- Today, we are pleased to introduce James Longhurst
as part the Wisconsin Historical Museum's
History Sandwiched In lecture series.
The opinions expressed today are those of the presenters
and are not necessarily those
of the Wisconsin Historical Society
or the museum's employees.
James Longhurst is a historian of urban
and environmental policy and the author of
Bike Battles: A History of Sharing the American Road .
He is an associate professor
at the University of Wisconsin La Crosse,
with a PhD in history and policy
from Carnegie Mellon University.
He is also a local bicycle advocate and a road cyclist,
bike commuter, amateur mechanic, social rider,
and lapsed recreational triathlete.
Here today to discuss why the bicycle sidepath movement
of the 1890s disappeared,
why this story has been forgotten,
and why it matters today.
Please join me in welcoming James Longhurst.
(audience applause)
- Thank you very much for coming out this warm,
early September day.
I'd like to thank, of course, the Wisconsin
Historical Museum and the Wisconsin Historical Society,
my colleagues at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse,
Department of History.
The research behind today's presentation
was funded by a variety of sources,
but it was also made possible
by the UW System's Library Fellows Program,
an embodiment of the Wisconsin Idea that makes
Madison libraries and research archives available
to all citizens statewide.
I certainly want to thank Kaitlyn Schumacher,
as well as Nicholas Hoffman, Jesse Gant,
and everybody behind this Shifting Gears exhibition.
In the decade of the 1890s, bicyclists in the Midwest
and across the nation came up with an incredible plan:
A separate network of hard surfaced bike-only paths
built by innovative public/private partnerships
and protected by state law.
Near the turn of the century, networks of sidepaths
were built in cities from upstate New York
to central Minnesota.
And advocates dreamed of a path across the Midwest
and eventually, the nation.
Today, I'd like to explain why the sidepath movement
disappeared, why this story has been forgotten by history,
and why it matters again today.
So let me start actually a bit
by going back and introducing myself a bit more
because this description of the different kinds
of cycling I do actually matters.
As author Mike Magnuson says,
there are actually different bike tribes,
each with their own motivations and tribal markings
and occasionally, initiations.
I'm actually a local bicycle advocate.
I volunteer for a variety of resources,
including our nonprofit destination marketing organization,
BicycleLaCrosse.com.
I invite you to come and join us for four straight days
of free cycling this Labor Day weekend
and throughout the year in the driftless region.
I'm also an everyday cyclist, a commuter,
a roady, and a credit card tourer.
And, in fact, I've been riding all this summer
to promote the book, which came out this spring,
starting here in La Crosse.
That's not me on the high wheeler.
Then continuing to major cities across the US and actually,
I'll be finishing up here in Madison,
tomorrow Milwaukee, because I have to go back to work
next week, sadly, the semester starts.
But I would make it clear that this is mostly
multi-modal travel that I've been doing.
I haven't had the time to ride all the way
across the continent, but I've instead been loading my bike
up into cars and planes and trains
and riding when I get places.
Now, this actually matters because when you ride
different kinds of bikes, you begin starting to think about
the cities and the places you ride in different ways.
And just as ther are bike tribes,
each with their own interests,
I'm also a member of different history tribes,
each with their own rituals and journals and initiations.
And I, as Kate said, I'm a historian,
an academic historian of urban and environmental policy.
And mostly, I've written about cities and the politics
of environmental disputes,
including pollution and resource management.
Of great interest to me when I started the research
that eventually became this book, Bike Battles,
was the fact that my history tribes
didn't always take the bicycle seriously
as a research topic.
Other tribes did a bit.
Historians of technology and of gender
and occasionally, biking enthusiasts
who were writing their own history for a popular audience.
But until quite recently, academic historians
thinking about the city as an environment
had not written a great deal about the bicycle
as practical transportation.
And I'll say quite recently because some of the people
who are starting to think this way are actually
in the room right here.
Why does this matter?
Because right now, we're in the middle of another
bike boom, maybe the third or fourth in American history,
depends on how you do the counting.
And it is occasioned great conflict.
Bringing the bike back has not been
a politically seamless task.
And one of my history tribes, policy history,
has the idea that the past can help us to understand
present-day conflicts.
So let's see if we can do just that.
