Bike Battles

Reviews / Votes

"Bike Battles is an enjoyable read that highlights important historical conflicts that shaped our current roadways. It is accessible and appropriate for any undergraduate class or person interested in bicycling."

- Lindsay Parks Pieper (Sports in American History) "Carefully researched, thoroughly documented, and very engaging, this is a book that everyone who travels needs to read and understand."

(Choice) "A measure of any book is whether it makes you think beyond its pages, and Bike Battles did just that for me. My dad used to tell me that if I got only one thing out of a book - an interesting fact, a point of view I hadn't previously considered, something helpful to my life or just entertainment - the book was worth its cover price. By that standard Bike Battles is a bargain. It allowed me to see the last 150 years of riding in America like a mosaic on the wall. I won't look at parked cars the same way again. The book ought to give today's bicycle advocates a sense of their place in history and make them proud to continue the battle."

- Grant Petersen (Wall Street Journal) "The book provides in scholarly and very readable style an analysis of cycling as it serves as a locus of conflict over the use and ownership of public commons. . . . Although bikes are the primary material theme of the book, they are a means to illustrate larger social, cultural, and political processes."

- Peter Cox (Journal of Transport History) "Longhurst's accounts build on a truly innovative use of multiple sources, from legal texts, design manuals, and newspaper articles to sitcoms and traffic education films. These chapters are pleasant reads and convincing narratives. . . . In going beyond the present, this book helps us understand why motorists so often consider the road as their birthright. It is not because of an oft-claimed American love affair with the car, Longhurst asserts, but because of those multiple lost bike battles during the past hundred years."

- Martin Emanuel (Transfers) "These colorful references, coupled with Longhurst's light and natural writing style, make Bike Battles easy to read."

- Amy Goetzman (MinnPost) "In six chapters, [Longhurst] traces the history of what is essentially road-sharing: first horses and carts mixed with pedestrians; then trolleys and buses; then, after WWII, an overwhelming shift, funded by federal highway dollars, to the primacy of the car."

(Seattle Weekly) "An excellent, enlightening new book."

- Knute Berger (Seattle Magazine) "Longhurst tackles this debate between bike riders, motorists, and pedestrians by exploring the different mediums Americans have used to create opinions on the bicycle, such as: popular songs, advertising, films, newspapers, and television."

(Momentum Magazine (2015 Best New Bike Book)) "Longhurst has provided an accessible and highly readable story of the bicycle. . . . [He] has taken us on a legal and cultural ramble on the American road as well as given us a useful model of engaged and responsible urban history scholarship."

- Joshua Lupkin (Journal of American History) "Reading Bike Battles is like riding down a smooth path with some unexpected sightseeing along the way. The writing is accessible and fun to read. . . . Especially relevant to a generation of students who are more likely to consider forms of transportation beyond the car, this book is a promising addition to a history, urban planning, or environmental studies class."

- Margot Higgins (Environmental History) "Bike Battles provides a well-researched foundation into many of the issues of bicycle planning today, and is especially valuable by framing the battles as more than just legal rights."

- Peter Furth (Transport Reviews) "Longhurst provides general readers with a sprightly history of the political and legal battles over cycling from the late nineteenth century to the present . . . The bicyclists currently navigating traffic-choked streets, inhaling exhaust and darting between behemoth SUVs, like many other aspects of the contemporary urban landscape, Longhurst asserts, represent the legal and institutional legacy of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era."

- Bruce J. Schulman (Reviews in American History) "You should absolutely buy and hold [Bike Battles] up as a righteous rebuke the next time someone complains that 'the war on cars is real.' Longhurst maps out the perfect storm of American consumer trends, policy decisions, and historical events that led to that car cutting you off downtown just now."

- Megan Burbank (Portland Mercury) "Tells the fascinating story of the legal and political battles over bicycles on the road. . . . Longhurst's timely study shows that the arguments over bikes and road space are not new and also holds lessons for present-day bicycle advocates who would be wise to avoid the mistakes that scuttled earlier efforts to build bike infrastructure in US cities . . . will be of great interest to anyone interested in the history of bike policy and roads in the US."

- John Lloyd (Boy on a Bike! blog) "Intelligent, relevant and enlightening, Bike Battles is what all history should be. The reader needn't be a policy wonk or a cycling enthusiast to appreciate the lessons, and its array of old photographs and sketches (bike commuters in 1902, "high riders" in Boston in 1880) are delightful. All in all, it's a worthy ride."

- Jennifer Graham (The Hippo) "His book, while academically rigorous, is easily accessible to the general public. In fact, I found it a page-turner as would any one who rides a bike on the streets of any American city or rural place."

- Dave Cieslewicz (Isthmus) "In six chapters, [Longhurst] traces the history of what is essentially road-sharing: first horses and carts mixed with pedestrians; then trolleys and buses; then, after WWII, an overwhelming shift, funded by federal highway dollars, to the primacy of the car."

- Joe Garvin (City Living Seattle)