Pooley and colleagues place everyday mobility inside a long historical frame, showing that family formation changes travel practices differently according to available technologies, social norms, risk perceptions and gendered responsibilities. Their evidence combines travel life histories with historical diaries, allowing routine movement to be analysed across more than a century without reducing mobility to spectacular journeys. The article’s key contribution is the insistence that ordinary travel is historically variable: walking, cycling, public transport and car dependence are shaped not only by infrastructure but by changing expectations about care, safety, time and appropriate behaviour. Methodologically, qualitative life histories recover decisions and constraints that aggregate travel statistics cannot explain, while the authors explicitly acknowledge the limits of retrospective testimony. The wider bridge is to mobilities history: everyday routes become social evidence, revealing how family, technology and cultural norms reorganise spatial practice over generations.