The ultimate cause of the current surge
in bicycle popularity is debatable,
but regardless of the cause, there is some kind
of change occurring.
As the Washington Post writes,
"Recreational and competitive cycling have soared
"in the 21st century.
"The number of people commuting by bike is estimated
"to have increased by 43% since 2000."
"In just the first decade of the 21st century,"
according to the industry group People for Bikes,
"the total number of bicycle trips doubled."
Graphics like this from the League of American Bicyclists
show the nationwide surge.
This is a city breakdown, and the rest of the nation is,
of course, chasing Portland, Oregon here
with its vast increase.
But it's also visible in a state-by-state breakdown.
No one is decreasing the amount of bicycling
that they're doing, and some places are vastly increasing.
Major cities can no longer consider themselves
attractive tourist destinations
or places of employment without bike rental systems.
Surveyed teenagers are less likely than previous generations
to prioritize auto ownership, and I'm just floored by that.
When I was 16, nothing was more important to me
than my driver's license.
And yet, 16-year-olds today,
nothing's more important to them than their smartphone.
So, while practical urban cycling is experiencing
a new resurgence nationwide,
a century of decisions privileging the car
are making it difficult to reintegrate the bicycle
into dominant automobile traffic.
It's a really dry statement for something a lot
of the people in this room have experienced
viscerally firsthand.
The problem is logistically, politically,
and culturally fractious.
In New York, according to journalists,
"The bike lane wars have become front page fodder."
And I have a collection of the headlines
from several years ago.
You can find these in almost any major American city today.
We call it the bike lash.
The amazingly outsized political backlash
against the return of the bike.
I actually threw in a Madison headline there for you guys.
(audience chuckling)
But you can find it in LA to New York,
from Detroit to Tampa.
And there's P.J. O'Rourke,
"Dear urban cyclists: Go play in traffic."
This is something that everyone in this room
has experienced.
Just open your newspaper and you'll find
these kinds of debates.
And, of course, it sort started to hit home for me
when the book came out this spring,
and I was lucky enough and honored to have a review
by Grant Petersen, himself an author of Just Ride,
Rivendell Bicycle Works.
And he reviewed Bike Battles in the Wall Street Journal.
And that was a great honor and...
Oh, dear.
Oh, there's comments.
(audience laughter)
Oh.
(audience laughter)
Should we read the comments?
Oh.
You know the rule.
If the comments are anonymous,
you must never read the comments.
(audience laughter)
In the interest of research,
I often read the comments, I say.
In the interest of not having a heart attack,
I'm going to try to stop doing that.
But in the interest of research to find what people
are talking about when they talk about this bike lash,
I read the comments.
And so I read the comments on mine.
Okay, all right.
"Reeks" is misspelled.
Okay, all right.
Oh, there's many, many things misspelled.
But at the same time, we're learning some things here.
Elitist attitude of bicyclists.
So we have some discussions of attitude and social group.
White male.
There's some interesting information here.
This isn't that bad.
I'm okay.
Well, that's interesting.
(audience laughing)
We have a political philosophy identified here.
In fact, saying that bicycle is a form of transportation
appropriate for one political philosophy
and not for another.
It's also not the political philosophy that's identified
in other places.
So this is interesting.
We're learning some new things here.
This isn't that bad, I actually don't think this is...
(audience laughter)
Oh, boy.
This actually gets worse the farther you read it.
"Banned from all city streets, shunned from society.
"This is the camel's nose to 1950 China's tent
"with the next stop..."
This person is comparing bicycling
to a Maoist cultural revolution.
How does...
The bicycle is a tool of transportation.
How do we get to these kinds of political associations?
This is very, very strange. But, actually, this is not bad.
Nobody has called me a Nazi yet. Oh, dear.
(audience laughter)
"There's a very smug and arrogant attitude by the bikers
"about health, global warming, redistribution.
"These people are not poor,
"good jobs, tax payers, a fistful of cash."
So, what do we see here?
Once I control my heart rate,
when we reflect on this, it's amazing how this reaction,
and much like it in Facebook threads
and anonymous newspaper comments across the nation,
it's not about the bicycle.
It's not about the technology, the tool,
or the usage of it.
Instead, it reflects divisions in political philosophy,
group identification and shifting claims
on the public good.
