Hidden alongside some otherwise unremarkable roadways across the United Kingdom are bicycle highways that today’s riders would envy. At CityLab, Feargus O’Sullivan reveals the research currently being conducted into these separate bike highways, all of which were built in the 1930s.
As historian Carlton Reid conducted research for a new book, he realized that a network of decades-old bicycle lanes existed along streets of many UK cities, many of which having since been adapted to parking, ignored, or left to be reclaimed by nature.
“In fact, as Reid discovered, Britain went through something of a cycle lane boom in the late 1930s. Between 1937 and 1940, Britain’s government demanded that any state-funded scheme to build an arterial road must also include a 9-foot-wide cycle track running the length of the road.
“… This enlightened official approach chimed with the times. Cycling was still a vital means of transit in a country where car ownership only became common in the late 1950s. Many of the new, broader roads that would ultimately take the burden of Britain’s car boom were still being planned and constructed between the wars. The cycle network grew up as part of this new road network, rather than by scraping existing lane space away from motor vehicles.”
The eventual loss of the lanes to time and memory, explains O’Sullivan, likely came about due to a lack of use, as the bike lanes had to compete with the adjacent traffic lanes, and due to Britain’s recovery in the postwar era. (See Reid’s Kickstarter video for images of some of the current conditions of the lanes.)
Though the shift from transit, walking, and bicycling toward personal automobiles happened differently in the United States and the United Kingdom, historic bike infrastructure shows how bicycling investments are far from a new idea for cities and towns. In the late 1880s, the Good Roads Movement in the U.S. was a key proponent for paving and expanding country road infrastructure to support the spread of bicycling.
And other cities had expanded dedicated bicycling infrastructure around that time, too, to support the mode. In Southern California, for example, a turn-of-the-century “California Cycleway” connected Los Angeles to the city of Pasadena, nine miles away.
As historian Peter Norton has explained on the Mobility Lab blog before, a return to “understanding our multimodal past” can play a key role in reshaping our transportation choices of today.
Photo: A modern “cycle super highway” in London, not dissimilar to the ones discovered by Reid (J Mark Dodds, Flickr, Creative Commons).