Embracing the Bicyclist as One of Us

The history professor answers questions during a recent stop on his book tour to promote Bike Battles: A History of Sharing the American Road.

The road is a shared resource. "It’s easy to forget it’s shared between many different users, and that’s the only way the public road had really existed for millennia before one user type became more successful than others."

He uses a model of path dependency to analyze policy. "Cities are the debris fields of history. They’re the leftover physical monuments of decisions that were made and not made in the past." This model offers us the freedom to politically evolve. "[Decisions] may be poured in concrete, but they’re not set in stone."

He touches upon the history of Golden Ages for bicycles in the United States, but notes that the current bike boom is more than a fad because the economics of transportation has fundamentally changed. "Even as gas prices come down, we can’t afford the infrastructure for cars. It doesn’t get cheaper the more of it we build."

Longhurst believes that a change in the perception of who uses bicycles is critically important to changing the politics around bicycling. "If you can make the user group mainstream, so people in cars look at them and think ‘that’s us,’ then voters and taxpayers will see the users simply as the public."