentially annoy people. If I did another Kickstarter campaign I’d probably limit it to two or three weeks; four is too much.

Kickstarter School recommends keeping it short:

“Funding can last anywhere from one to 60 days, however a longer duration is not necessarily better. Statistically, projects lasting 30 days or less have our highest success rates. A Kickstarter project takes a lot of work to run, and shorter projects set a tone of confidence and help motivate your backers to join the party. Longer durations incite less urgency, encourage procrastination, and tend to fizzle out.”

TAKE YOUR TIME & GET OTHERS TO CRITIQUE YOUR PROJECT
“The average successfully funded creator spends nearly two weeks tweaking their project before launching,” says Kickstarter school. This is exactly how long I spent, albeit on and off (I have a day job, too; in fact I have more than one). Don’t rush it. You can edit your campaign text, the main body of words, but you can’t edit the blurb or the financial amounts on the rewards. I spent a long time working out my costs and testing the prices on the rewards. I asked a number of key associates to look at the rewards structure for me: some said the rewards were priced too low, some said they were too priced too high. I took a middle course and hoped the market would bear the costs. It did. Some of the rewards sold out; the £275 reward was bought once; and the Karl Kron £105 package (hard-back book and name in lights in the book) was bought by seven people. No matter how good you are at video editing, graphic design, project management or writing, it pays to seek out the opinions of others. I’m glad I did, and thankful, too.

‘HIDDEN’ COSTS
I raised £17,407 but that’s not how much I ended up with, 14 days after the campaign ended. Kickstarter takes a cut (they gotta eat) and there are credit card charging fees, and VAT to pay.

Here’s the breakdown:

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Kickstarter gets a fee of 5 percent of whatever your campaign raises. Payment processing fees slice off another 3 percent, plus £0.20 per pledge. Pledges under £10 have a discounted fee of 5 percent plus £0.05 per pledge. Value Added Tax is assessed on the fees.

If you have a fixed amount of money you have to raise, you really ought to factor in these deductions from the start. Need to raise £15,585? You’ll need pledges worth £17,407.

On the subject of credit cards it’s worth pointing out that not all nations are fixated on plastic. If you expect to sell loads into Germany or Denmark or many other European countries, Kickstarter may not be for you. There are other crowd-funding services available and they often have more ways to pay.

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KICKSTARTER IS LISTENING
Part of the two week research and testing of the campaign involved reading Kickstarter’s comprehensive guidance notes. I noticed they pay attention to social media and to mentions on Google News. Hammering away on Twitter by constantly mentioning @kickstarter ain’t gonna achieve much. The company has too many followers to notice the @ messages. My goal was to try and get Kickstarter to take notice by getting mentions in news sites, sites crawled by Google News.

By asking nicely on sites such as Road.cc my project appeared in news stories. The plan was to accelerate the appearance of these news stories, outside of the world of bike media, in week two in order to maybe get handpicked as a Kickstarter staff pick.

As it so happened my project was a staff pick very early on. This led to some pledges from outside my social media reach but my biggest break was appearing in Kickstarter’s global email. In the graph near the top of this piece you can see the spike in pledges on March 27/28th when this email went out. The weekly global email picks out three projects: get in that and you fan out to a whole new audience. And here are the results in more depth.

Nailed it was the title of that week’s global Kickstarter email.

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Nearly a fifth of all my pledges came from the Kickstarter global email. I got lucky, but from the get-go my goal was to get in that email. Only three projects out of thousands get picked: getting in front of Kickstarter staff can be the difference of an OK campaign and a stellar one.

Direct traffic is made up of emails from CTC and my opt-in email list of 2000. CTC sent out one email newsletter about the project, I sent out seven emails, spaced over the month. I didn’t email friends and family. There were sixty pledges via Twitter. I have 10,800 followers on Twitter. The embedded widget appeared on this blog and so should be counted alongside roadswerenotbuiltforcars.com: so that makes 11.5 percent of cash pledged. The two articles on Road.cc brought in more pledges than the article I wrote on the Guardian Bike Blog, which surprised me.

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KICKSTARTER IS JUST THE, ER, START
Raising the money pays the bills but I feel Kickstarter’s greatest value is in raising a project’s profile. I can’t go into details right now but let’s just say the £17,407 (which turned into £15,585) isn’t the end of the story. I’ve had approaches from TV companies and major US publishers; I’ve appeared on podcasts in America and on mainstream radio shows in Austria. Success breeds success and a successful Kickstarter campaign is able put your project in front of new people, and in a manner that would hard to do in any other way.

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April 17, 2013 by carltonreid

Cities are not set in stone, stone can be moved

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MarbleArchBuckHouse

Cities are living, breathing, evolving entities. British ones are rammed with cars right now. As I wrote on the Guardian Bike Blog yesterday, this isn’t necessarily how it will be in the future.

Cities can be reshaped. And not just the roads. Massive been-there-for-ever monumental buildings can be moved, too. Take Marble Arch. It hasn’t always been stuck between the bus-clogged Oxford Street and the car-clogged Bayswater Road. It was once a grand entrance to Buckingham Palace. It was dismantled in 1850 and rebuilt in its present location in 1851. It could be so moved again and relocation plans are mooted from time to time.