Which leads me to the research question
I've been pursuing:
Can understanding the past,
debates about the bicycle, help us to understand
this current political bike lash?
I've been trying to find some history
that responds to this, and I've developed a short list
of incidents, stretching back over nearly
a century and a half that explain the disadvantaging
of bicycles.
I think of these as periodic and recurring
public policy debates over urban transportation.
And I suggested that as a title to my publisher,
and they said no way, and so we ended up
with Bike Battles.
And I don't mean the less useful metaphor of
bikes versus cars, or a war on bikes.
I mean, battles over bikes.
These lists of public debates include
the battle to include the bicycle in the legal definition
of vehicle in the 1870s,
the largely forgotten victory bike of World War II,
post-war suburbanization, and the failure to build
a much touted system of bikeways
during the bike boom of the 1970s.
But today, I just want to talk about one
of these incidents: the sidepath movement of the 1890s.
It's a largely overlooked episode in bicycle history
that illuminates serious questions concerning tax policy,
a changing definition of public good,
an important decision point in state formation.
None of these are things you think about
when you think about the bicycle.
My lesson out of this is that what gets built lasts
and shapes all decisions and experiences
and mindsets that come after.
And the bike path that didn't get built
also matters.
It's here that I use the political science
and policy analysis tool of path dependency,
which can help us to understand the historical basis
of current problems.
Path dependency is the idea that the decisions you've made
in the past actually constrain the whole universe
of decisions that are open to you now to a small subset,
which is another way of saying that history matters.
The sidepath movement,
with all of its political limitations,
partially explains why we ride the way we do today.
So, the sidepath movement happened
within the golden age of cycling in America:
the 1890s bicycling fad.
The safety bike was the centerpiece of this boom,
but it had multiple causes, including the entrepreneurial
acumen of boosters, an urbanizing nation
and popular reception with upwardly mobile
and vitality-obsessed consumers.
Named for its obvious advantage, safety,
over the deeply precarious high wheel,
which no one but young men and people
with no understanding of mortality rode.
Instead, the safety bicycle opened up cycling
for both men and women.
In this image, we have both women and men riding,
and we also have a scorcher here to the right,
hunched over and pedaling fast.
But everyone else reflected of the 1890s boom.
If this is the cause for the boom,
the limitations of the boom
were the condition of the roads.
Rural American roads in the 19th century
were almost all unimproved.
Their unpaved surfaces lacked adequate drainage,
were built without surveying or engineering
and were nearly impassable after rain or snow.
And, as usual, Mark Twain summarized the situation best.
He claims that if he ever went to hell,
then he would want to go by a bad road
so that he would at least be glad when he got
to his destination.
(audience laughter)
Mark Twain has such great lines.
This unapproved state had an underlying
financial and political cause,
an essentially local decentralized system of financing
road materials and labor.
Partly resulting from limited municipal governments
and partly from the fact that there's a huge distrust
of public works in general.
So, the good roads movement,
a phrase you might have heard of,
was a political reform movement meant not only to build
professionally engineered roads, but also to convince
Americans to pay for them through general taxation,
which they hadn't been doing, right?
And which was really anathema to a lot of
political philosophy at the time.
And cyclists were, if not the progenitors of this,
then they're absolutely tied up with this.
This is the League of American Wheelmen Bulletin,
and it's also the Good Roads magazine.
It shares two names throughout the 1890s.
And there's as much arguing for construction
of good roads and general taxation for roads
as there is discussion of cycling in these pages.
Later, it splits into two different publications.
And while they're supporting the good roads movement,
cyclists in the 1890s weren't prepared to wait that long.
It was going to take a very long time
for the good roads movement to persuade
state legislatures.
And so they, in the meantime, looked to create
their own alternative to unimproved dirt roads.
And they, for a while, are going to build their own
separate bicycle paths with packed gravel
or cinder surfaces.
This is actually, this is one here.
This is White Bear Path in St. Paul.
You can see it just sort of heading off into farmland
on its own.
And these bridle paths, these cycling paths,
were intended for recreational purposes
and mostly were built following their own routes
across parks and only occasionally linking up with roads.
Most importantly, these paths were often paid for
by cyclists themselves, through fundraising,
donation, and club dues,
or by park boards occasionally.
I want to pause here and talk about something else,
about the first phase of the bike boom.
