If There Had Never Been Automobiles

Been thinking about this more and if automobiles had not been invented then it's likely that most of us would have late-Victorian travelling habits.

Those that can afford the time and cost would be able to travel long distances in relative comfort but day-to-day life for most people would be a local affair. Mrs Don and I may choose to go to the local town to do our shopping but for many people this would be too time consuming and/or difficult and instead would shop in the village.

Our social lives would be much more geographically constrained. We couldn't decide on a whim to travel 20km to go to a local pub or restaurant or even friends for the evening. Visiting friends in Bristol wouldn't be a matter of jumping in the car an being there 30 minutes later. Instead it would be a multi-modal 2-3 hour journey.

We'd be living in an internet-age Larkrise to Candleford :D
 
I understand your premise but it's a bit of a clumsy way to go about it as seen by the responses. Your premise that someone could invent a bus or truck but not a car is silly and that's what people responded to.

Whether or not demand for personal cars could have been less if public transportation was more prevalent is plausible. However, in the USA there were a couple factors against that. One is the size of the country and how spread out things are. The other is that in a market economy the car makers want to sell as many cars as they can. In the USA they were phenomenally successful at that, in part thanks to the building of roads by various local, state and federal governments.
 
I'm telling you: Electric Horses.

Then you could hitch a wagon to them and ride in comfort. Eventually they would be manufactured already attached to the wagon. Then people would want faster and faster electric horse wagons and they would replace the legs with wheels...

Ultimately there would be a huge network of carriageways and service stations, traffic jams and massive road fatalities etc. People would be trying to build hypotheticals about how great the world could be if no one had ever invented electric horses...
 
Much of our farming is dependent on machines with internal combustion engines. The farming would need so many horses that half the land would go to raising hay.
 
Tero said:
Much of our farming is dependent on machines with internal combustion engines. The farming would need so many horses that half the land would go to raising hay.
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There are a couple of solutions in the hypothetical....

Even in Victorian times there were stationary engines to power ploughs and other agricultural equipment. These could be refined and so on.

The machines could be powered from another source, electricity or steam.

They could be like busses, an exception to the "no cars" rule.
 
sackett said:
A disappointing collection of responses. Can nobody imagine a world without cars? The automobile is a mass transit system (an engineer had to point that out to me), and you could hardly design a worse one: wasteful, disruptive, dangerous, inefficient, and ugly. Surely you can envisage a past, and a present, in which the silliness of the small motor vehicle -- and in the hands of Mr. Average Man! -- would be evident to everyone.

My assumption, unspoken initially but pretty obvious, is that the world would be better off without the automobile. But I might be wrong about that. Can someone show how bicycles, trolleys, buses, trucks, and trains couldn't improve on the horseless carriage?

For example, how is a town like Amsterdam improved by the cars on its streets?
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Trucks, horse drawn carriages, bicycles, busses and so on all need roads/streets so even taking the car away we'd still have to have pretty much the same infrastructure we need to today.

Just looking at one necessity - food - that still needs to get to individual homes. Would everything come via delivery truck to your doorstep? If it did then you'd need the same road outside your house as you have today. If not then people will still need to transport their food from a supermarket to their home. To increase public transport to deal with people needing a door to door system would be immensely wasteful. Of course it would also necessitate shopping going back to what you personally can manage to carry, so weekly shopping goes out the window and someone in a household will be having to shop 3 or more times a week.

And as others have said given engines in trucks etc. I really can't see how you could avoid smaller poweredpersonal vehicles being developed
 
If public transport was always going to be obsolete, why did the automobile industry have to work so very hard to sabotage it?
 
Darat said:
Not following you? :confused:
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Sorry, pressed post halfway through and then wandered off like a tool.

Some of it's conspiracy, some of it's confirmed. The automobile industry, in order to move people off public transport* and onto roads** is reported to have purchased, and run into the ground, public transport industries.


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





*All of which has to be funded by the provider

**The creation of roads can be abdicated to the government.
 
Public transport is one thing, but it'll never be as cool with da ladies as your own muscle car, right?

"Yeah, you go take her on the bus, Jerome. Enjoy. Come on, Suzie, hop in. We're outta here!"


Humanity is very good at providing individual-sized production of desirable stuff. Water distribution? Eh, a well will do. Water waste sewers? Nah, a septic field will do. Natural gas piping to the house? Meh, a tank of fuel oil in back filled up once a year gets the job done. Electrica...nah, a small generator works.

Heck, I hear photo cells are all the rage on your roof today! And there's even this newfangled thing called fireplace for those in desperate need. Or, if you're really advanced, well, you aren't the only potbellied thing sitting around!
 
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3point14 said:
If public transport was always going to be obsolete, why did the automobile industry have to work so very hard to sabotage it?
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Public transport works very well for transporting people within and between urban environments. It works a lot well in sparsely populated areas. It would be interesting to see how mass transport would have developed in Los Angeles without General Motors' involvement - indeed how Los Angeles itself would have developed.

