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Transit Tangents
The Podcast where we discuss all things transit. Join us as we dive into transit systems across the US, bring you interviews with experts and advocates, and engage in some fun and exciting challenges along the way.
Transit Tangents
Ep. 52: Bicycles, Good Roads, and Incredible Stunts
In this episode of Transit Tangents, we roll back the clock to explore how Carl Fisher, a bold entrepreneur and transportation pioneer, helped spark America’s love affair with movement—starting not with cars, but with bicycles. Before Fisher became synonymous with monumental road projects he was a passionate advocate for cycling who helped push for better roads.
This episode is a tribute to two-wheeled transportation, the early advocates who demanded better infrastructure, and the visionary who saw the potential for something even greater. Whether you’re a cyclist, a motorist, or just curious about how the roads beneath your wheels came to be, this episode will give you a whole new appreciation for the origins of modern transportation.
On this episode we dive into the story of a figure who has impacted your life and your daily commute, and we bet you don't even know his name. Take a trip back to the turn of the 20th century with us on this episode of Transit Tangents. Hey everybody, and welcome back to this episode of Transit Tangents. My name's Chris and I'm Lewis, and today we're doing an episode that's a little different than what we've done in the past. Today we're actually going to dive into sort of a specific person and how this person, who most of you have probably never heard of, has impacted your lives.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely. And yeah, chris had been reading a book about this. Mentioned it to me a couple weeks ago and I haven't read the book full disclosure. So Chris is going to be filling us all in on this individual who is.
Speaker 2:Who is Carl Fisher? I feel like I'm playing Debra.
Speaker 2:Who is Carl Fisher, and the book in question here is called the Big Roads by Earl Swift. This is a book that my boss actually gave me and I haven't finished it yet, but it's been really interesting to read through and the book's all about sort of the history of highways in the United States. So obviously we focus a lot on public transit trains, gondolas, all that stuff but it is always interesting to see how we got to where we are. So if you're interested in the history of roads in the US, this is a good one to check out.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely, and this actually pairs I wasn't thinking about ahead of time it pairs well with our. We kind of talked about the history of toll roads and whatnot in the us. At one point, uh, we've talked about highway removal, so, uh, on the same topic basically. Yeah, and also for those of you who are watching this on the day uh, happy holidays. Merry christmas eve if you celebrate that, happy hanukkah. Um, yes, just getting that out of the way.
Speaker 2:If you're looking for the last minute book for your uh, your highway enthusiast. This is it.
Speaker 1:I don't know uh maybe Amazon is having people like slave away on Christmas Eve, delivering same day delivery. Maybe that's a thing I don't know we'll see, I'm sure it's a thing, I'm sure it is.
Speaker 2:Yeah, all right. So, diving into this episode, we are talking about a guy named carl fisher and, again, this is a guy who has impacted your life in probably more ways than you really uh think and I, like I said, guarantee that uh, pretty much no one knows this name I don't think you've never heard the same I never really heard the same either.
Speaker 2:After reading a little bit more about him I remembered I had learned about some stories about this guy, but I actually didn't know who he was. But to get started, carl Fisher. He was born in 1874, which is only nine years after the Civil War, so we are going way, way back. Carl grew up around the Indianapolis area in the late 1800s. Around 1890s he had gotten involved in bicycle racing and with his brothers had actually opened up a bicycle mechanic shop where they were helping repair bikes that were sort of going out for racing.
Speaker 1:Totally and obviously. You know, if you had heard there in the beginning, the book is called Big Roads. You don't necessarily link big roads with bicycle shops necessarily. So a little bit of foreshadowing here.
Speaker 2:We're going to tell you how it all connects. Yes, At the time there were two types of bicycles out in the market. One were called normal bikes and the others were called safeties Do?
Speaker 1:you have any idea like how the what? Those were I. So we did talk about this like a couple of weeks ago. So I but I did not know before normal, but I'd not even heard the phrase normal bikes or safety bikes before.
Speaker 2:When I heard normal bike, I thought what we have today?
Speaker 1:Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, that is not the case. A normal bike is actually, if you can imagine, just like from back in the 1800s what people were riding on in bicycles, where you have one giant wheel, I believe, in the front right, one giant wheel in the front and then a much smaller wheel in the back, and you're sitting much higher, about five feet off the ground, which is insane. And then now, knowing what a safety bike is, you can probably imagine that the safety bike is more so what we're used to riding today.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly, the safety bike was the precursor for exactly what we ride today, the normal bikes. At the time you said giant wheel in the front, little wheel in the back, uh, to get on it you had to sort of uh, roll it along and then there's a step on the on the lower wheel, and you had to like hot, like run yourself up, yeah it was pretty crazy.