In its earliest stages, the bike boom was also
an elite fad, which is partly an explanation
of what happens later.
These are remarkably well dressed society women
in Rochester, New York.
And I absolutely want to say that these women
find a freedom of movement in public space
through the bicycle that would not have been
accessible to them previously.
At the same time, they are also displaying
very rigidly proper attire and clothing
to demarcate the appropriateness of this behavior.
Those are some fancy duds.
There are some women there wearing furs.
That is immaculately well coiffed and maintained,
and it reflects a very high status of bicycling.
We can see this in a couple of other places.
This is an early marker of exclusivity from the 1880s.
This would have been in the high wheel era.
And we have, from the Chicago paper,
we have a description.
This is a column that appeared daily and weekly,
and the column is Polite Athletics.
That is polite, meaning appropriate to the upper class,
and bicycling is reported under Polite Athletics.
And the markers of exclusivity are pretty impressive
and pretty extensive here.
Let's take a look at what the well-dressed
cyclist is wearing.
The new uniform of the Ariels,
a shirt in red and black stripes, polo cap to match,
dark blue stockings.
"It is altogether likely that the Oconomowoc girls
"will lose their hearts when the handsome boys
"in this elegant costume appear at the lake,"
and we all know how hard it is to impress Oconomowoc girls.
(audience laughter)
Think about how expensive that clothing
and that appropriate dress is.
These are humorous to us, markers of exclusivity.
To our eyes, there are more
pernicious examples.
A decade later,
the League of American Wheelmen will draw
the racial color line within its own membership
and enforcing racial segregation
in this era of Plessy versus Ferguson.
And this plays out, this exclusively plays out
in the politics of cycling.
Because the other problem with the path-building
that people have been doing for a while
is that it doesn't have enough money behind it,
and some are going to find it a slow
and unsatisfactory method.
Therefore, beginning in upstate New York,
cyclists began experimenting with countywide attempts
to raise funds through taxation or subscription
in order to build entire networks
of bicycle-specific paths.
And in Niagara County, New York, a businessman,
Charles T. Raymond, champions a countywide tax
on bicyclists to build something new,
something he called a sidepath.
Not a sidewalk, which already existed, but a separate thing
called a sidepath.
And this is the particularly rare Sidepaths magazine.
I'll talk more about it at the end, but
it put out hundreds of numbers,
had a nationwide audience out of New York,
and I can find six or seven of these.
There's huge numbers of these that
have not been preserved,
and we don't necessarily know why,
though I have some ideas.
Before most roads were widened and paved
and before cities required or assessed the butters
to install concrete sidewalks and curbing,
advocates took advantage of the transitional state
of the built environment to insert sidepaths
into the urban landscape.
The proposed paths were not to be less than
three feet wide or more than six feet wide
and constructed within the outside lines
and along and upon either side of such public roads
and streets, as the law read.
Let's take a look at what this means.
This is Rochester, New York.
We have, to the left here, we have a dirt road
in a residential street.
We have a little, probably a wooden curbing.
Then we have a sidepath, with a cyclist riding along it.
A ghostly cyclist.
Then we have a strip of grass with trees on it,
and to the right of that, a sidewalk,
and then people's front lawns.
And we can see what it looks like outside of town,
and this is a dirt road and a sidepath on its side.
While they were to be built within the established
legal right of way, the sidepaths were segregated
from both the adjoining road and from sidewalks.
Later, court decisions made it clear
that wagons, carts and horses were excluded
from the paths.
They were to be a separate network set apart
from foot and horse-drawn traffic, solely for bicycles.
Niagara County, New York, where this started,
built their paths through taxes.
And here, we have some newspaper stories
saying that everyone is paying their taxes happily.
But it was almost the only place to do so successfully.
While other cities, including Chicago,
floated the ideas for tax-based path building,
they went nowhere.
Most tax-based bike path building across the nation
ran into serious political and legal opposition.
Pennsylvania, Oregon and Washington state
all had tax-based sidepaths
or bicycle registration projects, all of which
were overturned by the courts.
For example, when a law was proposed in 1896
to allow nearby Monroe County, next to Niagara,
to tax all of their cyclists in the county a dollar
and build paths which only some cyclists might use,
there was significant backlash.
And here's where the social exclusivity
of early cycling fed criticism.
