🚲 Bike boom(s) with transport journalist Carlton Reid
How our best invention came to be, and why it's our future
Are we in the middle of a “bike boom?”
How did biking become a thing?
Why do futurologists say that bikes are our future?
I had such a fun and fascinating chat with bicycling and transport journalist Carlton Reid, author of Roads Were Not Built for Cars, Bike Boom, and hundreds of great articles for Forbes, The Guardian, BikeBiz, and more.
Watch the video, tune in on Spotify or Apple, or read it below.
What is modern bike anatomy?
When we say the word “bike,” what are we actually referring to these days?
Well I guess the first bike is the thing that you see little kids powering with their little feet, bum on the saddle.
That was like the first kind of bike that was ever done. And that’s over 200 years ago.
And then about 50-60 years after that one came out (it was done by a guy called Baron Karl von Drais, in Germany), and then it just fell out of fashion completely.
And then it took 50-60 years before somebody in France, probably the Michaux family, attached pedals to it.
And that became what we would now consider to be a bicycle, because you could pedal it.
It didn't have gears, it didn't have a chain. It didn't have pneumatic tires…. all the things that you would now consider to be of a bicycle - it didn't have any of that. But you can at least have cranks and pedals, and you could go decent speeds… in fact it was faster than a horse.
And you can go decent distances on this very little, late 1860s, velocipede bicycle (that we would now call it).
But the bicycle that we know today, progressed from that.
So obviously people know about the pennyfarthing - with the little wheel at the back and huge wheel at the front.
Well, that was kind of…. not a mistake... because it was very good for the rich elite people who were using these, these red Ferraris of the day to get out there and change society... but it wasn't until what's called the safety bicycle, which was safer because you're not high up on this massive great wheel. And the safety bicycle was basically a British invention.
So the bike was a German invention to begin with - to create it. Then you had French input to get to the second stage. And then the third stage is the English input, which is the pennyfarthing and the safety bicycle.
The bicycle hasn't changed since 1884, roughly. And the shape of that 1884 bicycle hasn't changed much.
So the Dutch bike - so you're in the Netherlands - the Dutch bike that we famously think of as a Dutch thing, the omafiets, is actually an English bicycle, of about 1900.
So that was the most popular bicycle of the day. And that was a bicycle with two equally-sized wheels. It's called a diamond frame. And it's like, “what do you mean by a diamond frame?” but it's just the shape. You've got two diamond-like things on the frame. And then you then have pneumatic tires, which came a little bit later on.
So you've got all the component parts, by about 1885, of the modern bicycle. And the modern bicycle is not that different from the 1885 bicycle.
Well, that was a wonderful overview. Thank you.
So I know about you from your book, Bike Boom. And I was looking for a book like that, because I was just thinking -- “what is the history of this? Why do I love biking so much? Where does this come from?”
But also, we're in the middle of a pandemic. A lot of people have been saying that they're buying bikes, or biking more.
But of course, there's a history to these booms -- these times when biking is in vogue, and when it’s not in vogue.
And your book just completely blew my mind - that biking started as this kind of elite thing, and then it was totally shameful at a certain point...
Are we using bikes in the way that they were intended initially? Where did this biking thing start? I mean, it's one thing to say, “here's a cool contraption thing that you can ride around.” But at what point did biking really catch as a form of transportation?
Transportation - really genuine transportation - say getting from your house to your work. That's post 1920. So that's when it really became shameful, what you just said there.
When working people got on bicycles - that’s when the elites really fell out of love with bicycles - because they didn't want to be seen on a vehicle that the working person was using.
But the first boom - the first time where bicycling became something very popular - even though it was actually a tiny number of people - was in the 1890s.
So you have the mid-1890s bicycle boom.
This was when royalty were on bicycles, all of the top actors and actresses of the time were on bicycles, high society was on bicycles. Hyde Park in London would be full of people riding around, and balancing, and learning how to do this new contraption.
The new safety bicycle was what spurred this boom. And then with pneumatic tires, you go fast. So these things were very, very fast, faster than any other vehicle of the day. And they were quite expensive. So only elites could afford them anyway. And when elites can only afford certain things, they become very popular with elites. And it wasn't until the second hand market when bicycles became handed down, and became much cheaper - 30 years after that first boom - was when bicycling as we know it, for transport, came in.
There were postmen on bikes in the 1880s, and all sorts of things like that, but it didn't become like a real mass form of transport, a popular form of transport, until well into the 1920s.
And it peaked in the 1930s. And so in the 1930s, the cloth cap image of a cyclist riding to work, that's where a lot of the stereotypes of bicycling being a lower class form of transport, that's where it came from.
And of course, at that time, I'd imagine that roads were for horses and people, right? And then all of a sudden you're introducing bikes into the equation. How did bikes change roads back then? (And then of course, we can get to the future from there.)
