this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2023
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Funny thing about horses - apparently when cities moved over to cars from horses they became safer. Because horses spook: and one spooked horse can spook the rest and you get a stampede.
Personally I'd rather be riding my horse from village to village over the hills - and I'm lucky enough to have had need to do that in real life. And I would prefer a city of bicycles to a city of cars. But my point (albeit meant casually) is that most of our solutions have downsides too, even the better-looking ones.
You seem cool enough / not carbrained that I'd like to suggest you to take a closer look at this. The perception of "horse -> car" as per transportation is pretty prevalent but it doesn't really hold up in the sense this fun fact is often touted, it's born out of a car based status quo applied backwards to horses mostly.
I'm happy to merit your insufficient-car-brains certification :-)
What quite do you mean? That horses weren't used in the same way or for the same demographic as cars are now? Sure, and you also don't refill them every 200 miles from the nearest highway hay-station. (Well, kind of...) But there were still horses clustered in many cities for a lot of the time, right? Where now there are cars? And as transport such as did use the one mainly transitioned to the other. I don't suppose there's hard, quantitative data on car-induced vs horse-induced deaths/injuries within cities at certain eras, but maybe someone has that data somewhere!
Actually, to go another step from your point: I suppose if cars, in their same number and usage, were traded for horses, then besides the epic problem of feeding them all, many cities would be far more dangerous now from the great horde of horses marching through every day!
I'll start off here: eh, maybe. Certainly a lot more full of massive amounts of poop everywhere, that was a common problem even with not every man, woman and child a horse, it's where we got sidewalks from - so you could walk in not-poop.
Yes, but nowhere near the same extent. Check out old city street pictures from the 1910 and 1920s. Sure, you'll see cars, they had been invented and hell, you still see horses, except pretty much all of them barring the ones with cops on it are pulling some thing or another. And also there's trams and also there's just a buttload of people walking - which is what most of them did.
The point I'm getting at is the notion that we basically just replaced horses with cars, for the most part, but that's ahistorical. We've replaced horses and trams and walking and cycling - all of which were done a lot - with cars. People used and could use a variety of options, now, eh, not so much, they're not really viable for a lot of people.
But then that's not because cars are so inherently great for any and all transporation, it's just we've built cities to accomodate cars first, foremost and nigh exclusively, to the detriment of everything else. You wouldn't find me arguing to bring back the horses, but trams, cycling, walking? Absolutely.
Because we have pretty much gained nothing from cars. People still have roughly the same commute as before - they just live further away and travel the same time, except now the societal cost of doing that is 10x the price per trip. People have a time budget for travel, not a distance budget, and that's stayed pretty much the same.
Fair point
I don't think that's true, though. Cars bring a lot of utility; even the opportunity to live further from the workplace is not 'no benefit'. After all, bicycles were hailed as the liberators of women, for much the same reason: ordinary women could have the freedom to travel further. I think what's happened is that every gain is an opportunity for benefit; but also an opportunity for the greedy and powerful (not to mention lazy, deceitful, foolish, or any combination of the above) to take advantage of other people (and themselves) through. So (for example) cars bring the opportunity to work further from your house; and now many people are forced into living further from their work because employers/infrastructure expect it to be possible. Cars make it much easier to visit far-away relatives for festivals; now Americans must line up every year on Reddit to moan about Thanksgiving politics.
I will agree with you it'd be better if we restructured most transport away from cars and that we have - in principle - the options for a good solution (trams, bicycles, better-arranged-cities, etc). Still, what would the American dream be, without driving to your gym every week so you can run on the treadmill for half an hour ;-p