The editor of the Rochester Post Express
claimed that cyclists "regard the tax as an outrage
"as it unfairly allowed cycle path riders
"to reap substantial benefits at the expense of others,
"including women and children.
"The vicious principle of class taxation
"was the central problem," claimed the writer.
"There is no more reason why the bicyclists
"should be taxed for cinder paths than that owners
"of vehicles should be taxed for the construction
"of better highways."
Complaints against the taxation of many
for the benefit of a few was a common refrain.
"20,000 wheel owners ought not to be taxed
"for the benefit of a few hundred,"
argued the Post Express.
Dr. EB Angel of the Rochester Wheelmen's League
attempted to defend the bill, declaring that the roads
of the county are unrideable, except by expert wheelmen,
and that without sidepaths, it would take five to 10 years
before Monroe County can expect to have good roads
through state legislation.
County resident, Franklin Smith,
his response epitomized the opposition as he took
the bully pulpit of a national magazine
to summarize the debate in Monroe and to settle scores.
The language here gets fairly heated
for a discussion of bicycling, which really should not
surprise us by this point, right?
Smith railed against the most ignorant minds involved,
their perverted opinions and amazing exhibition
of selfishness.
And so down here, he appears to be targeting Dr. Angel,
whom I just quoted,
when he criticized an, "unnamed distinguished physician
"equally destitute of a keen appreciation
"of the rights of those bicyclists that might
"never have time to take an excursion into the country."
Smith is not arguing against the sidepaths themselves.
He's a cyclist, he likes the sidepaths.
But he's arguing against the political philosophy
of taxation for the general welfare.
Citing a prominent proponent of social Darwinism,
he notes that Herbert Spencer's social philosophy
teaches that the improvement shall be undertaken
voluntarily by those that desire it.
What it forbids is that they should ever resort
to the argument of coercion to secure the aid of others.
And in Monroe County, taxation for sidepath building died.
They instead went to voluntary means to raise money.
Here, they had a fundraiser for a cycle show
and callithumpian parade.
And facing this backlash, sidepath supporters
in the state, when they gathered in Rochester
to create a new state law for all of New York,
they abandoned taxation.
It wasn't going to work.
Instead, they're going to charge a user fee
for those who choose to ride on the path
rather than taxing all cyclists,
or all county property owners.
"Commissions were to adopt a form of license,
"badge, emblem or device suitable to be affixed
"to a bicycle," read the law.
Here's the 1899 law that results.
And here's what sidepath tags looked like.
These were sold yearly.
They would have years and numbers on them.
And they would have the name of the county on them.
And I have a collection here.
These continue to appear on eBay.
They start about 50 bucks and go up to about 200.
If anybody wants to buy me one, I would take it.
It'd be great.
Here's a great, I love these celluloid and tin ones.
This user fee model in New York state was a success
in a bicycle-mad world.
20 New York counties, mostly upstate, built sidepaths.
And with their early starts, Monroe and Niagara
were the most obvious success stories,
with Monroe completing 150 miles of paths by 1900.
And New York's success actually spilled out.
For example, Minneapolis and St. Paul
became very ardent sidepath builders.
There is a bit of a problem, though.
They haven't figured out the tax issue yet either.
The St. Paul Globe predicted in 1900
that Minnesota legislators would soon take up a law
taxing the bicycles in every county in order to build
paths under the direction of a sidepath commission
similar to the New York commission.
The problem that they were trying to solve there
is that the existing voluntary system
had a number of what political scientists
would today call free riders.
In 1900, a journalist worried that the cost of sidepaths
is not equally shared, a small number do all the work.
Last year, 2,300 St. Paul wheelmen contributed,
while 7,500 received the same benefits without lending
any assistance whatever.
Thus, in 1900, the two cycle paths associations
of St. Paul and Minneapolis attempted to arrange
their own replacement by a quasi-state sidepath system.
That plan quickly fell apart.
The mayor vetoed it, and approving of the veto,
the St. Paul Globe described the ordinance
as "radically obnoxious,"
objected to the aspects of a plan that
"smacked of class legislation."
"The public thoroughfares are public property,
"and their use should be free and unrestricted,"
they opined.
"To exclude cyclists from the use of the cycle paths
"because they have not paid a fee is clearly
"unjust discrimination and against all true
"public policy."