The elites - on these new contraptions - they're expensive red Lamborghinis, which are very fast, very expensive, and can get you places. So obviously there are trains that can get you places, but to get out into the boondocks, out into the sticks - there are very few ways of really doing that practically, certainly individually, and the bicycle enabled that.
So all of these rich, elite, bolshie, manly male, and club - like the first ones were in military attire - they would go out into the countryside and explore on their bicycles.
There was this huge kickback from farmers. Farmers did not want these townies coming into the area. And the roads at this point were very much under-used, because the railways had taken away a lot of the reason for using long distance transport on roads.
So these major turnpikes - these major, what are now major highways - were falling into complete disrepair.
And these bolshie young elites came along on their fancy, schmancy machines, and said “well, we'd actually like to go much faster, and need to repair these roads.”
And so the bicyclists were the first group as a whole, in about a generation or two generations, to be A) interested in roads and then B) to actually do something about it.
So in America, the Good Roads Movement was highly, highly divergent. You certainly wouldn't have the expansion of motoring for instance, at the speed it went in 1910s, 1920s if you didn't have 40 years previously, this intensive lobbying, a successful lobbying, by these bolshie bicyclists.
Okay, so is that the moment when we start seeing politics and biking start to kind of come to a head?
It goes from leisure to transport.. And then, wait! Hold on! Transport can be quite political, right?
Yeah, it's always been political. Definitely.
There's this image now with many people, of bicycling being this... Some people think bicycling is for poor people, and other people think cycling is for elites, on their really expensive carbon bikes, you know - bankers on bikes.
You have both these groups now.
Back then, there were these [cyclists were] mainly the elites. This is pre-1900s. They were from this elite part of society, because they were from high society. They had channels of communication into these politicians. And these bolshie bicyclists were able to push for changes in the law, changes in how roads were administered, relatively successfully, in both America and in the UK.
So the Good Roads Movement actually sprang from a very similar movement before that, in the UK, the Roads Improvement Association.
And all of these were done by bicyclists.
Both of these movements - the Good Roads Movement in America, and the Roads Improvement Association in the UK, were both later taken over by motoring organizations. But they were both led by officials from cycling organizations.
So cycling morphed into motoring.
And the officials from cycling morphed straight over into motoring. And then they - because cycling became shameful - deliberately erased their bicycling history.
So an awful lot of these were considered proto-motorists, people who created motoring. They actually started in their careers as incredibly effective and enthusiastic bicyclists. But in the 1930s they didn't want people to know they were bicyclists back then.
So they actually went out and erased part of their history, and got rid of some of their diaries, and all this, because it was incredibly shameful to be a cyclist in the 1930s.
And that's why the history of motoring - which you wouldn't have the history of motoring if you didn't have, first of all, the history of bicycling - that's why motoring has just completely forgotten its roots in bicycling.
Not just the roads were improved by bicyclists, so that motorists then drive faster on them.
The actual contraption that is a car - an awful lot of the technology on this, so much of the technology came from the world of bicycle.
The first car companies - their capital came from cyclists. So the worlds of motoring and cycling now are assumed to be light years apart.
In fact, you know, if you looked at the DNA of a car, and the DNA of a motorist, it was all bicycling or cycling people.
And that's kind of shocking to today's motorists who, you know, want cyclists to get off the road.
You almost could say, “well, it wasn't for those cyclists, you wouldn't even have a car to drive on that road.”
It was the bicyclists who created motoring.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute! [Laughs]
So I thought the cars were like “horseless carriages.” I thought that this was like the history of…
Look, I grew up in the American Midwest. I thought this was the Model T Ford - this whole kind of “we took horses, and then we turned them into cars!”
But that's, that's not true?
That's a later, 1930s -1940s kind of trope.
The people who are actually living there, they knew that it was bicycles.
So in my book Roads Were Not Built for Cars, there's a little illustration from an automobile magazine in 1902 with one of these early, in effect Model T type of cars - an early car, not quite that era - with a person standing on top of that car holding a bicycle above his head.
They didn’t have to say in that magazine what that meant. They knew what that meant, because bicycling begat motoring.
You mentioned Henry Ford there - well, Henry was a cyclist throughout his life. In his 60s he was still riding around on a very lightweight English roadster machine on his estate in Dearborn.
And his first car...
You know, he was a bit of an anal guy, he kept everything - absolutely everything throughout his whole life. That's why you have all those museums with all his paraphernalia.
So we've got all the receipts - the Dearborn Henry Ford Museum has all the receipts from his first car, and his later ons. And a lot of the parts were bicycle parts.
So he was writing to bicycle chain companies to get the chains and a lot of component parts on his first motor car.
