"She’s got a ticket to ride" The Beatles sang, but we are far from ancient Rome, wouldn't you say?

Don't be so sure! The English verb "to ride" first meant "to travel on a horse." In the last century, the word expanded to include movement on a bike, in a car or even a surf board.

The English verb, along with the German verb "reiten", both come from the same celtic and germanic root "reidh-" that precisely designated the action of movement, on a horse or in a wagon, and by extension just general travel.

Distinguished travelers, Celts crossed Europe many times from the Bronze age through Rome's expansion beyond the Alps. As Germanic peoples, they traveled in masses. The whole people would move, men on horseback or on foot and elders, women and children in wagons, whose most known ones were called «re(i)da ».

This "re(i)da" was adopted by latin, possibly from the Celts who had settled in Italia. We find this word in latin litterature and famous Caesar's "The Gallic Wars." .

The general writes specifically:

« Tum demum necessario Germani suas copias castris eduxerunt (..), omnemque aciem suam raedis et carris circumdederunt, ne qua spes in fuga relinqueretur. »(1,51)

Gaul reda, then roman raedae, were four wheeled wagons. It thus seems that the "carri" spoken of by Caesar were just two wheeled wagons, like the cisia (sing. cisium).
The roman "carpenti" were covered, and the benna are considered the closest ancestors
of the French "bennes" while the plaustrum was a kind of tank-wagon.

Raeda’s cousin, the latin veredus, a mail or travel horse, comes also from Gaulish (uoredos).

Rome just added a greek prefix (para), and the low-empire paraveredus
was born. It was then successfully passed to the French as the medieval palefroi and
the Germans as the pferd that is still in use today!

Publius Memmius Albucius