In many cities (London included) the commuting costs of those who use public transport are subsidised by those who do not. On one hand this is a sensible move to keep the wheels of industry turning but on the other it encourages people to live a long way from where they work safe in the knowledge that they can commute time and cost effectively instead of living closer to work or more actively exploring the options for remote working. It also means that jobs can increasingly be concentrated in certain areas with all that entails in terms of (un)affordable housing and quality of life.

Truly, IMO, a double-edged sword.
 
Odd, how difficult it seems to be for many people to picture life without private cars. Maybe the idea frightens them.

I call that odd because the world without cars was, in my lifetime, still within living memory. Further, some of you younger gobblers may well live to see a world in which private autos are vanishing or even gone.

The automobile as a mass transit system suffers from inflexibility, not at the unimportant level of the individual owner (although people trying to evacuate from a disaster area might, sitting parked on a clogged freeway, reconsider even that), but on a larger scale. The passenger car as we’ve contrived it is of little use for serious haulage, even when governments try to commandeer them.

What got me thinking (okay, speculating) about cars and what they do to the world was trying to estimate the millions of hectares of land used up by highways, interchanges, parking lots, and garages, all of them necessary to handle car traffic. Yes, I know, trucks and busses need roads too, and other paved infrastructure. But because of their inherent efficiency, their flexibility in fact, they’ll use up far less real estate. As for rural passengers, heck, who says a bus line has to be a public utility? If the farmers (and yes, worriers, there’ll still be tractors and combines) need bus service, somebody will come along to provide it.

Ditto with rail, which of course must have right of way, and that means land use. But surely high-volume, in-demand rail can be accommodated more economically than the helter-skelter flow of passenger cars. (One idea I had was vertical double-tracking: one track at ground level and the other one elevated, in places where land is valuable. Hey, beats trenching out eight-lane autobahns!)

Without private cars, cities would be more compact, and suburbs, if any, would be more nucleated – which is simply saying more compact. Intra- and interurban rail existed long before cars, exists now, and will continue to exist. I remember how pleasant it was to take the tram, yes, a tootling little trolley, from Delft to Scheviningen, through the trees sometimes. Remarkable how carefree life can be with no damn car to worry about.

See my location? Motor City? A product of the private car and its proliferation. It’s not the awful place outsiders insist on picturing – but ‘Troit keeps pouring out automobiles, and never seems to look any better for it.
 
sackett said:
Odd, how difficult it seems to be for many people to picture life without private cars. Maybe the idea frightens them.

I call that odd because the world without cars was, in my lifetime, still within living memory.
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Maybe it's frightening. I doubt it, though. As you say, there was a world without cars not too long ago. And what did those people do? They invented cars. They knew what it was like to live without cars. They knew how to get around. They knew how to make things work. They knew how to live without cars. And as soon as the people of that world had a choice... They chose cars.
 
sackett said:
Odd, how difficult it seems to be for many people to picture life without private cars. Maybe the idea frightens them.

I call that odd because the world without cars was, in my lifetime, still within living memory.
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Maybe it's frightening. I doubt it, though. As you say, there was a world without cars not too long ago. And what did those people do? They invented cars. They knew what it was like to live without cars. They knew how to get around. They knew how to make things work. They knew how to live without cars. And as soon as the people of that world had a choice... They chose cars.

I don't think it's fear that keeps us from going back to a world without cars. I think it's agreement with our ancestors, who saw cars as a step forward into a better world.
 
The idea of being without doesn't frighten me. It just seems unrealistic at least in my life time of another 20-30 years.

The automobile had a massive social impact. It meant you did not have to live close to where you worked.

Even if you have good mass transit that reaches out, one has to get to the depot/station to get on that mass transit. Without cars, that's just substituting one city for another.
 
Darat said:
Trucks, horse drawn carriages, bicycles, busses and so on all need roads/streets so even taking the car away we'd still have to have pretty much the same infrastructure we need to today.
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Roman armies need roads to move about. That's were you got that infrastructure in the first place. :)
 
sackett said:
Odd, how difficult it seems to be for many people to picture life without private cars. Maybe the idea frightens them.

I call that odd because the world without cars was, in my lifetime, still within living memory. Further, some of you younger gobblers may well live to see a world in which private autos are vanishing or even gone.
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Then you should have a care old-timer, and keep in mind what happened to our Joey when he touched that third-rail known as... private automobile ownership. :mad:


:D:D:D

Oh, and... you're being delusional ;)
 
I make my living in the Hot Rod industry, it's utterly unimaginable to try and think of a world without cars. That'd be more like a nightmare, like that twilight Zone episode with Burgess Meredith, where he finally gets the chance to do nothing but read and then he breaks his glasses.
Why not just go back to the age of the plague as well?
That's seems to be one of the reasons different forms of transport were invented, a lot of people had other places to go. Over time, as information was shared at a greater rate our knowledge grew exponentially. We made machines, vehicles and communication devices, which in time evolved to the present state. Shared information led to cures and vaccines, and from such, billions of lives have been saved.
Sure, we've also vastly improved how to wage war as well, but I think overall the pros heavily outweigh the cons.
 
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