You know, the very first car, the Benz Patent-Motorwagen - well, we know which bicycle shop he bought from. It was a tricycle. And he went to a bicycle shop in Mannheim, Germany and bought the parts for the first motorcar.
And all of these early motorists, that we think of as proto-motorists - Ford, Benz - they were all bicyclists first, and they bought the parts for their first cars from bicycle shops.
So this “horseless carriage” thing - if you didn't have bicycling, in this intermediate form of technology, you wouldn't have motoring in a way, because a horse carriage is really, really heavy. You couldn't just put an early motor on a horseless carriage. It would have been too heavy, it would never have gone anywhere. It was the technology in bicycling - the lightweight aluminums, and the lightweight steels… you know aluminum was first used on bicycles.
If it wasn't for the bicycles, we wouldn't have had all these technologies that later were able to transfer to motoring. Especially pneumatic tires.
Pneumatic tires were an invention for bicycle, not for motorcars. But pneumatic tires are probably one of the most important forms of technology that enabled - first bicycling but then absolutely motoring - to take off.
And then you get down to just ball bearings. You don't think of ball bearings as a highly technical thing. But they were very technical. They were white heat of technology in the 1870s and 1860s when they were first being developed. And it was bicycle companies who transformed the manufacture of ball bearings.
All of these things which were later taken over by motoring, and thought to be a motoring technology, actually came from bicycling first.
Wow. So we basically have to blame ourselves for the fact that our roads look this way. [laughs]
I mean, if everything started with the bike, and then all of a sudden all these bike people are like, “Let's make the roads better!” And then, “Let's do these road associations! And now these road associations are associations! Let's build cars!”
It seems like... you open the box, and you got the amazing thing, which is the bike. And then all of a sudden, it's like, “This is so amazing! Let's ruin it!” [laughs]
Yeah. I mean, you can definitely blame cyclists for motoring, if you put it that way.
Yes. We’re to blame.
Great. [laughs]
Those were the seeds of our own destruction in many ways.
And so these people who gain their first independence on bicycles, and then transferred to motoring, well, they, in effect, destroyed what they had created in bicycling.
Because it's just absolutely natural, and it happened throughout history, and will continue to happen, is -- you want more and more speed, you want more and more power. So yes, bicycling was this incredibly fast and very powerful, incredibly elitist thing to do. But then as soon as the cyclists created motoring, well, of course, the cyclists went off, and the elite went off, and they developed motoring instead.
So it's just that intermediate technology. We tend to forget that you wouldn't have motoring if you didn't have bicycling.
This trope of you know, “horseless carriage, take the horse and put a motor on,” No. That is absolutely not how motoring came about.
And in my Roads book, I've quoted loads of carriage companies of the time who said that. So this is not me just making this up. These are reports of the day, of people making carriages, who said “no, you can never have had motoring if you didn't have bicycling.” And they were quite dismissive of this “horseless carriage” trope, because that did lead to the way we consider the formation of motoring today. And it's just completely bogus.
Carlton Reid
I have perhaps a silly question. But why didn't we just put a motor on a bike? Nowadays I think of e-bikes. Why did this go from bike, to car? Instead of bike, to faster bike?
It did. It did as well.
So, motorcycling was... when you consider that you think “well, you just put a motor on a bicycle.” That's a motorbike. So that's a relatively obvious thing, for a person in the streets to understand - that must be where motorbikes came from, but it's the fact that no, but that's also where cars came from as well.
Just because they've got four wheels, doesn't mean that isn't where the technology came from.
Because there are lots of, you know, quadricycles. And before you put motors on these things - with these tricycles and quadricycles, and all sorts of pedal-powered vehicles - on the roads that didn't have motors on. And then in the early 1880s, people started putting on motors, and in fact, it was electric motors, this is before the gasoline engine, so the electric car came from electrifying the tricycle.
So motoring historians consider the first electric car to have been a French guy who put a whole bunch of quite heavy batteries on an English tricycle. That's in the early 1880s. And then yes, then electrify and add gasoline motors to the bicycle, and then that makes the motorbike.
So was there a golden age of biking at around the turn of the century, where you had roads that were made for bikes?
Is there a time that we can pinpoint and say, “Wow, that was really great. That was the closest thing to Amsterdam that we had back then.” Is there a time like that? Or is that just, you know, a kind of false hope about looking into history and saying that there was this golden age?
There was one. And that's because there weren’t many motoring cars around at this time.
When we talked about your first question, which was about the bicycle and I mentioned this 1884 safety bicycle device done by an English guy called John Kemp Starley -
Well, the exact same year was when Benz was creating the motorwagen - so the first motorcar, which has all these bicycle parts built from a bicycle shop in Frankfurt Am Main.
