Roads Not Built For Cars

Hanover Street in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, originally built for horses and carts. Photograph: Carlton Reid

Definitely our cup of tea:

Even the BBC has called me it, so it must be true. Back in 2011 when I wrote this piece for the Guardian I was merely a journo-with-a-book-idea; now I’m a historian. Two years ago on this very blog I wrote:

Many motorists assume that roads were built for them. In fact, cars are the johnny-come-latelies of highways.

I went on to explain a little bit more about my highway history revisionism.

At the time I didn’t have a book title. I do now. The title – Roads Were Not Built For Cars – popped into my head, naturally enough, when I was cycling. A bunch of cars were parked on the pavement and a bunch more were clogging up the road ahead. “It’s not as though roads were even built for cars,” I mused, and I’m pretty sure my eyebrows must have been knotted and my lips pursed as I was thinking this.

Rewind. I used a couple of words that may need a little explaining. The first is pavement. As my book is about American highway history as well as British, I’ve trained myself to use pavement in its technical sense. When Americans – and British road engineers – talk about pavement, they mean the road, not the, er, sidewalk. Pavement is a colloquialism. The correct, legal term is footway. Mind you, in everyday speech, I continue to use pavement, especially when confusing Americans: “That’s right, in England, bicycles aren’t allowed on the pavement.”

The second word I’d like to draw attention to is revisionism. This isn’t used pejoratively; revisionism is history. Pulitzer Prize winning historian James McPherson, writing for the American Historical Association, said this of revisionism:

There is no single, eternal, and immutable ‘truth’ about past events and their meaning. The unending quest of historians for understanding the past – that is, ‘revisionism’ – is what makes history vital and meaningful.

Roads Were Not Built For Cars is therefore a proudly revisionist work, and, like all history, really, it’s revisionism with an agenda. The agenda is plain: I want motorists to think before they say or think, “Get off the road, roads are for cars.” Not all do, of course, but there’s enough out there to make life difficult for cyclists. The belief that roads were made for motorists is almost as old as motoring.