Speaker 2:They were, uh, incredibly dangerous. Um, they went really fast for the time, like people were getting them up to like 18 20 miles an hour on five feet in the air. Five feet on the air on like rutted out dirt tracks that you know horses and wagons are also using at the time. Yes, you know, there's no concrete roads around this era.
Speaker 1:Right, picture the worst road in your city and then make it worse than that. Basically, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and on top of all that, these bikes also didn't have brakes. I didn't know that that's hilarious they were. They were fixed wheel and so if you wanted to brake, you either jumped off or you just had to like pedal slower.
Speaker 1:Slow the pedals down, yeah that also makes it crazy that they're going 18 miles an hour. They're probably like getting it up to speed and then, just like lifting their feet off of it, letting the pedals go.
Speaker 2:It's, it's absolutely wild. And uh, carl fisher around this time he's a you know teenager and he really gets this, uh, this reputation for being a daredevil. So he's racing these normal bicycles, uh, up to around 20 miles an hour, often downhill, and I was actually reading an article about how people would race these bikes and when they were racing, they would put their feet on the handlebars so that in the event that the bike probably would hit something and come to a stop, it would just roll them forward off the front of the bicycle and then they would land on their feet and run to be able to.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's, that's some crazy, crazy stuff.
Speaker 2:Uh, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah, on top of all of this, uh, carl fisher was half blind, with a severe astigmatism.
Speaker 1:Classic, yep. So you know why would you need to see while you're racing down these hills on these giant bikes going down Now? Sounds like a wild character, for sure.
Speaker 2:Early on, already a wild character. So he is really popular in this bicycle racing circle. He's really spreading the word about these bicycles. He starts moving into the safety bicycles and he's really responsible especially in the Indiana area really responsible for bicycle racing taking off and there were bicycle racing tracks all over the place. At the time it was a really sort of high-endurance sport. People were very into it and so he's one of the people who was responsible. As he got a little bit older later teens he decided you know what Better business venture is not to just repair the bicycles but also sell them. He convinced George Erland, who at the time was a prominent bicycle manufacturer in Ohio, to give him $50,000 worth of bicycle merchandise to take back to his shop in Indianapolis to sell.
Speaker 1:And at the time that's probably a lot of money also. I'd imagine it was a lot of money at the time.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I'm just imagining this young kid pretty charismatic daredevil. The whole thing has this persona about him. He's really pushing bicycles and he goes to this guy and says hey, I want $50,000 worth of your supplies.
Speaker 1:Right, pretty bold move, absolutely. I mean again, you're like starting this bicycle business, essentially like starting selling them, and to take on that amount of inventory, wanting to sell it. And what's really interesting and I'll let you get into the story is to actually go ahead and start to sell these sorts of things. He essentially needed to come through and come up with some spectacles to get folks' attention so that they would know about his bike shop.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and this is the part that I had actually heard about him before. I think it was maybe a kid watching History Channel or something. But yeah, the problem was he got the merchandise. He got the merchandise, got it back to Indianapolis. He had no money to sell these bikes or to really promote them, rather to sell them. So he started coming up with these grand schemes to capture the public's attention so people would flock to his bicycle shop. One of the first grand schemes that he had he strung a tightrope between two buildings in downtown indianapolis and rode a bicycle across the tightrope which is absolutely wild, and this is gonna be.
Speaker 1:I don't even know if you know this about me. So in college you had bicycle no, not not a bicycle tightropist, but I, uh I went to school at like a very hippie, liberal arts school in northern vermont. Do you go to clown college? No, but I got very, I got very into slacklining okay and uh, I got really good at it, like I in my prime I could walk like a 150 foot long a 150 foot long slackline so you can laugh at me, but that's really difficult to do.
Speaker 1:You're not going to find any people I can't, I can't slackline at all I also.
Speaker 1:I also have experience highlining one time, um, so I was in the slight aside. I was in the utah, in the desert in utah, in the moab area, um, and there's a famous highlining area there, um, I was really good at slacklining on the highline. I basically could, like scoot out a little bit and then I was like yeah, no, this isn't happening. I took one fall and I was like nope, nope, um, but it was like 500 feet in the air.
Speaker 2:Would you slackline across two 10-story buildings?
