Road Systems

Abstract

This chapter looks at roads and their services from the eighteenth century until the coming of the bicycle and then motorised transport in the last four decades of the nineteenth century. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century developments in road transport were less revolutionary than changes taking place in shipping and the railways. While the motor industry clearly transformed road haulage, progress in road construction and transport in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was important for several west European countries as a significant break from previous practice and a much neglected contribution to the early industrialisation of those particular countries.