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When politicians and planners say cities have to accommodate cars as some sort of divine right and it will always be this way, they’re wrong.

Cars can be designed out of the picture. Will constricting cars throttle the economy? Hardly. In London, motorists are in the minority yet take up an inordinate amount of space. Covent Garden – thankfully – offers poor access to cars yet is thriving economically. In 1993, in an article about roads for The Geographical, author Oliver Tickell wrote: “If access by road is the key to economic prosperity then Birmingham should be the wealthiest city in Britain. It is not.”

Horses used to dominate our cities. They don’t now. Later trams dominated our cities. They don’t now. Cars now dominate our cities. In the future, they might not. The ‘might’ is down to planners and politicians and whether they can see beyond the myopia of the motorised majority.

But don’t expect any radical steps any time soon. Local authorities are being cash-raped by central Governent and transport is an easy department to decimate.

Decimate is a Roman punishment: executing one in ten soldiers for a dereliction of duty. Local authorities are being stripped of experienced heads and it’s worse than one in ten.

Realistically, we can’t expect any meaningful cash for radical transport measures until after 2015 (London is different). That doesn’t mean we can’t pile on the pressure for making our cities nicer places to live. And that means less access for cars. (And, HGVs, of course).

In rural areas, cars also need to be reined back by lowering speeds but this looks set to be an even more difficult task than taming cars in cities.

Hat tip to Phil Jones Associates for the Marble Arch info.

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April 11, 2013 by carltonreid

Road users should “take care owing to the children who make the road their playground”

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CTCBritishRoadBook1897Arthur T. Poyser of the Cyclists’ Touring Club wrote a series of itinerary-style touring books for the organisation he worked for. The British Road Book, produced in 1897, came in five volumes, covering the whole of Great Britain. Scotland was covered in volume four and there’s an instructive passage on the route between Stirling and Perth.

Poyser wrote this was “a very good main road, well-made throughout, and possessing on the whole a capital surface…”

The entry continued:

“There is a long descent through Auchterarder, becoming rather steep latterly, and requiring care owing to the children who make the road their playground…”

Cyclists – then and now – tend to be more cognisant of the risks of collision because in any impact, even in cases of impacting soft things such as small children, they are just as likely to injure themselves as cause harm to the soft thing they hit.

Compare and contrast this with the attitude of some motorists, then and now. Solid things are to be avoided at all costs but soft things pose little danger to the motorist.

This is illustrated by the infamous quote from Lieut-Colonel J.T.C. Moore-Brabazon, vice-chair of the Automobile Club and a motorist and a racing car driver from 1903 onwards. (In 1940 he was appointed Minister of Transport). His views, given to parliament in 1934, on how everything and everybody should get out of the way of cars, is chilling:

“It is true that 7000 people are killed in motor accidents, but it is not always going on like that. People are getting used to the new conditions… No doubt many of the old Members of the House will recollect the number of chickens we killed in the old days. We used to come back with the radiator stuffed with feathers. It was the same with dogs. Dogs get out of the way of motor cars nowadays and you never kill one. There is education even in the lower animals. These things will right themselves.”

And here’s a photo of a London driving school in 1905. The dog and chicken figures look to be on a movable track and were possibly more potentially damaging to the car than the real thing so very much to be avoided.

Notting Hill

There will be much more about driver attitudes to other road users in the book, the Kickstarter campaign for which has another nine days to run.

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April 10, 2013 by carltonreid

Tweed Run, 1888

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CTCuniform 15This Saturday sees the fifth annual staging of the Tweed Run, in London. Riders will be entertained by the legendary, 1960s-vintage Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band and judged on sartorial elegance by tailors on Saville Row, who come out en masse to watch the 500 riders roll by. This year’s chosen charity is CTC, which was once a very tweedy organisation.

In 1878, the uniform of the newly-formed Bicycle Touring Club – forerunner to CTC – was meant to consist of “dark green Devonshire serge jacket, knickerbockers, Stanley helmet with small peak, and Cambridge grey stockings.”

Not all members were in favour of this proposed colour combination. One critic wrote:

“I must say that grey stockings with green uniform will look absolutely hideous. Why not all dark green?”

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All dark green was duly adopted and H Goy of Leadenhall Street, London, was appointed the club’s official tailor (there were also official CTC tailors in most towns and cities throughout the UK; today, of course, there’s Dashing Tweeds, as used by the always dapper Gary Fisher). However, dark green showed “every spot of dirt” and “looked shabby” so the colour was changed in 1882 to “fast-dyed all-wool grey cloth, washable without injury.”

Not all members liked the fact there was only one uniform. In the mid-1880s a member said:

“even in the CTC, class distinctions existed and no amount of Club feeling will annihilate them.”

The member did not think that “baronets should be called upon to wear the same uniform of bricklayers.”