Speaker 1:Probably not. I mean I'd be happy to try, but there's no way I'm riding a bike across one. That's. The point I'm trying to make is like I know how difficult it is to like walk across something when it's like close to the ground, but when you put yourself on top of a really tall building on a bike, it starts to be a little bit crazy here's the other kicker.
Speaker 2:Uh, there were no real safety precautions during this stunt, he just wore a padded suit. Yeah, just in case in case.
Speaker 1:So he would, uh, essentially be like a smushed body, and pretty much on the ground. Okay, got it that's wild.
Speaker 2:Uh, the stunts. Well, that one was pretty grand, didn't quite end there. Uh, one of the stunts he he made a 20 foot bicycle and he had to board the bicycle from the second floor window of a building and then he rode it through downtown indianapolis it's also very fun.
Speaker 1:Got a lot of attention.
Speaker 2:I would love to see somebody do something like that today. Yeah, um, another one that he did. He released, uh, over a thousand balloons in indianapolis and a hundred of those balloons contained a number and you could, if you found that balloon later, uh, you could take that number to his shop and redeem it for a free bicycle. So also something pretty pretty creative, Good, good one.
Speaker 2:Uh, my favorite is uh. He also went to the top of one of the tall buildings in Indianapolis and he just just chunked a bicycle off the roof to a crowd of spectators, obviously not directly under, but near and uh.
Speaker 1:The first person to collect the wreckage and take it back to a shop got a free bicycle I really, really wish that these sorts of like that there was some sort of this sort of thing going on today. I just feel like marketing today is so boring in comparison to this. I mean just like, yeah, we're just gonna throw a bunch of money at ads on youtube or on whatever, and it's just like not, I don't know, this is way more exciting yeah, nothing.
Speaker 2:Nothing really matches this. I mean, maybe the closest thing is like what red bull does pretty regularly yeah, yeah or, you know, elon musk shooting a tesla roadster into space.
Speaker 1:That's fair, it's probably pretty close, but I don't think you see this quite as often, right, definitely not to this extent.
Speaker 2:Yeah um, the reason why him throwing the bicycle off was my favorite one is because, uh, at the end of it, the police came to a shop and they're like, hey, uh, you can't do this. Like you absolutely can't do this, it's a safety hazard. Uh, you drew too big of a crowd.
Speaker 2:You threw metal off of a building yeah, you could have hurt somebody and he's like, okay, yeah, I won't do it, I won't do it. Well, then he put out a little while later, uh, an advertisement that he was going to do it again. So he got a bigger crowd because everybody knew the police were on to him. Uh, the police to prevent him. They knew what building he was going to. They staked out the building, had a complete perimeter around it, uh, to prevent him from doing it. That he still threw the bike off the building because he had arrived the previous day and camped out inside the building to evade the police and was able to escape via a back stairwell in a very movie fashion, escaped out of the building.
Speaker 2:The police went to his shop to confront him about it and when they got to his shop the phone was ringing. It was him from the police station where he had already turned himself in.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you can't, you can't like write that into a story. Yeah, that's, that's wild, it's so good.
Speaker 2:He just had this, this wild uh persona about him and, on top of all of this, he was about 19 years old during all of it.
Speaker 1:Wow, that's really impressive. It really is, yeah, starting a business and really really turning a lot more folks onto biking in general.
Speaker 2:Yeah, just the amount of work that he put in convincing somebody to give him so much money at the time or so much merchandise, and then all of these stunts, and then, yeah, being still around 19 years old was really really impressive, totally.
Speaker 1:We're going to jump right back into this episode in just a second, but first, if you have not liked this video or subscribed, please consider doing so. It helps us out quite a bit. Also, leave a comment, we love reading them absolutely.
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Speaker 1:You get lots of additional benefits for being a member on Patreon. All the information for that is in the description, but without further ado, let's jump back into the episode. All right, so we now know Carl Fisher did all these sorts of different things, but we started at the beginning of this saying that this person has had an impact that literally has affected all of us today, and all of that really starts with what was known as the Good Roads Movement.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and the Good Roads Movement was created by the League of American Wheelmen, which is a great name. I don't know if they're still around. It'd be amazing. If they are, we should look it up. But the League of American Wheelmen. They started the Good Roads Movement in the 1880s and their whole goal was to promote better roads for cycling. At the time, roads, especially just outside of the city, were nothing but mud trails. I mean, we're talking late 1800s. People didn't travel city to city by road.