So all of these bicycle parts are being put onto the first car, Benz’s car at the same time as we're having this revolution with the safety bicycles.
It's the exact same year. Which is freaky.
People say, you know, “bicycles are this ancient Victorian invention.” Actually, they were invented the same year! Not ‘invented’ - I shouldn't say ‘invented’ - they were innovated the same year as motoring came along.
There are many, many more bicycles of course, than motorcars, for the first certainly 30 years. So 1905 - you’re really starting to see more motorcars coming on the road. And by 1910, you're getting a significant number of motor cars on the road.
And I think that's when you start seeing, in the literature, you start seeing people saying, “the golden days have passed us.”
A) You wanted to get one of your cars anyway, if you're a rich cyclist, you wanted to transfer into the world of motoring instead. But also, that's when these start going fast really, really quickly.
You know, these things were not puttering on at five miles an hour for 20 years. They were accelerating, literally accelerating, very quickly.
And when you had these very powerful, very fast machines - they are starting to muscle bicyclists off the road in effect, and you really couldn't go faster in these proto motor cars if you had chickens in the way, dogs in the way, people in the way, bicyclists in the way, slow moving carriages in the way…. So that's when the first motorists started getting really, really aggressive and skimming past people very quickly, running over chickens - to get the roads to themselves. So this aggression that we think of as a modern thing like “road rage” - that was there from the very first motorists, because they realize you can't go fast on these things if you don't get everybody else out of your way.
Perhaps it's because you're calling those first original bike “safety bikes” - but it does seem a hell of a lot safer to be on a bike back then, than to be in one of those initial cars. Especially for pedestrians. You have this new thing that's going really fast on the streets. I mean, that must have been complete chaos. Right?
It was. Mainly they were going out into boondocks, so that's where the cars are going.
Whenever you create a new technology, you have to test it to its limits.
So there's an awful lot of longer distance journeys, you know, like cross-America journeys on motor cars, just as you had 20-30 years previously. You had exactly the same kinds of technology testing with bicycles.
So we were traveling around the world on bicycles, and people were going fast on bicycles. In effect, it was a sales tool, so all these bicycle companies were sponsoring all of these technology improving events, just as 20-30 years later, motoring did exactly the same.
When both bicycles and motor cars became quite fast - then that led to lots of friction.
Bicyclists were actually the first people to start pushing pedestrians, chickens, dogs off the roads because they wanted to go fast on their contraptions.
And the first motorcars legally weren't allowed on roads, just as the first bicyclists weren’t legally allowed on roads because they were interlopers. And it took an enormous amount of pressure from these bolshie cyclists to actually get their machines legalized. And this is both in the US and in the UK, and pretty much similar in most other countries.
And the exact same things that they had to do - lobby politicians to get their vehicle legal on the roads - were then carbon copied by motorists - who then did almost exactly the same thing to get their vehicle legalized.
But again, it's as soon as you get legalized, you then want everybody else out of your way.
And transport tends to be like that - you want to dominate the road, so cyclists definitely wanted to dominate the roads, not share them with pedestrians, and motorists didn’t want to share roads with all of these other people who have been using roads for 1,000s of years.
So roads are now considered to be something for motorists, but of course, they weren't for that, they were for movement, but they're also for play. For market stalls.
You know, roads have been used for many, many things. And now there's mono use. And we've lost that multi-use aspect of roads, because roads were - as people think - built for cars.
And my book was to say, “No, roads weren’t built for cars.”
But that was the kind of the impetus to get everybody else off this form of infrastructure so you could go fast. Bicyclists were definitely as guilty of that as motorists later were.
Is this a conversation about human nature, or is it about biking as a form of transport? [laughs]
As well as young men.
So the first bicyclists were young men, the first motorists were young men. And you know, women driving and women owning cars and driving - that's a much later phenomena.
And so with bicycling, it was the safety bicycles when women started to ride bicycles. There were a few real stick outs who were riding these pennyfarthings, but they were so few. You know, you almost can count them on one hand. It was a male preserve.
And I think when something is a male preserve, it's that testosterone thing, it's that power thing, it's that aggression thing. They just wanted everyone else out of their way.
And, you know - I don't sugarcoat the history of bicycling. There were some real horrible people out there doing this, some nice people as well.
But there's an awful lot of racism in the early cycling clubs. So black people were excluded from cycling. There's a lot of white supremacy history, in early cycling.
So it's not all rosy - this history of bicyclists being “nice” people. A lot of them weren't nice people.
And this aggression on the roads was quite early. And that aggression, in effect a bicycle is quite relatively benign, but it’s only relative to what came after.
The motorcar was incredibly powerful and destructive. The bicycle had been a version of that. So you can actually see what was coming from all the conflict that bicyclists were having with pedestrians and carriage drivers in the 1880s, 1890s.
