Roads were not Built for Cars

Live Broadcast on April 6​, 2015 at 12:00 – 1:15​ pm EDT

This webinar provides a historical, contemporary, and future look at roads and their close association with bicycles.

This webinar helped open up the 2015 Bike Month, as Bike to Work Weeks began in locations across the U.S. The author of Roads Were Not Built For Cars, Carlton Reid, dissects the inseparable history of bicycles and roads as we know them, and how understanding this history can bring about greater tolerance and multi-modal use of modern roads. Reid was joined by moderator, Heather Boyer, Built Environment Editor at Island Press and Andy Clarke, Executive Director of League of American Bicyclists, and Martha Roskowski, VP of Local Innovation at PeopleForBikes. The webinar brings context to the importance of bikes on roads, and active, forward-looking examples on biking policy, infrastructure, and biking potential in communities.

For your convenience, you can find the slide presentation for the webinar here.


The Panel:

Moderator: Heather Boyer is Executive Editor for the Built Environment at Island Press, a not-for-profit publishing company focused on environmental issues. For over 20 years she has worked on shaping and growing the Island Press book list focused on urban sustainability issues. In 2004-2005 she was a Loeb Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. In 2009 she co-authored Resilient Cities with Peter Newman and Timothy Beatley (currently being revised). She is based in Brooklyn, NY.


Carlton Reid is a British writer based in northern England. He has written for The Guardian (UK) and National Geographic Traveller, and is the executive editor of BikeBiz, a trade magazine, and author of eight books, including his latest, Roads Were Not Built For Cars (Island Press, 2015).


Andy Clarke, with 30 years of experience in cycling advocacy, is the president of the League of American Bicyclists. His experience includes stints at Rails to Trails Conservancy, the Association of Pedestrian and Bicycle Professionals, and a consultant to the Federal Highway Administration. Clarke is a 1984 graduate of the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom with an undergraduate degree in law. He worked for 3 years at Friends of Earth in London as their bicycle campaigner. Clarke’s passion for cycling started when he was growing up in England, and has stayed with him through hundreds of thousands of miles of cycling on four continents. Clarke lives in Fairfax, Va. with his wife, Kristin, and two children Ashton and Jacqueline.


Martha Roskowski is Vice President of Local Innovation for the national non-profit PeopleForBikes. She directs the PFB Green Lane Project, an effort to get better bike lanes on the ground in U.S. cities. She joined PFB in January 2012. Previously, she spent 7 years managing GO Boulder, heading up the innovative transportation planning, policy and program efforts for the City of Boulder. She led the America Bikes campaign in Washington DC from 2002 to 2004, focused on the reauthorization of the transportation bill, which created the federal Safe Routes to School Program and launched the Complete Streets movement. She also spent seven years as the Executive Director of statewide advocacy group Bicycle Colorado.

Thank you to our sponsors, Island Press and Willdan Energy Solutions, for making this event possible and free to attend!