How Bicyclists Paved the Way for Modern Highways

For over a century, automobile advertising has sold Americans a specific dream: the open road, the wind, the unencumbered self. Freedom. That promise, it turns out, was borrowed, and it was borrowed from bicycling.

The first vehicle to deliver that sense of freedom was the bicycle, says Carlton Reid, a cycling journalist and historian whose book Roads Were Not Built for Cars traces the overlooked origins of America’s highway system. Before cars, before timetables-be-damned road trips, the bicycle was the first machine that let ordinary people go where they wanted, when they wanted, under their own power. No rail schedule, no horse to feed. Just themselves and the road. The winged logo of the League of American Wheelmen, the cycling organization that helped reshape American infrastructure in the 19th century, wasn’t decorative. It meant exactly what it looked like: flight.

When automobiles eventually promised this same unencumbered movement, much of the infrastructure they required already existed. Between 1880 and 1900, the Good Roads Movement, led by an unlikely coalition of urban cyclists and rural postal workers, overhauled the country’s abysmal dirt paths into a coordinated network of paved streets. By the time motorists claimed the movement as their own, cyclists had already established the Office of Road Inquiry and laid important legislative groundwork for the National Highway System we use today.

But as Reid notes, those highways carried the seeds of their own gridlock: “Cars are only useful when there’s a few of them. When there are millions and millions of them, their utility shrinks.” The open road, it turns out, was never meant for everyone.

“A road in the 19th century meant basically a dirt road,” says Peter Norton, a transportation historian and associate professor at the University of Virginia. “And of course, if the weather was wet, it meant a mud road.” Long-distance travel relied on railroads, rivers and canals. Getting between destinations, though, meant slogging through whatever the weather had left behind.

A group of wealthy men who loved riding their high-wheel bicycles, commonly known as penny-farthings, decided they were tired of the mud. That set the country on course to the paved highways we drive today.

The cyclists who began agitating for better infrastructure in the 1870s and 1880s were not everyday commuters, they were elites. Bicycles in the early years cost upward of $300, several times a tradesman’s weekly wages, and the eye-catching penny-farthing bicycle, with its chest-high front wheel and knee-high rear, was essentially a status symbol with spokes. Riding one meant perching several feet off the ground with almost no way to brake quickly. A stray rut or stone could send a rider pitching headfirst over the handlebars in what cyclists of the era called a “header.” It required quite a bit of nerve and the luxury of leisure, qualities concentrated among wealthy, athletic young men.

They organized quickly, and in 1880, a coalition of bicycle clubs gathered in Newport, Rhode Island, forming the League of American Wheelmen, known today as the League of American Bicyclists, to lobby for safer, smoother roads.

“The three richest people in American society at the time,...the Rockefellers of this world, were members of the League of American Wheelmen,” Reid says. “They wanted to have nice places to ride their bicycles.”

Reid is careful to note that while their motivations were self-interested, they also recognized that improved roads would benefit farmers, tradesmen and others. The impact would be broadly transformative. Building coalitions would be key. As it turned out, wanting good roads for cycling alone wasn’t a persuasive public argument.

The cyclists’ most important ally turned out to be the U.S. Post Office Department, which in 1896 launched Rural Free Delivery in Charles Town, Halltown and Uvilla in West Virginia, bringing mail directly to farmhouse doors for the first time. The catch: Home delivery was only guaranteed on passable roads. That gave rural Americans a powerful reason to join the paving cause.

“Now, you have a nice coalition that really gets the road paving going,” Norton says. “The bicyclists were relatively well-to-do, urban people typically, and the rural free delivery people were just the opposite.” To win over skeptical farmers, League of American Wheelmen official Isaac B. Potter argued that bad roads were a drain on the wallet, forcing farmers to own and feed 2 million more horses than they would actually need if the roads were smooth. The League even sold “breast aprons” or protective bibs for horses stamped with the slogan: “I WANT GOOD ROADS.”

Just like public education, food and drug safety, or workplace conditions at the time, the idea that the federal government had any business paying for roads was not merely unpopular, but it was considered constitutionally dubious. Roads were a local matter. The notion of national funding for road construction was, as Reid put it, “totally alien.”

The cyclists didn’t just lobby, they published. Albert Pope, a Bostonian-turned–Hartford, Connecticut, businessman and brevet lieutenant-colonel in the Union Army, was the dominant American bicycle manufacturer. Pope had seen firsthand during the Civil War how impassable roads hampered troop movements and supply lines, and he carried that lesson into peacetime.

When he turned his attention to cycling infrastructure, he framed good roads not only as a convenience for riders but also as a matter of national preparedness. Pope funded a monthly magazine called Good Roads, which was distributed not to cycling enthusiasts but to politicians, farmers and road surveyors. It included technical guidance on how to build better roads, how France did so, how to construct better bridges and more.

“It wasn’t just a bunch of people saying, we need this,” Reid says. “It was and here’s how to do it.”

