In 2013, Jeremy Clarkson surprised viewers of Top Gear by declaring: “I bought a bicycle.” Then he told them he’d also bought a T-shirt to wear while riding his new possession and held it up to display its logo: “Motorists: Thank you for letting me use your roads.”

I know I’ve unduly flattered that “joke” by repeating it, but it sums up the philosophy Carlton Reid demolishes so effectively. This book is a closely argued, meticulously researched retort to all those Mr Toads who not only think that they own the roads, but also that they’ve always done so and that everyone else uses them on sufferance.

His starting point is so obvious it possibly doesn’t need to be stated even to the Clarksons of this world. There were plenty of roads before cars came along, and originally cars were seen as the interlopers. MP Sir Ernest Soares told parliament in 1903: “Motorists are in the position of statutary trespassers on the road … roads were never made for motor-cars. Those who designed them and laid them out never thought of motor-cars.”

Out of this, Reid develops a more nuanced and hitherto underreported story. It wasn’t motorists who began the process of improving roads in the UK and US, after decades of neglect during the age of the train. It was late-19th-century cyclists and well-organised lobbying organisations such as the Cycling Touring Club in the UK and the Wheelmen of America. They first campaigned for properly paved roads, mapped them out and also ensured that politicians took notice. One parade of cyclists in San Francisco in 1896 even carried with it a “gallows, from which hung a dummy representing ‘the first man who will vote against good roads’.”

It was only later that motoring groups were able to start taking credit for the cyclists’ work. They often deliberately distorted history in the process. In 1927 Henry Ford sent out a press release commemorating the 15 millionth Model-T to have rolled off the production line and declaring that “Ford … started the movement for good roads”. In the face of the mass of evidence Reid presents, this untruth seems egregious – although not out of character. Ford appears as a fantastic bogeyman throughout the book, putting almost as much energy into spreading lies as he did into making cars.

Even the idea that Ford invented assembly line mass production is exposed as a myth. As early as 1881, Columbia was manufacturing bikes with interchangeable parts and developing production lines with modern machine tools soon after. Reid produces evidence that Ford visited the Columbia factory before developing his own production line.

Cars owe plenty of other debts to bikes. Alongside the usable roads that made it possible to career around in early cars, motorists can thank cyclists for differential gearing, pneumatic tyres, the mass production of ball bearings and the first road signs.

Reid also takes in class struggle, racism (plenty of pioneering US cycle clubs had a bar on black members), Hitler (he hated bikes – of course), Fabian socialism (George Bernard Shaw, Beatrice and Sidney Webb and HG Wells all loved bikes – naturally), and custard (the dessert magnate Sir Alfred Bird was a champion tricyclist – and road lobbyist).

This book is also a treasure trove of curious trivia and arcane detail. Did you know that Babel Street in ancient Babylon was capped with asphalt? Or that Native Americans laid out the original routes of many of the great American roads? (US highway 12 began as the Great Sauk Trail.) I was also delighted to learn about an Anti-Automobile league set up by a group of farmers who vowed to “give up Sunday to chasing automobiles, shooting and shouting at them”.

And who wouldn’t share Reid’s pleasure in the “delicious” subtitle of the 1896 tome The Velocipede: Its Past Present and Future – Straddle a Saddle, Then Paddle and Skedaddle.

Roads Were Not Built for Cars is gloriously eccentric. Reid calls himself a “velocipedestrianisticalistinarianologist (one who studies the study of studying cycling)”. He’s clearly in a field of his own – and his determination to plough this solitary furrow is admirable. This book has been self-published and funded on Kickstarter.

This decision to self-publish hasn’t been without its pitfalls. The book looks good, but sometimes the photos are strangely placed and it lacks professional sheen. But while the print edition might lack some of the finesse a good publisher would bring to it, the Ipad edition puts those same professionals to shame, featuring lovely use of video, a wealth of images, clever 3D models, and even a 19th-century ditty about speeding cyclists.

It is sometimes possible to argue with Reid. He claims that 19th-century cycling, like motoring, was mainly a rich man’s pursuit. “Tricycles, especially, were vehicles for moneyed individuals,” he writes. In fact, HG Wells had access to one in the early 1880s when he was barely out of short trousers and most definitely wasn’t rich. His mother was a servant, his father was a failed shopkeeper and injured county cricketer and he himself was sent off to be a draper’s apprentice before he completed his education. This experience would form the basis for his novel The Wheels of Chance – an 1896 book describing cycling as a pursuit easily within the reach of its protagonist, another poor draper’s assistant – and indeed describing it as a pursuit that helped level out the classes.

But that doesn’t detract from Reid’s main arguments: that cyclists pioneered highway improvements, that the arrival of the car saw the needs of the many “thrust on one side for the few”, that the supposed libertarian motorists calling for “freedom” on the roads have won their own privileges at the expense of other users. Next time Clarkson wears his bike T-shirt, someone should throw this book at him.

• To order Roads Were Not Built for Cars go to the author’s website.