Speaker 1:Right, and I mean like cars were not you know their early 1900s. It would have been like there might have been some cars on the road but they were not normal to see at all People, would you know? Wagons and horses and all that sort of stuff. But to get city to city we're mostly relying on the railroads at this point. This is before we gutted the railroads. Yes, it was before we gutted the railroads.
Speaker 2:It was a different era, very different era. This is only like 50 years after, you know, the wagon trains really stopped. Actually, I think the last wagon train was in the like 1860s yeah, this really isn't that long after wagons even stopped like crossing the, the plains, right, we have these roads and again, the roads just aren't great. The only way you got city to city was by rail. Right, so the good roads movement, um, they would go to state governments, they go to the federal government, they would go to, uh, other industrialists and say you know, this is, this is going to benefit you if you have better roads.
Speaker 1:But it was all in the name of, they wanted to have better cycling right, because, if you one more point on this is like, imagine, like biking down the bumpiest you know, even for those of you from austin uh, right now, like some of the roads in hyde park actually, if you get off of speedways, bike lanes are like hilariously potholed and bumpy and if you're riding on them you're just like going through everything.
Speaker 2:Imagine that times like 100 and I don't even know if you're bumping a lot, because if there's any rain, you're just sinking.
Speaker 2:Sinking that, yeah, that too there you go also roads at the time because horses were the only mode of really pulling things like covered in, covered in manure. So if you fell into this, if you're walking across it like it was just, it was just known that if you're gonna travel the roads, you're gonna be disgusting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, in fact, there is a an old saying that the usdot even has on their website about roads at the time that, uh, roads in the us were wholly unclassable, almost impassable, scarcely jackassable.
Speaker 1:Wow that's a, that's a. That was like part, that was a, a department of transportation, like saying well, it was a, it was a saying in the US the Department of.
Speaker 2:Transportation now has it on their website. Ah, I got you. Yeah, there wasn't really a.
Speaker 1:USDOT at the time. Okay, oh, that makes sense. Otherwise, hopefully there would be better roads, I guess.
Speaker 2:So I actually think that would make a really good t-shirt. Yes, we should make a vintage t-shirt Good Roads Movement. Have that on it, yeah for sure.
Speaker 1:Actually, this is a great plug before we continue on.
Speaker 1:Speaking of t-shirts, we may be doing other sorts of merch in the future, but we did have our first batch of stickers made. Yes, and I will personally see to it that a sticker is mailed to anyone who signs up for our Patreon. You can see a link to it down below, and I will also personally make sure that next week's episode is already available on patreon right now and this is me getting a week ahead on the editing. So again, if you want it, you know, once you sign up on patreon, I'll send you a direct message. You can send along an address and I will personally mail some transit tangent stickers which are brand new, uh out to you directly. So, um, there's that yeah, with that plug.
Speaker 2:Yeah, look at that plug. Um, yeah, so. So at the time, roads are terrible. We got, we established that, uh, the good roads movement wasn't really gaining a lot of traction, and so they started to look, uh, to other people to help broaden their coalition to convince the government that more money needed to be spent on these roads. And the governments really weren't interested at the time, especially state governments.
Speaker 2:Railroads, they operated fine. If only we could go back to sort of that sentiment railroads are fine. So they began to look to broaden their coalition Around. This time is when Carl Fisher had joined the League of American Wheelmen, and about that time he was introduced to the Good Roads Movement as well, and so, being this gregarious, charismatic guy, he also took up this mission to help promote the Good Roads Movement and started talking to a lot of people about this. This was also about the time the first automobile really hit the market, and when we're talking about the first automobile, again, we're not talking about what you think of as as a car today, really. Uh, this was several companies that were trying to build the horseless carriages, and it was just that carriages.
Speaker 1:Isn't that such an amazing? I love that thing, but but yeah, this is like pre. You know this is long before the model t. Even like there's no mass assembly cars, they are extremely expensive only for the like ultra wealthy of the time and, I would imagine, extremely dangerous and clunky.
Speaker 2:Very dangerous, very clunky, very top heavy. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, not safe vehicles whatsoever, but they were the fastest thing on the road at the time, right, and Carl Fisher fisher being the speed demon sort of daredevil that he was, decided that he was going to get into automobiles as well this is the beginning of the the turn, the turn into the turn yeah so before we get into that, um, just to set it set the scene here our carl fisher, big bicycle enthusiast.