Pope also organized what became one of the most striking lobbying artifacts in American history. In 1892, he printed thousands of copies of a “monster” petition demanding that Congress create a federal office to promote road construction knowledge, then enlisted cyclists to collect signatures across the country. The result was a scroll bearing 150,000 names, including that of U.S. Chief Justice Melville Fuller, displayed on a pair of hand-cranked oak spools standing 5 feet 7 inches tall and deliberately designed to resemble bicycle wheels. Pope delivered the petition to the U.S. Capitol in 1893.

“If you go to the National Archives...they’ve got to literally wheel it out,” Reid says. “It’s this massive thing that is spooled onto these big wooden wheels.”

That same year, Congress authorized the Office of Road Inquiry, a two-person fact-finding operation that was a direct precursor to the Federal Highway Administration. As these routes improved, cyclists became some of the primary explorers of the American countryside. Because state maps of the time rarely showed local roads, the wheelmen were the ones who finally mapped the rural landscape and installed signposts to guide travelers.

The push for better roads also sparked experimentation with what those roads could be made of. Cyclists, unable to wait for government action, sometimes funded their own paths in places like upstate New York, surfacing them with coal ash, an abundant byproduct of the coal-heated homes and factories of the era, or constructing wooden plank paths where cyclists paid a subscription fee and displayed a small medallion on their bike as proof of access. Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota, had the most extensive network of these subscription paths in the country. Brooklyn, New York’s Ocean Parkway became the first street in the country with a designated bike lane in 1894. A wooden cycleway in Pasadena, California—planned to stretch 9 miles from the Hotel Green to downtown Los Angeles—was among the most ambitious, though only a mile and a quarter ever opened before the project collapsed. Elsewhere, toll-funded turnpikes offered packed-dirt or plank surfaces for horse-drawn travel.

As the movement gained momentum, newer materials entered the picture: tarmac, concrete and natural lake asphalt imported from Trinidad. Then came an unexpected development.

Refining crude oil for gasoline, the fuel the new automobiles required, produced asphalt as a byproduct. Suddenly, there was more paving material than anyone knew what to do with, and it was nearly free.

“[That’s] why we see overwhelmingly asphalt roads today,” Norton says. “If you’d asked someone in 1910 what’s the future of pavement for motor vehicles, they would have said concrete.”

A democratic shift arrived in the late 1880s with the safety bicycle. Featuring two equal-sized wheels, a diamond frame and pneumatic tires, standard models cost an affordable $30 to $50—a price point that flooded the 1890s with working-class and female riders. But for the wealthy men who had championed cycling as a marker of status and daring, that was precisely the problem. By the 1900s, cycling had become ordinary.

Automobiles, fast and expensive and thrilling, offered a new frontier for elite leisure, and many of the same men who had lobbied loudest for better roads quietly pivoted to motoring. This transition was not without its own struggles through the mud that cyclists had long detested.

As electric streetcars were spreading through cities, the first automobiles were arriving on the very roads cyclists had helped build, and automobile interests moved swiftly to claim the whole movement as their own. Early automobile proponents co-opted the cyclists’ organizational model. To establish the Lincoln Highway, the first transcontinental route for cars, in 1913, auto enthusiasts didn’t rely on the government. Instead, they formed a private association, selling $5 honorary memberships to everyday drivers to fund paved “seedling miles” in rural communities. These demonstration projects left the highway entirely free and open to the public, using the exact same grassroots funding and educational tactics that cyclists had pioneered decades earlier.

“Cycling was very much written out of history,” Reid says. “In the 1920s, you have Ford [Motor Company] paying literally millions of dollars for an advertising campaign...basically saying Ford started the movement for good roads... These are blatant lies.” As automobiles proliferated—Ford was producing about 2 million Model Ts a year by 1923, and the Model Ts price had fallen from $850 in 1908 to under $300—auto interests engineered a powerful funding mechanism: the gas tax. Beginning with Oregon in 1919, states passed laws earmarking fuel tax revenues for road construction. By 1929, all 48 states had done the same.

Cyclists, meanwhile, were being systematically pushed off the roads their predecessors had fought to build. The American Automobile Association distributed free safety curricula to public schools warning children not to bicycle in the street, even as cities banned bikes from sidewalks. The bicycle, once the vehicle of wealthy reformers and seemingly the future of personal transportation, was already being rebranded as a child’s toy.

Yet, Norton, Reid and other historians draw a direct line from the League of American Wheelmen to the Federal Aid Road Act of 1916, which first authorized federal money for road construction across state lines. It was signed into law by Woodrow Wilson, himself a devoted cyclist. The timing was not incidental. With World War I underway in Europe and American entry looking increasingly likely, the military’s need to move troops and materiel over land gave Congress an urgent, practical reason to act. This federal commitment was codified by the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1921, a key milestone that required every state to designate a connected system of “primary” highways, forming the skeletal structure of what would become the national highway network.

“The whole Good Roads Movement really gets started by bicyclists,” Norton says. “It’s reinvented as rural free delivery...and then it gets reinvented again as pavement for drivers. Each reinvention does change [the] trajectory. But it does all begin with the cyclists.”