By the summer of 1900, the Minneapolis City Council
overcame the mayoral veto and passed a city ordinance
requiring sidepath tags.
At the same time, St. Paul is still selling voluntary tags.
As the...
problem continued,
the issue was clearly about how to compel
without controlling.
"The cycle tag in St. Paul has represented little more
"than a individual expression of appreciation,"
said the Globe.
The tags are there for some sort of voluntarily purchased
symbol of charity issued by a private association,
sort of like an NPR tote bag,
and attempts to shame riders into buying them
to pay for the cycle paths they're riding on continued.
But as the bicycle boom continued,
this solution was reaching its limits.
Cycle riders wanted paths to be built by taxes,
but that wasn't going to happen.
But there was still a possibility that the public
might be brought around to support the user fee
licensing system.
And one approach to
drumming up support for path building
found inspirationl plans for an interstate
transcontinental bicycle network,
connecting Chicago eastward to New York
and west to Minneapolis and beyond.
This visionary transportation network would be
"a complete system of sidepaths from Maine to Texas,
"and from the Atlantic to the Pacific."
Particularly here in the Midwest,
cyclists supported the League of American Wheelmen's
1900 plan, aiming to build a continent-spanning network
of bicycle paths, allowing them to go
"from New York to any point in Maine, Florida,
"or California on smooth roads made especially for them."
I've been out riding, that doesn't actually exist.
The first part of this imagined
coast-to-coast network was to be a central spine
of surface paths, stretching from Minneapolis
to New York City, and connecting Chicago, Gary, Buffalo,
Rochester and Albany along the way.
And supporters referred to this as the trunk line,
but additional linkages were to split off
to go to Omaha and elsewhere.
One St. Paul journalist predicted the ability
to travel a wheel from Chicago to the Twin Cities,
in soaring rhetoric, depicting the connection
of existing local paths as
"a consummation of perhaps the greatest project
"ever undertaken by wheelmen in the northwest
"and anywhere in the United States for that matter."
In the midst of these plans,
New York style sidepath laws were having success.
Maryland, Ohio, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Florida,
Minnesota, all passed laws on the New York model
in 1900 and 1901.
And additional states, including Massachusetts,
New Hampshire, Vermont and Wisconsin
were all pretty close.
The plan to connect through the Midwest here
came up against a number of logistical hitches.
And here's where things were starting to fall apart.
The first problem was that the plan required
all the counties and municipalities along the way
to be as successful as upstate New York and Minnesota
in creating their own sidepath commissions.
Outside of a few exceptional locales, this wasn't happening.
The second problem was secure
the Mississippi River crossing.
They've avoided the obviously superior crossing
in La Crosse, and have
gone further to the south.
And there's actually quite a bit of difficulty
in crossing the river there and getting back up the bluffs.
But the fatal blow came when Wisconsin
did not pass their proposed statewide sidepath bills.
So while the plan floundered in 1900,
it did not die immediately.
The new idea is to avoid Wisconsin altogether.
And here, you see the dotted line is the original path,
and now they've created a new path further south
through Iowa and through Illinois.
Without a statewide sidepath bill,
it was not safe to count on individual Wisconsin counties
to build their own parts of the sidepath network.
This was not enough.
While they continued to exist for a while,
1903 was really the last great season
for building sidepaths.
St. Paul's success was celebrated locally and nationally
with an incredible 115 miles of paths built
for the use of reported 12,000 cyclists,
supported with club dues and government subsidies.
Minneapolis itself has a remarkable radial network
of more than 50 miles of paths extending from downtown,
and at least another 75 into the surrounding county.
And counties throughout upstate New York
had hundreds of miles of paths.
Let's take a look at some of the St. Paul.
This is the rutted dirt road to the right
and then the much more attractive, shady...
And then here's another set of images.
These look like sidewalks.
They're very carefully paved by the municipal engineer,
but they are, in fact, sidepaths.
But the dream of the sidepath nation was already fading.
Sidepath commissions withered away
throughout the rest of the decade.
Like a receding tide revealing rotten piers,
by 1905, the decline of the exuberant bike fad
left the sidepath movement exposed
and unable to support itself.