When you're looking at Road reforms back then, “let's make this road nicer.” I imagine that there was also a lot of pushback from communities just saying, “No, we don't even want these bikes on our roads.”
We can say a “road is a road.” But of course, you know, I think of my cousin who's a civil engineer of roads, who would be like, “no, there's so many different types of roads, and different types of pitches for roads, and angles.”
When did we start seeing roads become differentiated?
So you said that, there were “multi use roads.” And that's a place to play, a place to drive, a place to bike, place for your chickens to walk past, right? But then at what point did we start seeing bike paths come into the picture?
Okay - let’s go slightly backwards to the Good Roads Movement.
That's when the cyclists who created that, realized they had to get people on their side, mainly farmers, because these roads that they were cycling on were rural roads. And so they made huge, huge strides to get farmers on their side. The farmers didn't want these townies to be out on their rural roads.
So the cyclists really did a huge PR job on farmers, and they created these massive magazines, high circulation magazines at the time, which were praising farmers and using the mail - that was relatively new at that time - to send these magazines out, to get farmers to back, in effect, what the cyclists were demanding, and saying, “look, this is good for you, because it will get your goods to market, so you'll get your goods from your farm, to the train railhead, or to the town much easier if you've got a better road.”
So eventually the agriculture interests came on board with the cyclists, and they did work together, but it was the cyclist who recognized that you had to be nice to your constituent audience, that's going to be eventually able to pass laws.
Cyclists couldn't really pass laws. But farmers could. So farmers were an important lobby back then.
Then the first cycle paths - so we're used to seeing the cycle paths now as something that's separate from the road, and you have separate modes - you have the motoring, you have bicycles, and you have canals with boats on… this is a very Dutch thing, which you'll be very familiar with.
The first cycle paths weren't like that. The first cycle paths left the actual road part of the road to wrack and ruin. They thought, “we're going to improve just this strip for the cyclists.”
So the first cycle paths were actually, not to get rid of cyclists, so motorists could go past faster, they were to make bicycles faster.
So this is what's called the Side Path Movement in America. So the side paths were - some of them were quite long distance in America, there's a whole network across the whole US and an awful lot of them have been built on later roads later, on top of them, but there was this quite impressive network of cycle paths in the 1890s in America. And there’s organizations pushing for them. And some cyclists wanted to just go on the roads, and didn't wanna have a side path, and then the side path people said, “No, we should have side paths, and improve these.”
So there was this conflict between cycling groups and cyclists at the time - “Where do we put bicyclists?” And then motoring came along, and cyclists in large part flopped off and went off there. And then it became moot, because cars came along, and were just going so fast that cyclists then had to have side paths in order to have anywhere to ride.
So the history of bike paths isn't separation. It's improvement for the bikes, and bicyclists. It then became something of self preservation later on.
That’s fascinating.
Staying on this urban planning route - I’m just grateful that you've traced the history in this way - at that point, we're still kind of in the reign of the car, so to speak. And I would say that in many places, we're still in that, right?
We are talking a lot about the early 1910s, 1920s. At that point, you have wars coming in, you have cars - massive infrastructure that's for cars, planes.
You know, it seems like we've been kind of in the era of the car since... or is that just an assumption that's not based in fact?
If you actually look at numbers, for instance, and this seems very counterintuitive, but the number of horses actually went up before the Second World War.
In towns, to get anywhere in towns, you then needed some form of transport to take the goods to the train station.
So railway companies had huge amounts of horses.
And this is right the way through until the 1930s - there was a huge amount of horse traffic around. And again, we tend to forget how ubiquitous horses were, and how many, many, many millions of horses were in towns and cities to power that transport.
And it was only in a slow transformation that motorcars took over. So it wasn't, you know, “first Ford Motor Vehicle 1913, right, everything then transformed overnight.” It took a good few years before we would consider the rain of the car.
So it absolutely wasn't an overnight phenomenon, at all. It might seem that way from when you look at photographs and cinema reels. But if you look at the actual statistics, there are a huge number of horses actually doing the grunt work before motorcars actually really took over. So it was pretty much certainly well after the 1930s, before motoring really started for want of a better expression, accelerating.
So at that point, we had cities and towns that could support bikes, right? And then we have these cars come in. Obviously there's a lot of political pushback.
But you know - there were some cities, I imagine, that were really good for bikes, and some that were just being built.
At what point do we start seeing every place transform from a place where you could bike safely, relatively, to totally not at all? Is that congruent with the rise of the automobile?
There are some cities even today where it's really easy to bike around, right? And then there are others where you're just like, “Nope, I do not want to die.”
Yeah, yeah, I'll give you that. [laughs]
The Netherlands is a good example, because it was an agricultural society. It didn't industrialize until much later than the US and the UK.
