By Lorenz J. Finison, Club Historian
For CRW's 60th anniversary, WheelPeople and Club Historian Lorenz J. Finison are taking a look back through the club's history. This article is the first half of an article originally published in November 2016's issue of WheelPeople under the title "The Early Days of the Charles River Wheelmen: Part 3."
In March 1972 the Charles River Wheelmen (CRW) newsletter headlined “A Massachusetts Bicycle Trail System!” Two state legislators, John Ames and Bob Wetmore, had cosponsored a bill to mandate trails in every county of the state. CRW announced plans for a “huge ride to the State House” to support the bill. In August, CRW members rode out to Marlboro to escort a Pittsfield-to-Boston Pedal Against Pollution trek in support of bike paths and lanes. Bike facility proponents, like CRW founders George and Bruce Bailey, were also opponents of increased highway construction: specifically the never-built “Inner-Belt” and the I-95 extension from Route 128 to Boston via the also never-built Southwest Highway. Better to travel, as they did, by bike or multi-modally train and bike. Bicycle manufacturers, too, were hot on the idea of bikeways. Starting in 1966 the Bicycle Institute of America published a nationally circulated newsletter Boom in Bikeways.
What happened to C.R.W.’s foray into bike facilities in the decade after its 1966 founding? Reactions to the Ames-Wetmore bill and others must be understood in the context of auto dominance, the rise of vehicular cycling, and the inadequacies of 1960’s-era bike paths.
Historically, successful cycle paths – early roadside paths called sidepaths, not sidewalks – developed in scattered pockets around the United States, especially in rural upstate New York. Robert McCullough’s book, Old Wheelways: Traces of Bicycle History on the Land, traces the sidepath movement during the bicycle Craze of the 1890s and its decline during the bicycle Bust, post-1900. Boston cyclists of the Craze tried to get bike paths and trails across Boston Common, in Franklin Park, around the Emerald Necklace, and along Commonwealth Avenue. Largely, they failed. During the Bust, highway rights-of-way which had or could have been allocated to bike paths were frequently sacrificed to widen the roads to accommodate more cars at higher speeds. Urban streets had long been recognized as public ways for multiple uses – transportation, play, leisurely walking, and neighborhood gathering. Sidewalks helped keep pedestrians out of the mud and manure, but walkers were not restricted to them. After 1910 streets were more and more claimed for automobiles passing through or parking. The term “jay-walking” helped enforce auto dominance.
The bicycle Bust and an epidemic of cars, interrupted only briefly by World War II restrictions and rationing, ended any talk of bicycle facilities until the Renaissance of the 1960s and 1970s. Dr. Paul Dudley White (made an honorary member of CRW in 1969) started the movement again with his Committee for Safe Bicycling (CSB), which pushed for bike paths on Nantucket (1958) and along the Charles River Basin (1960). But the Nantucket sidepath inaugurated by White only extended a thousand yards along the state road (Milestone Road) and even when finished did not go into the village streets of Nantucket and ’Sconset. The Charles River Basin path has had its own complicated history. Among other problems, it dead-ended at the Boston University Bridge until 1977 and the construction of a wooden underpass around the base of the bridge.
Bike facilities, including bikeways of various kinds, were of considerable interest to early CRW members. Its 1966 founders included many bike commuters. One-third of CRW members lived in Boston or Cambridge in 1970, compared with 14 percent today, and they might be thought sympathetic to bike facilities.
But leadership in bike facilities flowed elsewhere – with mixed results. In 1971 Boston Parks Commissioner Joseph Curtis led a group of lunch-hour cyclists, including Boston’s “bike coordinator,” Lou Antonellis, through the first section of a new Green Belt Bikeway, designed to go across Boston Common and through the Public Garden, the Commonwealth Avenue Mall, the Fenway, and the Jamaicaway to Franklin Field. A Boston Globe writer parodied the route and the event in a story headlined “City Opens Bike Path, but Ride is Risky.” She likened the dedication ceremony to a “saké rite for departing kamikaze.” Most of the route was on the road and she added, “The Jamaicaway, dangerous enough to drive in an automobile, can only be described by a bicyclist as thrilling.” Antonellis announced that they planned to install some small ramps to eliminate the problem of having to “portage bicycles over the many curbstones enroute.”
By the following year, the Association for Bicycle Commuting (ABC), supported by the CSB, partnered with Commissioner Curtis, who had a $50,000 bike budget and hoped to combine that with another $50,000 in federal matching funds to improve the “Green Belt” route. The Globe reported that cyclists considered the present route “rough and bumpy and in many areas unsafe.” ABC organizers like Randy Selden and Nicholas Peck, and Commissioner Curtis, spoke of bike lockup facilities and small concrete shelters along the route to protect cyclists from rain storms, and to be equipped with lights, phones, and handy vending machines dispensing drinks and tire repair kits. Curtis also proposed closing several downtown streets to auto traffic, and push button traffic signals to assist cyclists at intersections. He spoke ambitiously of extending the Green Belt back from Franklin Field to Boston Common to make a complete circle, but warned that this “could involve some risk and would entail some extra traffic markings along the roads.” Little happened other than installation of signage – soon to disappear.
