The Transcontinental Bike Path that Doesn’t Exist: Chicago and the Forgotten Sidepath Movement of the 1890s with James Longhurst - "Bike Battles"

Co-sponsored by the Blackstone Bicycle Works and the Active Transportation Alliance. What can history tell us about the current politics of bikes in Chicago? Uncovering the forgotten sidepath movement of the 1890s helps us understand the present, according to James Longhurst, author of Bike Battles: A History of Sharing the American Road.

About the book: In Chicago and across the nation, we know it’s sometimes politically difficult to talk about adding bicycle lanes and paths. But that’s partly so because we’ve forgotten a lot of bicycle history, including the existence of an entire transportation network built for bikes. The sidepath movement -- beginning in the late 1890s and lasting for less than a decade -- was a nationwide push to create bicycle paths in cities throughout the Northeast and Midwest. It imagined cities and towns connected not only by roads but also by a separate, bicycle-specific network of improved paths, including a continent spanning bicycle highway through Chicago. While there was some success, the movement was severely limited by political opposition to taxation, and development floundered by 1905. Most bicycle advocates threw in their lot with the combined-use Good Roads movement rather than a separate system, and the creation of auto-centric cities began. The sidepath movement was a path not taken in urban development, one that would have created an integrated bicycle path network connecting city center with suburbs and rural America throughout the 20th century.

About the author:  James Longhurst is a historian of urban and environmental policy, and the author of Bike Battles: A History of Sharing the American Road (2015). He is an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin – La Crosse, with a Ph.D. in history and policy from Carnegie Mellon University. His first book, Citizen Environmentalists (2010), described the rise of local environmental organizing in Pittsburgh and the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. He is a local bicycle advocate and a road cyclist, bike commuter, amateur mechanic, social rider, and lapsed recreational triathlete.