The disappearing public interest exposed the inherent
weakness in the movement's institutional structure
as essentially charitable funding stream
proved incommensurate with the needs of permanent
infrastructure for stable and incremental investment.
With sidepath commissions weakened,
their paths eventually disappeared under newly paved roads.
In 1907, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle worried that
"it is possible that when the state engineer comes along
"to survey for newly funded good roads,
"that he will demand that the entire width of the roadways
"where sidepaths now are, be graded,
"which would cut out the sidepaths."
This is indeed what happened.
Where sidepaths existed, they were merely paved over.
Most cyclists were delighted by this.
Before the automobile, this new road
was available for them.
But others were concerned.
With prescience, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle observed:
"It is to the interest of everybody,
"school children especially, that the sidepath
"be allowed to stand, as it is too dangerous
"in these days of automobiling for a bicyclist
"to be compelled to ride in the road."
But that appears to be exactly what happened.
If you compare sidepath networks as radial extensions
in Rochester to the good roads and radial extensions,
the good roads just paved over
the most used roads where the sidepaths previously were.
So let's talk about some conclusions,
first, from history and then for policy today.
Why were the sidepaths forgotten?
Why have so few people written about this history?
And, by the way, when I go back to Rochester
and tell people in Rochester, New York,
that these existed, I actually have been accused of lying
because these don't physically exist anymore,
and that's the first reason.
It's difficult for us to imagine this past.
Really, only Minneapolis and St. Paul
in American cities kept remnants of theirs,
and somewhat accidentally
as bridle paths and parkway is a part
of their grand rounds.
They nearly didn't keep the knowledge
of what the sidepath was.
Additionally, the good roads movement,
at the end of the sidepath movement there,
was going to erase its support from cyclists.
Frankly, having cyclists be supporters
was too politically divisive at the time,
and sort of stopping talking about bicycling
and starting to talk about other benefits of good roads
for farmers and others was better political rhetoric.
And for the end and the successful moments
of the good roads movement, bicyclists
are largely erased from that,
that they're involved in the beginning.
Additionally, we don't remember sidepath history
because the records from sidepaths
were not set, partly because people don't think of cycling
as an important piece of history.
It's fun and toys and child's play.
Additionally, sidepath commissions,
being public/private partnerships,
were not part of city or county governments,
and so their records were very rarely put immediately
into archives.
There's so very few left.
The records are spotty, and I've had to
piece this together.
And this is where finding those very few
remaining Sidepath magazines
was such an amazing discovery.
After that point in time, through the 20th century,
I'm now going to point the finger at us, we historians.
For us, bicyclists were unserious.
Bicycle was unserious as a topic.
And so, therefore, what historians wrote about the past
did not include this history.
And so, therefore, the sidepaths, as a political moment,
were written out of our popular memory.
What does this mean for us today?
I'm a policy historian,
I identified my tribe at the beginning.
Policy historians like to think we can use history
as a tool to make better decisions today.
I'm going to say that funding streams matter.
We get into huge debates as bicyclists about what kind
of lanes or paths or tracks we should build,
and I'm not offering a solution there.
What I am offering a suggestion is that money matters.
It shapes what happens.
And I also would say that, to the cyclist detriment,
was being identified as an other.
The elite and exclusionary language of bicycling
turned against it in this political debate.
So I would recommend, if you're a bicycle advocate,
coalitions matter.
Figuring out ways to not be identified as the other,
but instead to be identified as part of the public
is a way you talk people into thinking of bicyclists
and bicycle transportation as a public good.
I don't think that sidepaths were a failure.
Because they didn't exist doesn't mean
they did not serve a purpose or were not a public good.
It's somewhat accidental, the timing
of why they were erased.
And I would say that what gets built matters right now.
What if the sidepaths had existed?
If the sidepaths had existed through the 20th century,
imagine what would have happened when suburbs came along.
They would have been built on top of a radial network
of paths that connected people back to downtowns.
If sidepaths had been built,
the history of urban America would have been different.
And just as we're looking backwards at the choices
that could have been made in the past,
we are the future's past.
The decisions we make now about building our cities
shape what will happen in the future.
The wheel has turned full circle.
We want to ride some place,
just as the people in the 1890s wanted to,
but we can't because of the condition of the road.
Thank you, and let's ride safe out there
because we're all just trying to get some place.
Thank you very much.
(audience applause)