The Cycling City: Bicycles and Urban America in the 1890s

Abstract

Bicycles are characterized by indeterminacy. Unlike other forms of urban transportation, they are portable, which means that they can be used for travel as well as taken on conveyances such as motor vehicles and street cars. They can be ridden on roads and sidewalks and off-road. They can be used for commuting, long-distance touring, the delivery of goods, and racing. Evan Friss examines the relationship of cycling to American cities during the 1890s, when bicycles enjoyed a brief heyday. He contends that not only were bicycles a fundamental feature of urban life in this period but they also figured in the construction by cyclists and their supporters of an imagined alternative city that was free of the worst elements of other forms of mass transit and, by implication, of the ills that the subsequent adoption of the automobile would soon foster. In nine chapters, he surveys the rise of cycling as an important urban pastime, describes cyclists in terms of their class, gender, and ethnoracial identities, and investigates the varied reasons for taking up the wheel, traces the efforts of local and state governments to accommodate the newly popular contraptions by defining bicycles’ roles and regulating their usage, and explores the impact of cycling on the good roads movement. He provides in-depth accounts of the use of bicycles for recreation and for commuting and by women. His discussion of the gendering of cycling is especially instructive.