Speaker 2:His stunts got him recognition all over the country because these stories about throwing bicycles and doing the tightrope and everything else hit headlines all over and he really was a huge force in influencing people to buy bicycles in this late 1800s period. Because when you saw this story about this crazy guy in Indianapolis and you're in, you know Texas, maybe the time, maybe not as many people in Texas were doing this, but you're in another state and you see that you're like, oh, I'm going to get a bicycle. That sounds really cool. So he was this huge force at the time, really big at promoting bicycles, and now he got his first taste of speed on a car or automobile and it was kind of all over from there, right on a car or automobile and, uh, it was kind of all over from there, right.
Speaker 1:And I mean, at this point too, the good roads movement starts to turn into like not just cyclists, but it really turns into a coalition of, uh, horseless carriage owners and uh and cyclists kind of working together for this um, and it eventually kind of leads to really like the the of paving roads in the US for the most part, which is kind of wild to think about.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there was occasionally a cobblestone road here or there, but now we're talking about actually creating initially better dirt roads and with gravel crushed gravel, things like that A decade or so after this is when asphalt was really introduced for the first time. So this is really the laying the groundwork for what roads are, or the roads we have today. And, as you said, they started to build a broader coalition. They went to farmers.
Speaker 2:Farmers had trouble moving their stock into cities and at the time, they were really skeptical of the Good Roads movement because it was a bunch of elitist bicycle dandies in the cities and they didn't want anything to do with it. Right, it's funny how some of those sentiments still elitist bicycle dandies in the cities and they didn't want anything to do with it, right. It's funny how some of those sentiments still exist today. Um, but the bicyclist lobby and some of the car lobbies came in and said, well, if you have, uh, this new invention called a truck and it's on a road that's passable, then you can get your goods into the city. And so now the farming lobbies started to petition rural governments to say, hey, maybe we need to improve these roads and make this better. And this is where the public perception starts to shift on roads to it actually being a really big public good and something that can help with economic development in all these communities across the country, right.
Speaker 1:And I mean obviously like from this point. I mean the rest is kind of history, obviously, like the automobile eventually goes crazy and everyone you know. Uh, with the model T and Ford it all of a sudden becomes more affordable. Regular, everyday folks can now start to afford a car. Um, and you can obviously imagine that sentiment goes even more so and they're like yes, let's pave all of these roads everywhere.
Speaker 2:Um, yeah, yeah, yeah. And at this point, this is when carl fisher uh, calms down and has a very, uh peaceful life afterwards no, not at all.
Speaker 2:I was gonna say that I was like I didn't read the book. But no, not at all. This guy, uh, in his crazy ways, uh, continued on trajectory. What he did for bicycles he then did for cars. So not only has he impacted your life with what we know of as the bicycle industry today, he is very largely responsible for the wide adoption of cars as well. And one of the ways he did this when he got involved with the Good Roads movement, he started getting involved in the automotive industry. He opened up one of the first car dealerships in america.
Speaker 2:Uh, he continued his crazy stunts, because not only is he now throwing bicycles off of a roof, he threw an entire car off of a roof. Classic. The car went off of the roof, uh, came all the way down to the street and landed right side up and stayed right side up and then was driven away from the scene. Wow, yeah, and nobody really knows how he did it to this day. Interesting. So the guy is like equal parts showman and salesman and just like brilliant at all these things. Another thing he did he took a car and attached it to a giant balloon and flew it over Indianapolis and it landed in a field far, far away and, as the media reported, the same car that landed in the field got driven back into town. That's hilarious. The secret was he gutted the car and so it was like really light.
Speaker 2:And there was a duplicate car waiting where he landed and he drove that back in. So a little bit of deception there, but just overall just brilliant sales guy. But with all of these things and selling cars in the region, he got involved in car racing, which is one of the reasons why Indianapolis is such a big racing town Indianapolis 500.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the Indy 500 and the big racetrack there. He starts getting involved with a lot of car manufacturers and trying to figure out how to make cars safer for the public as well. At one point he was the primary investor and then took over presto light, which were the first headlights on cars which were operated with this gas canister a lot of old cars. You'll see a big gas canister on the side that has this um, the presto light gas and it lights, illuminates the the lanterns on the car without electricity.
Speaker 1:basically, you don't need to have like right, it's oil, or what did you say? It was oil. It's like oil and gas.
Speaker 2:Yeah, oil and gas it was like a special gas that's unsafe, yeah, but he made this huge fortune by selling car headlamps. At the time, the only way to illuminate your car was to have this little candle, and that doesn't really work, no. So using your car was really a daytime only activity, and he said, well, I want to drive at night. So they figured out how to drive at night. So he's instrumental in that side of it. As time goes on, he still wants to be able to take these long drives through the country and he's promoting this to other people in an effort to sell cars. So what does he do? He goes to other industrialists in this sphere and says to them hey, let's design a roadway that goes from one coast to the other.