Because it was an agrarian society for much longer, they didn't develop the motoring industry. There's not like one truck company there. There are no Ford’s in Amsterdam. There's no massive car companies in the Netherlands - as in domestic manufacturing.
So because we didn't have this huge, huge industry that later became huge, it can develop in different ways.
So for all sorts of different reasons, the Netherlands became the leading bicycle kingdom, but it was like that by about 1910.
Virtually everywhere else around the world - bicycling was on an absolute downward slope to extinction. And it was the opposite curve in the Netherlands.
You often find a common trope on social media of “it was the 1970s, when cycling was transformed in the Netherlands, because of the OPEC oil crisis” - all of these different things. In fact, it's much, much earlier.
So by 1910, the Netherlands is already the world's leading cycling nation. And from that date, it starts building bike paths. And - this is this absolute red rag to a bull in many countries - but the cyclists paid for the bike path because there was a bicycle taxation in the 1920s in the Netherlands, and shock horror, cyclists actually paid for the roads for motorists too in the Netherlands.
Because there were so many cyclists in the Netherlands, the Dutch government taxed cyclists, and that was the way they would actually raise money for the roads.
So the Dutch cyclists, yes, paid for their wonderful bike paths, that grew up into this unbelievable world class network, but they also paid for the first roads too.
So they were absolutely sowing the seeds of their own destruction in many ways - in that motoring took off. And motoring is huge in the Netherlands. And yes, cycling is also huge.
But it's all due to this separation of modes - which is a Dutch thing.
And if you look at the history of the Rijkswaterstaat, which is the Dutch Infrastructure Ministry that goes back to the 1700s (you know most other infrastructure, roads departments are very, very recent, in terms of the UK Department of Transport, [you’re looking at] early 1900s, 1920s).
So the Dutch have been separating modes of transport since the late 1700s.
So you've got examples of a road for horses, a road for pedestrians, a road for carriages, then you have the canal... it was this cultural separation of modes mentality, which then enabled the first bike paths to be also then put in.
But you've got hundreds of years of history in effect, behind the Netherlands actually being able to develop its own bicycle network.
So this 1970s thing - yes, the network probably doubled. And there's an awful lot more cycleways put in, but if we actually look at those statistics - cycling didn't double. All it actually did was stabilize cycling at that level, at the time. But it was already incredibly high.
If you look at the statistics of some Dutch cities - there was this sort of 90% bicycle modal share. That's just totally freaky. Even today, that would be freaky.
Dutch cities, generally, even in the most bicycle-friendly cities, it tends to be the highest at about 50%.
So you had an enormous amount of bicycle use in the Netherlands starting roughly in 1910.
And so whenever you think “cycling's modal share in the Netherlands, it's amazing, it’s at about 45%.”
Yeah, that's because it started at 90%.
That's why the modal share is so high in the Netherlands, because it started out so high.
It’s been coming down, it has stabilized, but it has been coming down compared to 1920s, 1930s.
So the golden days for Dutch cycling, aren't today really, they were back in the 1920s.
That's when huge, huge bicycle use was going on.
And then yes, it’s kept it, which is amazing. And most other countries lost that bicycle use.
So yesterday I was in Hull, in northern England. And I'm looking at newspaper reports - I can actually see them on my computer screen here now - which said the newspapers of the day are reporting in 1950 that Hull has a 40% bicycle modal share.
So again - lots of cities had this huge amount of cycling going on. But then it's just dropped off.
And the whole modal share is about 10%, which is still three to four times higher than anywhere else in the UK.
But it's that level because they have 40-50% 60-70 years ago, and it's the same for the Netherlands. Their high bicycle modal share today is because they had stellar, world-class modal share in the 1920s.
What are some other bright lights - places around the world where you see high modal share, or even perhaps even high potential in other cities where biking is celebrated and understood to be the... best form of transportation?
China became the bicycle kingdom for a while. It didn’t last long, unfortunately. There was this directive that [everyone] had to get on a bicycle. So that's why China became this bicycling kingdom. Recently in the last 10 years, they've installed a whole lot of bicycle paths. So Cycling is actually increasing in Chinese cities, again.
Almost everywhere, I think is now waking up to the fact that you can't have cities with cars in them. It's pretty much incompatible with urban living.
So I had a story on Forbes yesterday on Paris. Paris is going great guns on in effect removing cars from its city center.
So as a resident, you can have your car. As a tradesperson you can drive through in your van, but it's the through traffic that's going to be removed.
And when you analyze the traffic patterns, it's virtually 80% through traffic, people who are not stopping, in that suburb, they're just driving through, which is incredibly destructive to that suburb.
So Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, and now in her second term, the socialist mayor of Paris, is being relatively radical. She is in effect, partially pedestrianizing a huge amount of this, what we consider the heart of Paris.
It’s moves like that, that then spur other cities.
In the UK, we've got London, where we put some amazing bicycle highways in about 10 years ago now in front of Parliament and all sorts. That, is slow, but that is leading other cities in the UK to think, “we can do that too.”
And slowly but surely, we're getting some really quite decent cycleways put in, in British cities.
So everyone's looking at the Netherlands as this exemplar of cycling. And many Dutch academics who specialize in this field will actually say, “Well, actually, the Netherlands is falling behind.”
Because it considers itself to be a cycling nation, and considers everything to be perfect there, they're actually not innovating. They stopped innovating. Other cities are going to overtake.
In the next 20 to 30 years, you perhaps you'll see other cities actually have a higher modal share for cycling than Amsterdam - which seems quite shocking. But then again, if you want people to move in your city, then you need excellent public transport. You need excellent places for people to walk, and you need places for people to bicycle. And a large four wheel vehicle carrying one person often, is just unsustainable on so many levels.
Nevermind saving the planet, which is absolutely, obviously, one reason we need to be getting rid of cars in cities, but just the heft. The size. You can't get that many of them in a city without them gumming up. Whereas you can fit an enormous amount of bicycles in a city.
You can get bicycle traffic jams at midnight in the Netherlands, of course, as you will know.
They do tend to flock like birds - cyclists are able to move around each other because it's more human scale speed in effect.
So you don't get the same kind of blockages that you get when you're in a car. Cars do not flock and merge, and all these different things. They’re pretty much stuck in their little territory and they can't move, whereas bicyclists can move.
So cities are going to have to have - if they want to move in the future - really good underground rail systems. really good overground buses, and really good cycleways threading throughout the whole city.
And Amsterdam will actually have to up its game if it wants to be as good as certain other cities, who are chomping at the bit to do an Amsterdam, and probably even do better than Amsterdam.
What are some of the most kind of “low hanging fruit” things that we can do to help speed along bike safe infrastructure in our cities today?
That is the question - but the reason why I'm asking it is that, you know, biking in New York City, where I lived for 12 years, is incredibly different from biking here [in Amsterdam].
I am so much more nervous about getting doored in New York than I am here. So what are some of the low hanging fruit things that we can do to kind of help speed up that process in cities where it's just harder to envision this?
Don’t think fruit. Think vegetables. Carrots and sticks.
So you need carrots -- so the cycleways, subsidizing electric cargo bikes - they’re the carrots.
But it's the stick part of that element. That's the most important thing. So you've got to have enormous great sticks to get people out of cars. Because I don’t think people are going to do it out of their own volition.
Cars are very comfortable. Cars are wonderful. Cars are fantastic, when you're in the early 1900s and there's only one of them. Cars are brilliant. It's when you've got 25 million of them, you know, trying to fit into a space and where really, you can only fit a few - that's when motoring doesn't become quite such a good utility.
But because it's so comfortable, and because of driverless cars potentially - people are gonna just stay in their cars but have four hour trips where it would’ve taken 40 minutes before, because you won’t have to drive you can just sit there on your iPhone, etc. etc.
We're going to have to have sticks to get people, to make people get out of their cars.
That’s raising gas prices. Raising fuel taxation. Road pricing. It's all of these things that we know deflate demand.
And then yes, you have the alternatives. And you’ve got to probably use all of that money that your hitting motorists with and invest it in other forms of transport.
So the carrots are still going to be really important. And you can fund them from the big fat sticks.
And by investing in other forms of transport - you can then free up your city. And most cities will be much, much nicer. As we as we saw it in lockdowns -- how nice it was to actually hear birds. People in Manhattan can hear birdsong for the first time ever.
I think people are waking up. We lose an enormous amount by having unrestricted motorcar use in our cities. Motor cars are great for going cross country, running long distances. They're absolutely not great for doing one mile, two miles across the central business district, or even a suburb is an even worse way of getting across.
I think we are waking up to it.
Many governments are recognizing that,and it's bringing people along with them that is going to be so hard. And I recognize that's going to be difficult. But at the end of the day, if you don't do this - you've got gridlock in the future, you've got planetary destruction in the future. So politicians have really got to start telling people that we've got to reduce the amount of motoring.
And that is gonna be such a bitter pill. But it really is one of the only ways we've got to rescue the urban fabric and dramatically the planet - because transport, road transport is a huge component part of the emissions that we've got.
Remove the engine, okay, that removes the emissions part - electric motor instead. But it doesn't solve congestion.
So electric cars are not a panacea in shape or form. We've got to wean ourselves off the automobile, whether it's an autonomous automobile, whether it's an electric powered automobile - whatever. We've got to get away from relying on motor cars for so many of our trips. Keep them for what they're good for - long distance, city to city.