At the state level, Ames and Wetmore filed several bills in 1972. The first asserted that a highway be defined to “include a foot or bicycle trail wherever such trail would be of significant benefit to the community.” This might allow highway funds to be expended for trail purposes.
A second bill proposed that the Commonwealth establish “a program to assist the cities and towns which have established conservation commissions under section eight of chapter forty in acquiring lands and in the planning, designing, and constructing bicycle paths and hiking trails.” A third bill directed the “commissioner of natural resources and the commissioner of public works to develop a system of bicycle paths and hiking trails in Barnstable, Dukes, Plymouth and Nantucket counties,” all recreational areas. The bill was later amended to include the entire state, and then further amended to add the Metropolitan District Commission, but to require only an “investigation and study” relative to the “development of a master plan and a method of financing a system of bicycle paths and hiking trails.” No report emerged, or it has been lost to the historical record. Bike path/trail planning fell into a legislative limbo.
State Senator William Saltonstall of Manchester had a keen interest in cycling safety. In late 1971 he circulated a draft of proposed legislation that got MIT professor of mechanical engineering, CRW member (and CSB member) David Gordon Wilson’s attention. After telling Saltonstall diplomatically that “we are delighted that you are putting forward a bill to provide better regulation for bicycles,” Wilson spent much of his letter pulling the draft apart. In particular he objected that the paragraph “requiring bicyclists to use bicycle paths when provided could bring opposition; a similar ordinance was fought for many years in Britain. The reason is best illustrated by, for instance, Memorial Drive and the Charles River bikeway. This may be an excellent facility for recreational Sunday-afternoon bicyclists, but for commuters [such as Wilson] it may be far more dangerous than using the drive, in my opinion. This is because any bikeway in which the intersections are shared with motor vehicles, and in which bicyclists therefore suddenly appear at these intersections, is bound to be more dangerous than if bicyclists pedal with the traffic.”
One section of Saltonstall’s 1972 redraft would support designs “upon the public streets to be used as bicycle lanes.” Beyond that, cyclists should have “all of the considerations of motor vehicle drivers”; cyclists should (may in the final 1973 bill) ride in the rightmost lane except when turning left; be careful when passing a standing/ moving vehicle; hand-signal before slowing down, stopping or turning; stay off limited access highways; slow down at all intersections; ride single file; ride on a seat (!); display a white front light (or a white front reflector in the final bill), and a rear reflector after sunset; have adequate brakes; and have a bell or horn, but not a siren or whistle; not obstruct pedestrians or vehicles when parked; or be towed by another vehicle. After age 13 (an age criterion not in the final bill) cyclists could ride sidewalks (outside of local business districts) unless prohibited by local ordinance.
Cyclists could not or carry a passenger except in a basket (baby seat in the final bill) or trailer. or have an extended fork. The extended fork was popular among youth since it allowed them to ape motorcycle styles, and they loved to carry passengers on the crossbars, handlebars, rear fenders, and axle pegs.
Another cyclist, Richard Lotreck of Natick, protested the revised Saltonstall legislation in a letter to CRW He called the whole movement a “fiasco” and suggested that more restrictive legislation would yield still more restrictive legislation. And he wrote that if legislation was necessary, then CRW should push for “a requirement that a motorist give a cyclist at least six (or some such number) of feet clearance when passing.”
Saltonstall met with the CRW board along with Randy Selden, ABC president – and got another earful of cyclists’ opinions. In the final bill, most of the cyclists' goals were achieved and it was signed by Governor Sargent in September, 1973. The new law incorporated a watered down version of Lotreck's proposal, amending the motor vehicle code to read: “in approaching or passing a person on a bicycle the operator of a motor vehicle shall slow down and pass at a safe distance and at a reasonable and proper speed.” (emphasis added). This important detail did not make it into local press accounts.
The debate over bike safety and paths, lanes, and trails took place in the context of big interest among Boston university students. The Urban Bikeways Design Collaborative (UBDC) started in the early 1970s and brought together students and faculty from several Boston area universities with a base at MIT. A UBDC member drafted federal legislation that resulted in a budget line item of $100 million approved by Congress for urban bicycle paths. UBDC also sponsored an urban bikeways design competition, raised $10,000 in prize money, advertised it in the Boston Phoenix, and to universities nationally, and received dozens of entrants from around the country. Leading entries were published in a Bikeway Design Atlas (1974). UBDC gave special honors to John Williams’s study for the City of San Louis Obispo. Williams created a typology of cyclists: five levels of tourists, two levels of family cyclists and two levels of commuters. He then critiqued each of five levels of bikeways.
