The United States differs from other developed nations in the extent to which its national bicycle transportation policy relies on the use of unmodified roadways, with cyclists obeying the same traffic regulations as motor vehicles. This policy--known as "vehicular cycling"--evolved between 1969, when the "10-speed boom" saw a sharp increase in adult bicycling, and 1991, when the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials adopted an official policy that on-road bikeways were not desirable. This policy resulted from a growing realization by highway engineers and experienced club cyclists that they had parallel interests: the cyclists preferred to ride on highways, because most bikeways were not designed for high speeds and pack riding; and the highway engineers did not want to divert funding from roadways to construct bikeways. Using contemporary magazine articles, government reports, and archival material from industry lobbying groups and national cycling organizations, this book tells the story of how America became a nation of bicyclists without bikeways.

NACTO's Urban Bikeway Design Guide quickly emerged as the preeminent resource for designing safe, protected bikeways in cities across the United States. It has been completely re-designed with an even more accessible layout. The Guide offers updated graphic profiles for all of its bicycle facilities, a subsection on bicycle boulevard planning and design, and a survey of materials used for green color in bikeways. The Guide continues to build upon the fast-changing state of the practice at the local level. It responds to and accelerates innovative street design and practice around the nation.

Culberson set his sights on riding Amigo, his BMW R80 G/S, the entire length of the Pan American Highway-including the Darien Gap, a feat never before accomplished by a motorcyclist. He suffers failure before meeting success, encountering killer bees, arrest by a corrupt law officer, cycling injuries, and back-breaking labour to get himself ......

As Evan Friss shows in his mordant history of urban bicycling in the late nineteenth century, the bicycle has long told us much about cities and their residents. In a time when American cities were chaotic, polluted, and socially and culturally impenetrable, the bicycle inspired a vision of an improved city in which pollution was negligible, transport was noiseless and rapid, leisure spaces were democratic, and the divisions between city and country blurred. Friss focuses not on the technology of the bicycle but on the urbanisms that bicycling engendered. Bicycles altered the look and feel of cities and their streets, enhanced mobility, fueled leisure and recreation, promoted good health, and shrank urban spaces as part of a larger transformation that altered the city and the lives of its inhabitants, even as the bicycle's own popularity fell, not to rise again for a century.

The Invisible Bicycle brings together different insights into the social, cultural and economic history of the bicycle and cycling in historical eras of ubiquitous bicycle use that have remained relatively invisible in bicycle history. It revisits the typical timeline of cycling’s decline in the 1950s and 1960s and the renaissance beginning in the 1970s by bringing forth the large national and local variations, varying uses and images of the bicycle, and different bicycle cultures as well as their historical background and motivations. To understand the role, possibilities and challenges of the bicycle today, it is necessary to know the history that has formed them. Therefore The Invisible Bicycle is recommended also to present-day practitioners and planners of bicycle mobility. Contributors are: Peter Cox, Martin Emanuel, Tiina Männistö-Funk, Timo Myllyntaus, Nicholas Oddy, Harry Oosterhuis, William Steele, Manuel Stoffers, Sue-Yen Tjong Tjin Tai, Frank Veraart.

Americans have been riding bikes for more than a century now. So why are most American cities still so ill-prepared to handle cyclists? James Longhurst, a historian and avid cyclist, tackles that question by tracing the contentious debates between American bike riders, motorists, and pedestrians over the shared road. Bike Battles explores the different ways that Americans have thought about the bicycle through popular songs, merit badge pamphlets, advertising, films, newspapers and sitcoms. Those associations shaped the actions of government and the courts when they intervened in bike policy through lawsuits, traffic control, road building, taxation, rationing, import tariffs, safety education and bike lanes from the 1870s to the 1970s. Today, cycling in American urban centers remains a challenge as city planners, political pundits, and residents continue to argue over bike lanes, bike-share programs, law enforcement, sustainability, and public safety. Combining fascinating new research from a wide range of sources with a true passion for the topic, Longhurst shows us that these battles are nothing new; in fact they’re simply a continuation of the original battle over who is - and isn’t - welcome on our roads. Watch the trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNleJ0tDvqg

Subways and yellow taxis may be the icons of New York transportation, but it is the bicycle that has the longest claim to New York’s streets: two hundred years and counting. Never has it taken to the streets without controversy: 1819 was the year of the city’s first bicycle and also its first bicycle ban. Debates around the bicycle’s place in city life have been so persistent not just because of its many uses—recreation, sport, transportation, business—but because of changing conceptions of who cyclists are. In On Bicycles, Evan Friss traces the colorful and fraught history of cycling in New York City. He uncovers the bicycle’s place in the city over time, showing how it has served as a mirror of the city’s changing social, economic, infrastructural, and cultural politics since it first appeared. It has been central, as when horse-drawn carriages shared the road with bicycle lanes in the 1890s; peripheral, when Robert Moses’s car-centric vision made room for bicycles only as recreation; and aggressively marginalized, when Ed Koch’s battle against bike messengers culminated in the short-lived 1987 Midtown Bike Ban. On Bicycles illuminates how the city as we know it today—veined with over a thousand miles of bicycle lanes—reflects a fitful journey powered, and opposed, by New York City’s people and its politics.