For every other urban journey, we should be using other methods, than using a motorcar.
Hear hear. [laughs]
The bike is a technology. From the beginning this has been technology, no?
What I've learned from you is that from bikes, we have the car technology, we have plane technology, right? There's so much that came from bikes - those pneumatic tires, ball bearings, etc.
What can we expect when we're talking about the innovation of today's bikes into the future? I'm thinking ebikes - but what else are we seeing right now in terms of how this tool that served us forever could also kind of move into the future with us?
One of the beauties of the bicycle, certainly one of the reasons it took off and has stayed with us, is its simplicity.
And yes, I’ve had electric bikes, I do have electric bikes in my garage. Electric bikes are fantastic.
But at the end of the day - the pedal powered, human powered bicycle is such an amazing tool.
Electric power is a good adjunct to that. And many many futurologists just think, “well, the pedal powered bicycle is going to fade away into history as electric power takes over.”
And probably when - you know a lot of electric bikes we see today, you can tell they're an electric bike - big fat batteries on the back end - but many of the modern ones, the newer ones coming out, you can hardly tell they're electric bikes. And you just get this propulsion addition to your human propulsion, and that will get you along.
That technology absolutely has a fantastic place. But at the same time the pedal powered, human powered bicycle is just so incredibly efficient. And it’s powered by and is powered by cornflakes, powered by bananas, and cake. It’s powered by food. And it's that simplicity that I think has enabled it to last so long and will outlast the automobile.
I am very biased here, because that's where I come from. But the bicycle is such an incredible invention, introduction.
And it's so simple, and yet can multiply human power so effectively.
You know, there's famously, in Scientific American in 1973, I think it was, there's a guy, a Professor called Wilson, who put all the different condors, and animals, and cheetahs, and then he plotted the train, and aeroplane, and then the bicycle was actually the most efficient form of locomotion in everything.
Pound for pound, you can’t get any more efficient than a human on a bicycle.
And because that sheer efficiency is both scientifically proven - and such good fun! That's the amazing thing, we've got this technology that is both an unbelievably fantastic utility, yet it is such good fun at exactly the same time.
So bicycling technology will improve. But you know, we came into this conversation talking about the safety bicycle. That safety bicycle hasn't changed that much. We’ll change materials, we’ll have carbon fibers maybe, your lightest steels, and all sorts of technologies that are incremental -- not massively different. Gears, and electronic gears, all these different things, but they're actually not that big of a jump.
The 1884 bicycle was a perfect innovation. It has lasted the test of time, and it will outlast many other forms of more complex technology.
Because it's so incredibly efficient. And so incredibly simple.
So according to you, the future looks like an urban landscape wherein we are walking, we're taking incredibly fast trains, and we're biking? Is it basically like “goodbye car, we thought you were great! Moving forward!”
Do you really believe that they we’re just gonna kind of say “goodbye cars,” apart from those long distances?
There’s innovation on the streets right now.
If you look on the bike paths, you know, it's no longer just bikes. You've got scooters, you've got unicycle electric platform skateboards, you’ve got all sorts of different forms of transport being innovated.
Right now some of this is for money. So the share scooters, capitalists coming in trying to make money from this. But at the end of the day, the bicycle is just so incredibly efficient, and so incredibly simple. I think it will outlast many of these other innovations that we are seeing.
It's going to be a multi modal, multi contraption future.
So I think we shouldn't maybe think of bike lanes anymore, we should maybe think of them as mobility lanes. Because yes, there are going to be different forms of transport around. But many times in the history of bicycle, people have assumed it would wither and die. It has not withered and died. There are more bicycles made now than cars, for instance.
The bicycle is an incredible, incredible machine. And we tend to forget how incredible it is. You can balance on this thing. And you can do at least at minimum four times faster than you can walk. And that's just an ordinary person. You can get a faster bike, a fitter person, better surfaces - you can travel enormous distances at great speed if you have to, on this incredible invention, the bicycle.
We’re always going to have bicycles. There are going to be different kinds of bicycles - electric bikes, as well as cargo bikes, all sorts of different stuff. And then these other modes of transport will be joining in. But I think because of their simplicity and because of the just the sheer, unbelievable excellence of that 1880s design means the bicycle I think will remain incredibly dominant. It really is something that, for a five mile, 10 mile journey, is just an incredible tool. •
By Jenna Matecki
Read Carlton Reid’s books:
Bike Boom
The Unexpected Resurgence of Cycling
https://islandpress.org/books/bike-boom
Roads Were Not Built for Cars
How cyclists were the first to push for good roads & became the pioneers of motoring
https://islandpress.org/books/roads-w...
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