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Some believe the answer to this infrastructure problem is bicycles, but finding the space for bike lanes along already crowded thoroughfares can be challenging. The historian and bicycle advocate Carlton Reid is proposing an alternative in his native United Kingdom: The miles of lost cycleways that date to the Britain of the 1930s–some of which are buried beneath today’s streets. Reid isn’t alone in excavating the past for answers about the future. As many urban centers attempt to make themselves safer and greener, more cities are turning to history to rediscover their older selves–digging into a time before the car reigned supreme, when cities were more walkable, bikeable, and livable. Excavating England’s Lost Bike Highways In a new project that launched on Kickstarter in April, Reid is proposing to locate and, if needed, excavate miles of old cycleways, and link them up with the U.K.’s existing modern cycle infrastructure. “What you get from official bodies and planners is we can’t provide for cyclists because we don’t have enough space,” Reid says. “But this project is proving that not only do we have the space, but we’ve had it for 80 years.” Reid writes about his discovery of the extensive network of bike lanes in his recent book Bike Boom, which looks at the history of cycling as transportation in the U.K. from 1900 to 1980. He devotes one chapter to the ’30s, and his discovery of the hidden bike lanes that date to that prewar era before cars had entirely taken over as the primary mode of transport. While Reid says it’s difficult to know why the government started investing in cycle infrastructure between 1934 and 1939, he has two theories: one, cyclists were “dying like flies” with the new numbers of cars on the road; and two, government officials wanted to get the bicycles out of the street so they could drive faster in their cars. “They thought, let’s protect them and give them their own space, and that pleases everybody,” he says. In order to force local governments to comply, Reid says, the Ministry of Transport instituted a simple rule: Anyone who wanted to build a road with grant money also had to build bicycle lanes. “It was arm twisting. It was blackmail,” Reid says. “We had no idea the Ministry of Transport was so far ahead of its time.” After spending countless hours looking through records of road building material from local counties’ archives, the Ministry of Transport in London, and old local newspapers, Reid would scour the area where he thought there might be an old cycleway and look for the telltale sign: old concrete, a much rarer sight now that the vast majority of British roads are paved in asphalt. “I‘m very much a concrete nerd now,” he says.

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If he finds old concrete, he looks for the types of roads they’re built on and the age of the road. If the cycleway is in a city, he looks for any municipal housing that might be nearby. That’s because the houses that were built for working class people often had cycleways, since the working class would take bikes while the middle and upper classes would have cars–a fascinating historical detail of the class divide baked into infrastructure. Of course, not all the cycleways are recognizable–and that’s where the money from Kickstarter comes in. Reid hopes to map out where all the cycleways are, including ones that may be buried, to find all the routes that might be usable again. “Some of the roads could have been buried or widened and long gone,” he says. “That is the case for some in London, which have been buried under eight-lane highways. But there are so many that are still there, and people have no idea that they’re still there.” Ultimately, Reid’s plan is to link up the old bike paths with modern ones, and he’s paired up with John Dales, an urban planner and the director of Urban Movement. While the Kickstarter money (now at nearly $21,000, 233% of their goal of $9,000) will fund the duo’s research for the next six months or so, Reid hopes that the number and ardor of their supporters (there are 633 as of this writing) will be an arguing point when they try to convince the government to fund the maintenance and connecting of the old and new paths. The Ministry of Transport’s brief but radical cycling policy ground to a halt with the onset of World War II, when road building stopped and money was directed toward the war effort. When the war was over, infrastructure development continued in the form of building housing for returning soldiers. Reid says the government did not pick up road building until the late ’50s, when cycling was already on its way out. Century-Old Lessons From Cities Past There’s a good chance the U.K. isn’t the only country with older cycleways that have fallen into disrepair. Reid says that he was recently cycling on a trip to Cologne, Germany, where he came across a bike path that fit all the markers he’s come to look for. As far as he knows, no one’s dug them up yet, but there’s potential for other bike advocates to look into similar projects in their home countries.

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