Speaker 1:And the highway is born, and the highway is born, and that's not an exaggeration, right?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah, it really is. He was one of the first people to actually plan out the highway route from the East Coast to the West Coast and what would then become the Lincoln Highway, right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean there's the completion of the transformation, essentially from young cyclists to I just love the phrase horseless carriage. I think we should just start calling cars horseless carriage. I think we should start calling cars horseless carriages again. Yeah, um, we'll go for really everyone, please adopt doing that. We'll see, uh, if we can make make something of it again. But, um, yeah, from cyclist to uh automobile salesman to now, like literally, highway developer, yeah, um, and it that brings us full circle to to the big roads it does?
Speaker 2:it brings us full circle, back to the book.
Speaker 1:What's really interesting to me throughout all of this is especially hearing about how cyclists and drivers like really worked together in the very beginning of this and how unfortunately today they're they're very much at odds. In a lot of cases it feels like, and I don't think it necessarily needs to be that way no, I don't think so at all.
Speaker 2:I think there's a way for us all to peacefully coexist, and I think in some cities we're starting to get back to that place yeah, yeah, yeah, and in some cities we aren't in some cities we aren't right, and I mean like I.
Speaker 1:I actually do think for the most part in austin things are trending in the right direction.
Speaker 1:There are people who like love to hate on bike lanes still, but, um, you know, as we see, we said, we said this project all the time, so it's not like a broken record, but like, as we see, success stories with things like the barton springs road project, um, and with many other really successful bike lane projects throughout the city. You know people might complain about them at first, but then when there's you know it's like oh wow, the road is safer than it was before. I'm not really experiencing any new delays and now I don't have pesky bikers in my lane or, you know, I have to pass them over. It's like when you design a road the correct way and have the appropriate amount of space for people walking, biking and driving, it can make the experience for everybody better. And I feel like that gets lost on people in a lot of cases and like a negative example of this where it's like really going the other way, I'm seeing some wild stuff in Toronto, right now, it's really surprising about Toronto.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's really surprised me about Toronto.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, Toronto's mayor is trying to rip out bike lanes left and right. Very similar vibes to Houston's mayor, which we talked about in an episode a few weeks back from this, our Houston in a Day Using Only Public Transit episode. But yeah, it's just interesting to see the wide range of how this can go if the messaging goes awry.
Speaker 2:essentially, yeah, absolutely. I don't know, We'll see. Maybe when somebody argues with you that they don't want a bike lane, you should just say but the good roads movement yes. This road exists because of us. You damn horseless carriage drivers, but overall super interesting guy, like anybody in history history I'm sure there's something problematic in there. Um, he went on to help develop the dixie highway. He went on to develop the first resort area of miami beach, which strange combination of all sorts of got destroyed by hurricane.
Speaker 2:He moved up to montauk, he developed a huge uh development trying to make montauk a uh, a resort town, uh. But then he kind of ended his life in poverty around 65 years old when he passed away of natural causes when I say ended his life, he died of natural causes Crazy, crazy life. And somebody who now you know a little bit more about Totally how we got to where we are today.
Speaker 1:I didn't know all of these. We had talked about this a little bit before, but I think it was an interesting different topic to try to cover here. And, as always, if you've got ideas for topics, episodes, if you liked this, if you didn't like this, definitely let us know in the comments below. Also, thank you so much for watching everything. It's been a very busy year of transitangents. We've got a lot more in store coming into 2025. Do you like that rhyme? A lot more in store, wow, um, uh. If.
Speaker 1:If you haven't liked this video already, please go ahead and do so. It helps us out quite a bit. Leave a comment, that sort of thing. And if you want to help us out directly, the best way to do so is on patreon. You'll get access to early episodes, ad free episodes, some extra bonus content and for one, you'll actually have next week's episode already loaded in there for you. If you want to keep going and watch the next one, you can do that right now, but without further ado. Enjoy the rest of your holiday season, happy New Year's and we will see you all. Wow, that really made Chris laugh.
Speaker 2:Sorry, no, I was about to jump into Trace Transit Tangent Tuesday. Yeah, okay, but you said, enjoy the rest of your holiday.
Speaker 1:Enjoy the rest of your holiday and enjoy the rest of your Transit.
Speaker 2:Tangent Tuesday.