Historian and advocate James Longhurst is optimistic that the current bike boom will have meaningful impacts.
Bicyclists often find themselves fighting for a narrow strip of pavement between a row of parked cars and a lane or two of auto traffic. And even that is often ceded to them only grudgingly by government and by motorists.
It wasn’t always like this. In fact, as James Longhurst explains in his new book, Bike Battles: A History of Sharing the American Road, the road is a commons that long predates cars, bikes or even horse-drawn vehicles. Our concept of the open road and how to use it keeps evolving with new technologies and there is no telling what will come next.
Longhurst is a professor at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse and an historian of urban and environmental policy. But his book, while academically rigorous, is easily accessible to the general public. In fact, I found it a page-turner as would any one who rides a bike on the streets of any American city or rural place.
Longhurst will be in Madison Tuesday to read from and answer questions about his book at noon at the Wisconsin Historical Museum and at 6:30 p.m. at the Sun Prairie Public Library.
I asked Longhurst why he chose this topic from the infinite number of things he could have written about. He told me that as an urban historian he was thinking about these issues as he rode his bike through the streets of Pittsburgh when he was studying there. He remains an avid cyclist today.
“Cities are designed around the transportation modes of the time. History helps us understand the problems we’re facing right now,” Longhurst said. “We can use history as a tool to make good decisions.”
As I read the book it occurred to me that it would be good if every state legislator who voted in the last state budget to repeal Wisconsin’s Complete Streets law - which required that bicyclists and pedestrians be taken into account whenever a road was built or reconstructed using federal or state funds - would read it with that in mind. The history of the road tells us that it was not conceived for cars alone. Instead, the road has always been a place where people congregated both to move along it toward destinations but also to build and to live alongside it. Streets are as much about cafes as they are about cartage.
And, in fact, bicyclists played a key role in the “good roads” movement of the late 19th Century even before cars had made their appearance in any great numbers. Cycling activists of the time literally paved the way for the higher quality roads that later benefited motor vehicles and yet America pretty much forgot the bike as soon as the automobile came on the scene in a big way.
The nadir of the bike movement may have come in the mid-20th Century when the once powerful League of American Wheelman disbanded and newly written uniform manuals for road building and signage didn’t even take bicycles into account. By the 1950s the bicycle was viewed almost exclusively as a child’s toy, it’s only serious use being the education of future drivers about the rules of the road.
Longhurst chronicles actions at the federal, state and local government levels, among bike activists and the industry. He reveals that through much of the dark periods in American cycling history it was the industry that kept the flame alive, often trying, as industries do, to expand their market back into the realm of adults.
Longhurst traces the current bike renaissance to the 1970s when a combination of events, most notably the OPEC oil embargoes and the nascent environmental movement, conspired to bring the bike back.
An accomplished academic, Longhurst also describes himself as a bike advocate. So, given his deep knowledge of history and his personal interest in cycling I thought it was fair to ask a historian to project into the future.
He was surprisingly optimistic. “The current bike boom is really different from earlier ones,” Longhurst said. “This time it’s much better organized, which makes this bike movement more meaningful and effective than those in the past.”
Longhurst also sees growing municipal budget pressures colliding with the huge costs of serving automobiles as another reason for the continuing surge in cycling. “Can an autocentric city afford to survive?” Longhurst asked. “I don’t think so.”