Williams quoted extensively from John Forester, a vocal bikeways critic, and concluded: “since the publication of John Forester’s initial article on bikeways ... a tremendous change has taken place. At that time, almost every bike club and magazine endorsed and lobbied for the construction of bikeways. Now, one and a half years later, no major bike group supports the bikeway concept (with the exception of friends for bikecology).” UBDC turned to other alternatives to increase bike safety and urban bicycling.
In September, 1975, UBDC designed and produced 12,000 copies of a Stanford bicycle safety comic book - Sprocketman. The name “Alice B. Toeclips” was slyly inserted as a UBDC contributor. This was obvious reference to the 1960s counter-cultural heroine Alice B. Toklas, the writer Gertrude Stein's lover. She was also the author of a cookbook with a recipe for what became known as Alice B. Toklas fudge/brownies, whose main (psycho) active ingredient was hashish or marijuana. The brownies played a prominent role in Peter Sellers' popular 1968 movie: “I Love You Alice B. Toklas,” which spiked a nation-wide surge in home-kitchen brownie production. The comic title itself paid cultural homage to the Elton John song “Rocketman,” a hit single in 1972. Several more editions were tailored to specific localities and in 1976 the federal government's Consumer Product Safety Commission printed half a million copies to promote bicycle safety.
Subsequent UBDC publications included Cyclateral Thinking – a 1976 compendium of ideas about bicycling and bikeways written in a youthful and engaging style. The back cover of Cyclateral Thinking included a “King of The Road” playing card image, perhaps a playful allusion to the popular 1964 song written and originally recorded by country singer Roger Miller.
Douglas Smith’s introduction to Cyclateral Thinking repeated John Williams’s bikeway typology, and explained the problems with each type. Class I, for example, involved complete separation, as in the 19th century sidepaths or in a typical rails-to-trails arrangement. Smith pronounced this unrealistically expensive for urban areas. Even on vacation-land Martha’s Vineyard a bikeway had cost $100,000 per mile to construct in 1974, according to UBDC associate and landscape architecture student Eti Katoni. Additional articles by Williams and Forester stated that in urban areas the major safety problems were not on the straightaways, but rather in the frequent road crossings, for which a bikeway offered no protection.
Several “blueprint” drafts of a UBDC bike map dedicated to alternatives circulated to the cycling community. Ben Olken of the Bicycle Exchange in Cambridge provided seed money for BU student and UBDC member John Troja. Troja was able to parlay that money into larger funding from the Environmental Protection Agency - which funded bike related projects to reduce air pollution. The resulting UBDC-EPA Boston bike map (1976) brought in a cartographer, David Weaver, along with coordinator Duff Bailey, son of ardent cyclists and CRW members George and Lucy Bailey. Rather than bike lanes on the roads or specialized bike paths off-road, the map was subtitled “Toward Intelligent Commuting,” and featured “the key to an alternative route system.” The mapmakers went on: “Automobiles are the major cause of Boston’s most serious air pollution: Carbon monoxide and smog. Riding these routes will help you become part of the solution.” Few actual routes were mapped; many were proposed. Cyclists were invited to send their own route suggestions to Cathy Buckley of the Commonwealth’s Central Transportation Planning Staff.
Boston Area Bicycle Coalition (BABC) (and soon to be CRW) member John Allen was a route consultant for a 1978 edition of the Boston bike map, which featured the locations of bicycle shops; inter-modal connections to bus, rail, and subway; cultural institutions; and considerably increased routes – often on less-used residential streets. Safety instructions and suggestions for inter-modal transportation, including folding bicycles, were prominently featured on the map's back, in triptych line drawn form. The map featured Alice B. Toeclip's “Intermodal ride to adventure.” Readers were encouraged to “follow this red route and learn with Alice as she puts Sprocketman's Cycling Skills into practice. ”
The bicycling Renaissance of the 1960s and '70s had ignited a national battle over bike paths and lanes. Legislators and regulators were attracted by the money for urban paths, and they worried about cyclists' safety on the road (with the increasing flow of traffic). One option, which prompted cyclist horror stories across the country, was of localities and even states banning bicyclists from the road where parallel bike paths existed – this was part of Saltonstall’s first draft bill, too. The League of American Wheelmen [LAW] Bulletin printed letters from cyclists who had been stopped by police and ordered onto the sidewalk! Opposition soon developed, led by John Forester and his followers – who were eventually called vehicular cyclists. The subsequent battles are described in Part 4.
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The article is based on Finison’s book: Boston’s Bicycling Renaissance: Cultural and Political Change on Two Wheels.University of Massachusetts Press, 2019. The book is a follow-up toBoston's Cycling Craze 1880-1900: A Story of Race, Sport, and Society. University of Massachusetts Press, 2014. Many of the source materials are in the Bicycle History Archives at UMass-Boston Archives. A footnoted version of the article is available at: Bostonscyclingcraze.blogspot.com
