Asger Risom
Long before mass-produced automobiles dominated Western roads, modern highways were muddy, impassable dirt corridors that broke wagon axles and grounded local transport.
Spend an hour sitting in traffic and it is easy to assume the asphalt grid exists purely to serve the automobile. Broad avenues, interstate ramps, and smooth asphalt boulevards look like monuments built exclusively for combustion engines and heavy freight. Yet decades before Henry Ford rolled out his first factory assembly line, the political crusade that dragged Western roads out of the mud was organized and paid for by people riding bicycles.
Mud holes and broken bones
During the late nineteenth century, venturing outside an urban center meant navigating an unpaved disaster. City avenues were paved with rough cobblestones or slick granite setts, while rural thoroughfares were little more than dirt tracks beaten into the soil by stagecoaches and livestock. In wet winter months, those dirt roads dissolved into deep quagmires of axle-deep mud that swallowed wagons whole.
The invention of the high-wheel “ordinary” bicycle in the 1870s turned those conditions into an active health hazard. A rider perched over a five-foot front wheel had no suspension and very little balance. Catching a concealed rut, an exposed root, or a loose stone could pitch a cyclist over the handlebars head-first into the dirt—a violent wipeout known as “taking a header.”
When modern “safety” bicycles arrived in the late 1880s featuring equal-sized wheels, chain drives, and pneumatic tires, cycling transformed overnight from an athletic novelty into a mass transit boom. Millions of everyday commuters suddenly owned personal transport, and they immediately ran into the same roadblock. While trains could carry passengers between distant cities, the local roads connecting towns and neighborhoods were virtually unnavigable on two wheels.
Organizing the League of American Wheelmen
Faced with abysmal riding conditions, cyclists organized what became one of the most effective lobbying coalitions in modern transport history. In 1880, bicycle industrialist Albert Augustus Pope helped form the League of American Wheelmen to protect riders’ legal access to public thoroughfares. The organization quickly grew into a political powerhouse, expanding to more than one hundred thousand dues-paying members.
Cyclists first took to the courtrooms to establish that their machines had every right to occupy public rights of way. In landmark legal challenges, judges ruled that roads were common public property, not the private domain of horses, wagons, or streetcars. With legal standing secured, the Wheelmen turned their resources toward an even bigger goal: launching the Good Roads Movement to physically rebuild America’s transit corridors.
As highlighted by Smithsonian Magazine, the league launched a full-scale public relations offensive to win over skeptical rural communities. In 1891, they published The Gospel of Good Roads, an influential pamphlet that argued smooth thoroughfares were an economic necessity rather than a luxury. In 1892, they followed it with Good Roads magazine, which rapidly hit a monthly circulation of a million readers and pushed state legislatures across the country to invest in macadam and asphalt paving.
Converting farmers into infrastructure allies
Winning the road debate meant convincing rural farmers that paving was worth paying for. For decades, rural counties relied on antiquated “statute labor,” a system where local property owners paid their road taxes by spending a few days a year digging ditches and dumping dirt into potholes. Farmers viewed smooth paving with deep suspicion, assuming urban cyclists were trying to force higher taxes on farm communities just to enjoy weekend joyrides.
The Wheelmen won the argument by speaking in cold, calculated financial terms. They published exhaustive charts demonstrating that a team of draft horses could haul four times as much grain over crushed stone or smooth asphalt as it could over raw mud. They calculated that rutted roads cost farmers millions in lost market revenue because crops rotted in barns whenever autumn rains made trails impassable.
The economic pitch worked, turning rural agricultural boards into dedicated infrastructure partners. Together, cyclists and farmers pressured the federal government to establish the Office of Road Inquiry in 1893—the agency that eventually evolved into the Federal Highway Administration. Decades before automobile owners were numerous enough to organize their own lobbies, bicycle clubs had already mapped out routes, published regional road books, and established modern highway departments.
The irony at the traffic light
By the early 1900s, state-funded civil engineering had begun rolling out miles of hard, modern tarmac. But the timing proved bittersweet for the people who had fought and paid for the overhaul. As soon as roads were graded and paved smooth, internal combustion engines could finally travel without snapping their axles or sinking into the mud.
Automobile manufacturers seized on the newly paved corridors, mass-producing cars that quickly outpaced human-powered bicycles. The sheer speed, size, and weight of cars rapidly made the open roads dangerous for the cyclists who had lobbied to build them. Within two decades, city planners began redesigning street networks solely around cars, relegating bicycles to the margins of roadways they had paid to surface.
The hostility modern drivers sometimes direct at cyclists on narrow roads is one of the great historical ironies of urban transit. Every time a car tires roll smoothly across asphalt instead of bogging down in a muddy ditch, the driver is benefiting from a nineteenth-century cycling lobby. Motorists did not build the modern road network; they just took it over.
