[CafeRacer]

> It is the young people that are growing up conditioned to press accept

There is a similar story with Ford and how they build pavement everywhere and taught the young population that roads are for cars. Now we have to drive for 10 minutes to get from one shop on the plaza to another shop on the different plaza.

[bluGill]

It was the bikes who fought for pavement everywhere. Cars took it all over. Mud is annoying to walk it, but otherwise humans handle bare dirt just fine.

[jodrellblank]

The Romans built roads across Europe instead of mud paths two thousand years before bikes were invented. Humans might be able to cross dry compacted dirt, but do much better on engineered roads than on deep, wet, sticky, slippy mud, even before thinking about carts and wagons.

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

Unless you mean something else, but Paris was paving roads in the 1750s, a lifetime before even the hobby-horse Draisine was invented:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macadam#Pierre-Marie-J%C3%A9r%...

On that page it's mentioned that Macadam (predecessor to tarmac) was used in the USA in 1823 on a stretch of road of 10 miles which took stagecoaches 5 hours to pass in the winter before it was Macadamized, suggesting quite a desire for better roads a century before safety bicycles with chains were invented.

Then 'History of the bicycle' says:

"On the new macadam paved boulevards of Paris it was easy riding ... the "bone-shaker" enjoyed only a brief period of popularity in the United States, which ended by 1870. here is debate among bicycle historians about why it failed in the United States, but one explanation is that American road surfaces were much worse than European ones, and riding the machine on these roads was simply too difficult."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_bicycle#1860s_a...

Although apparently it was a thing in the USA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Roads_Movement

"The Good Roads Movement occurred in the United States between the late 1870s and the 1920s... a coalition between farmers' organizations groups and bicyclists' organizations .. Early organizers cited Europe where road construction and maintenance was supported by national and local governments."

[bluGill]

Those road function more like hiways. I'm not arguing paved roads are not or didn't exist. I'm saying that many smaller roads would not have been paved.

[philwelch]

And horses actually do better on dirt than on pavement.

[kjkjadksj]

Depending on where you live in the country mud is a certain default state.

[kjkjadksj]

Look at the suspension on a model T. That thing was built for the dirt wagon roads of the time. People on youtube actually off road the thing today.