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Comment by maCDzP | Hacker News Reader

I work as a civil engineer in road construction. I was certain that it was the roads that drove the development of bikes, not the other way around.

It’s cool that the bike movement had a role in building roads. And that a political movement can drive technological change.

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Yes, when bicycles were young people took trains to travel between cities (or boats). So no one was really interested in roads all that much.

> So no one was really interested in roads all that much.

Romans had roads thousands of years before trains were invented. They had "things on wheels" too: horse-pulled (or human pulled) carriage.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_roads

FWIW there are many places in Europe where pedestrian, bicycles, cars and whatnots are still using these very same roads, made of pavement, the exact same way romans were building it. I use these in the old city center nearly daily.

Right, but those roads were useful enough to be worth then effort to build for the Romans. However they were not enough more useful than a dirt track to be worth building in general. There were much less roads built after the fall of Rome, as Rome was able to find the labor to build them at get enough benefit. The rest of the world wasn't connected enough that great roads made much a difference to enough people that they were worth building. Once roads exist the rest of the world will use them, but they wouldn't build them.

In the US some roads were built in the early days, but canals and later the railroad had enough advantages over road transport (both can haul far more bulk) that for most roads were not worth building and the dirt track was fine. Towns would build roads in town because mud was annoying enough, but farmers (the majority of the population) didn't travel often enough that the cost (labor) to build a road was worth it - they just stayed on the farm when it rained.

> The rest of the world wasn't connected enough that great roads made much a difference to enough people that they were worth building.

When bicycles were young, the world was connected enough for this. But train tracks were a better technology (with better cost/benefit) at the time.

> In the US some roads were built in the early days, but canals and later the railroad had enough advantages over road transport (both can haul far more bulk) that for most roads were not worth building and the dirt track was fine.

Yes, exactly!

> [...] but farmers (the majority of the population) didn't travel often enough that the cost (labor) to build a road was worth it - they just stayed on the farm when it rained.

And they also only just needed to get to the next train station. The didn't need a county [sic!] spanning network of roads, just many individual star topologies.

Roads are immensely useful for military logistics. But you have to be a very thoroughly militarized society to benefit from and appreciate that effect, given the immense effort that goes into building them. Romans were exactly such a society - they mobilized an unusually large proportion of their population for pretty much non-stop warfare.

I agree that Rome built her roads for her military, and her military benefited from them.

However, I am not sure that Rome mobilised an unusually large proportion of their population. For the longest time, Romans were better at warfare than most of their neighbours, but I'm not sure they actually did more of it.

Their neighbours weren't as organised, and not as organised on as large a scale; but they perhaps mobilised just as much?

"So the Romans have something on the order of 750,000 adult males liable for conscription, of which some 526,000 are in the band the Romans generally think of as ‘fighting age’ (17-46). That is a staggering figure, though of course the Romans never put that many men under arms at one time: peak roman mobilizations in 212 and 211 are around 185,000 (which is still more than double peak attested Seleucid or Ptolemaic mobilizations)."

(https://acoup.blog/2024/02/16/collections-phalanxs-twilight-...)

The Romans were around before bicycles were young, they were around before bicycles were born.

The Roman made some decent roads, but only in some parts of the world and only a comparatively few.

When bicycles were young, train travel was the norm.

Before trains they took stagecoaches. So people were very interested in roads.

Yes, that's before trains.

But when bicycles were young was during trains' heyday, not before.

There are many places in the world today where there are no paved roads, but people ride bicycles OK. Lived in one such place as a child, rode my bicycle through the mud to the grocery store every day.

There's also a lot of paved road where you will absolutely not see a bicycle.

That’s only really true for bicycle with modern rubber wheels. Attempting to ride through the mud or on rough surfaces with wooden wheels would have been much more challenging (not to mention uncomfortable).

So was the development of the wheel to begin with.

Without an appropriate surface, such as a road, wheels are a pretty bad mean of locomotion.

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