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
bicycles--where they belong, how they should be ridden, how cities
should or should not accommodate them--have 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 bicycle's rise and fall in
the late nineteenth century. In the 1890s, 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 today's car-centric cities--and ended the prospect of a true
American cycling city ever being built.
