Place / Antecedent

Mapping the Urban Bike Utopias of the 1890s

Bicycle mania swept the nation at the end of the 19th century. Can it happen again?

by Greg Miller via National Geographic on February 24, 2017

...first “bike box,” a designated space for cyclists to wait at an intersection. That was in 2009. Cycling continued to grow in the following years. By 2015, San Franciscans took an estimated 82,000 bike trips per day, and the total length of the city’s bike lanes was 125 miles and growing.

The popularity of cycling in cities around the country, advocates say, is an encouraging trend that reduces traffic congestion and air pollution and promotes healthful exercise. But it’s not exactly new.

The maps in this post come from an earlier time when cycling mania swept the nation: the 1890s. The bicycle as we know it—with two wheels of equal size, among other features—had just been invented. “Bikes really took off in cities because they provided the first affordable private transportation,” says Evan Friss, an urban historian at James Madison University. “Horses were expensive, and cars, by and large, didn’t exist yet.”

In his 2016 book, The Cycling City, Friss writes that the bicycle gave middle-class people more freedom to travel when and where they wanted. It allowed them to get around the city more efficiently, but perhaps more importantly in an era of rapid industrialization and urban population growth, it allowed them to escape it.

“There was this great notion that on a bicycle you didn’t need a plan,” Friss says. “You could start out in the city and end up at the beach or a mountain or just go see some foliage.”

Then as now, bicycle advocates pushed for road improvements, and for dedicated lanes and paths for bike traffic. Local cycling clubs sprang up around the country (Manhattan alone had more than 50), and in 1897, the League of American Wheelmen boasted more than 100,000 members.

Washington, DC map — In this 1884 map of downtown Washington, DC published by the Capital Bicycle Club, dark lines indicate roads that have been paved and are therefore amenable to cycling.
MAP COURTESY LIBRARY OF CONGRESS MAPS DIVISION

The most significant early bike path in the country was the Coney Island Cycle Path, which ran five and a half miles from Prospect Park in Brooklyn to Coney Island (it’s shown in the map at the top of this post). Completed in 1895, it epitomized the intent of many bike paths of the era—to give urbanites an easy way to get out of the city for the day.

Even grander plans were proposed, including an illuminated “aerial bicycle highway” in Chicago; a 40-mile toll route connecting Baltimore and Washington, D.C.; and even a transcontinental route between San Francisco and New York. None of these came to pass. Construction did begin on a proposed nine-mile elevated bikeway between Los Angeles and Pasadena (see photo below), but the project was never completed.