In the 1880s and 1890s this was, largely, an irrelevant point. Most cyclists were middle or upper class, bicycles were for the rich. It was only after the end of the Bicycling Boom – at the very end of the 19th century – that a great many affordable bicycles came on the secondhand market, toff cast-offs.
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The British Library holds a copy of Cyclists’ Touring Club’s Uniform rules & regulations, London, 1888. This small pamphlet – coincidentally produced in the ‘Year of Jack the Ripper’ – offers a chance to see and touch what kind of all-wool clothing members of the Cyclists’ Touring Club rode in. Eminently sensibly, the pamphlet remarks that none of the official garb contained cotton. Modern outdoors people know that cotton absorbs and holds sweat, chilling the wearer.

However, the CTC’s E.R. Shipton, club secretary and who wrote the uniform guide, described the act of perspiring and the advisability of use of wicking fabrics far more prosaically: “cotton [is a] material which is a fatal stumbling block to the proper discharge of the bodily functions when undergoing fatigue.”

The uniform – complete with official “helmets”, would you believe – was officially abandoned by the Cyclists’ Touring Club in 1907.

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April 8, 2013 by carltonreid

The rosy-cheeked future for cycling (and legal protection in case you are run down by a driver)

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Roads Were Not Built For Cars cover close-up (Whipple 1897)

The rosy cheeks may have been the result of imagined exertion along this improved, macadamised road in Detroit but the mascara and the lipstick seem to suggest the artist wanted to portray this fictional young rider as a confident, independent woman, a woman who cared about her appearance despite the silly medical scares of the time such as ‘bicycle face’ and female-specific ailments closer to the saddle area. Seascape artist Seth Arca Whipple (1855-1901) painted this woman into a road scene for an 1897 competition organised by the League of American Wheelmen. It won the competition (maybe because of the product placements; check out the number of LAW logos, including the woman’s brooch) but the painting later disappeared from view. It’s owned by the Detroit Historical Society and is now in storage at the Detroit Historical Museum.

RoadsWereNotBuiltForCarsEbook

It’s been the cover image for Roads Were Not Built For Cars since almost the beginning of the research for the book. I bought the rights to the image for use on the cover and also paid a visit to the museum for a personal look at Whipple’s work, an 18 x 23 inch watercolour dripping with historicity. If my Kickstarter campaign reaches £14,000 by April 20th I’ll be commissioning another cover which can be chosen as an alternative to the Whipple painting. but I won’t be losing the painting, it will be featured prominently in the book because it tells an arresting story; a story not just about the emancipation of women but about how cyclists played a key and influential role in improving roads before motorcars came along and stole their thunder. (The US and UK motor lobby casually airbrushed cyclists out of highway history in the 1920s and 1930s; in Nazi Germany the airbrushing was more overt with regulations against describing the beginnings of German automobilism having sprung from cycling).

Close-ups of features in the painting – which is pretty much an advert for the League of American Wheelmen’s Good Roads campaign – bring the varied stories to life and I’ll be dissecting the painting in great detail in the book.

Oh, and the drivers mentioned in the headline aren’t of the motorised kind, but teamsters or horse drawn carriage drivers.

Roads Were Not Built For Cars cover close-up (Whipple 1897)

Roads Were Not Built For Cars cover close-up (Whipple 1897)

Roads Were Not Built For Cars cover close-up (Whipple 1897)

Roads Were Not Built For Cars cover close-up (Whipple 1897)

Roads Were Not Built For Cars cover close-up (Whipple 1897)

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April 7, 2013 by carltonreid

The Joy of Setts

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sharpstone

Victorian touring cyclists from Britain often complained about the rough granite setts used in Belgium, setts now famous as the pavé to be found on about 50kms of today’s Paris-Roubaix road race. 19th Century cyclists preferred macadam surfaces (small stones bound with dust) or, for speed, wooden planking, which was found in the posher urban areas. The picture above comes from a pamphlet issued in 1900 by the Roads Improvement Association and showed the proper dimension of stone to be used in macadam roads, and decries the large, sharp stones sometimes found embedded in the macadam.

The Roads Improvement Association had been created in 1885 by the Cyclists’ Touring Club and the forerunner to British Cycling. By 1900 it had been joined by motoring interests (the cycling organisations would be later pushed out of the way) and the pamphlet, which was aimed at influencing county surveyors, remarked that granite setts, now a very expensive road treatment and used to demarcate low-speed or historic zones, was at the time one of the cheapest and least desirable ways of surfacing roads.

It was also bumpy, as can be seen from the TV pictures from Paris-Roubaix. Cyclists then and now have never been fond of granite setts (the pavé isn’t strictly speaking made of cobblestones, they’re river-rounded stones unsuitable for any traffic whatsoever).

The 1900 RIA pamphlet said:

“It is to be regretted that granite setts compare so favourably with other materials in the matter of cost of maintenance – in other respects they have little to recommend them, and all that can be said in justification of their use is that they are a necessary evil…the initial saving is far more apparent than real, seeing that the life of carriages and all light vehicles is materially shortened where such a bone-shaking and destructive pavement is employed.”

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