Begin Your Journey With The Cycling City: Bicycles And Urban America In The 1890s Outlined By Evan Friss Provided As Electronic Format
and dense but sometimes dry history about rise and fall of bicycling in the US, If you are interested in history and bicycles another interesting book is sitelinkBicycle in Wartime, pretty dense, pretty dry. wanted more out of the last few chapters about cycling for reform and the others that accompany the pattern, overall, good read. An edited version of this review appeared in American History magazine,
By Daniel de Visé
In the final decade of the nineteenth century, the bicycle reshaped the American city, Herds of cyclists vied with streetcars and horses for supremacy, A forceful bicycle lobby compelled local governments to pave roads and pass traffic laws, bringing order to the findesiècle chaos of urban transit.
For a brief time, urban Americans embraced the bicycle as their preferred vehicle and cycling as their favorite sport, At the peak of the craze, fifty cycling magazines circulated, Madison Square Garden housed a cycling academy, and Chicago hosted four hundred bicycle shops.
And then, as abruptly as a punctured tire, the bicycle boom went bust, Production dwindled from one million bicycles into onequarter million in, Membership in the League of American Wheelmen plummeted from,into,in,
In The Cycling City, historian Evan Friss reveals the crucial role of bicycles and bicyclists in shaping the modern city, At the dawn of the bicycle era, anarchy ruled the streets, A powerful cycling lobby drove New York into enact the nations first comprehensive traffic rules, The “wheelmans vote” drove civic leaders in New York, Philadelphia and Chicago to pave thousands of miles of roads,
The bicycle arrived at a time when most American could journey no farther than their feet would carry them, Bicycles
brought liberation and escape: Now, an urbanite could pedal several miles to work and ride out to the country on weekends.
New York and Chicago “led the way in creating cyclingrelated infrastructure,” Friss writes, anticipating a new era of bicyclefriendly urban planning in Paris and London and Amsterdam.
Then, just after the turn of the century, bicycles vanished from American streets,
A hundred years later, an American cycling revival is underway, In Europe, though, bicycles never went away, One reason is the density and inherent bicyclefriendliness of ancient European cities, But Friss points to another factor, one that speaks volumes about the fundamental frivolity of American consumerism, Europeans purchased bicycles for utility, Americans seized on the twowheeler mostly for sport, Once the fad had passed and the bicycles were gone, Americas city planners bowed to
the ascendant automobile,
The Cycling City takes a breezy ride through a forgotten chapter of Americas urban history,
Daniel de Visé is author of The Comeback: Greg LeMond, the True King of American Cycling, and a Legendary Tour de France.
Glad to read it and it was quite interesting, a,. Would have liked a bit more clarification in some areas when the author made statements, but overall a good read, Lots and lots and lots of detail in a modestsized book, ONLY because I enjoy bike riding, Time And Again, and The Last Days Of Night was I willing to persevere with this book.
I was a little surprised with there being no mention of the Wright brothers, however glancing, DEFINITELY worth seeing if it appeals, The listing of other titles in the Historical Studies of Urban America is bonus extra information, Cycling has experienced a renaissance in the United States, as cities around the country promote the bicycle as an alternative means of transportation.
In the process, debates about the nature of bicycleswhere they belong, how they should be ridden, how cities should or should not accommodate themhave played out in the media, on city streets, and in city halls.
Very few people recognize, however, that these questions are more than a century old,
The Cycling City is a sharp history of the bicycles rise and fall in the late nineteenth century.
In thes, American cities were home to more cyclists, more cycling infrastructure, more bicycle friendly legislation, and a richer cycling culture than anywhere else in the world.
Evan Friss unearths the hidden history of the cycling city, demonstrating that diverse groups of cyclists managed to remap cities with new roads, paths, and laws, challenge social conventions, and even dream up a new urban ideal inspired by the bicycle.
When cities were chaotic and filthy, bicycle advocates imagined an improved landscape in which pollution was negligible, transportation was silent and rapid, leisure spaces were democratic, and the divisions between city and country were blurred.
Friss argues that when the utopian vision of a cycling city faded by the turn of the century, its death paved the way for todays carcentric citiesand ended the prospect of a true American cycling city ever being built.
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