If There Had Never Been Automobiles

theprestige said:
Auto manufacturers are private companies, too. How come they got the "subsidies" and not the Interurbans?
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The auto manufacturers were able to lobby more effectively.

However, once the reliable, economically affordable car came into mass production the American public was hooked. People who had never been 10 miles from their home could routinely travel 20 miles away and return the same day. For most people the convenience of the personal automobile far outweighs any benefits of mass transportation.
 
theprestige said:
Auto manufacturers are private companies, too. How come they got the "subsidies" and not the Interurbans?
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historically, its easier to sell an indirect subsidy to the public. Roads exist for the people to drive on not for the car makers to sell a product. Rail subsidies pretty much have to be direct to rail company.
 
Steam powered cars?
Electric cars?
Bigger (steam/electric) railway networks?
Canals still in use for non-urgent goods?
Slower pace of life?
 
You know, "Imagine there's no Buicks" was John Lennon's first stab at the lyrics for his iconic song, but he couldn't make it work.
 
Well, wasn't this excellent news for beasts of burden?

Horses hate being attached to carriages. They hate being ridden. They try to buck humans off.

Anything that eliminated the abuse of animals is a good thing, no?
 
sackett said:
Suppose that Otto and Duryea and Daimler and the others had stood back from their proof-of-concept vehicle and remarked, wiping their hands on oily cotton waste, “Welp. It works, but it’ll never pay if it can’t carry freight.” Then they’d set out to find bigger powerplants (Herr Diesel was doing interesting work about then) and embark on a scaling-up project, and

And the idea of the small private motor vehicle would never have occurred to anybody, and today that cursed thing, the automobile, wouldn’t exist.

I have nothing against trucks and buses, and I think they’d fill their niches, but the vast, unsightly, wasteful infrastructure that has grown around the private car would never be needed, or conceived of, to keep large IC-engined machines on the road.

Imagine a world without cars. How would things be different?
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I'd be a lot fitter having kept up the cycling.
 
Attempting a reply to the hypothesis (yes, others are right that the car would have been inevitable):

Technology would have reverted to pre-1900 speed. Small town mentalities and lifestyles would have continued, never getting the boost that high mobility offered. You'd only be drawing workers from the neighborhood pool, so the scale of any tech goes way down. Education would be much poorer; you could only go to schools within walking distance, or at least within the teacher's walking distance. Your social world would be formed by those in your tight circle.

Homes would be significantly lower quality and state of repair. Just getting a caprenter or plumber to cart his hundreds of pounds of tools to a house would be kind of a major undertaking.

I live on an island that is a thriving and popular summer resort. It would be a virtual ghost town in the summer, as travelling miles across swamps would be far too cumbersome for a day trip.

The big one I guess would be a much lower life expectancy. Y'all ain't driving to the doctor with any kind of regularity if he does not live nearby. And no ambulance to come get you or get you to the hospital. Trying to travel in bad weather would leave a lot of bodies lying in ditches.

Basically, it's the city people that could get by with mass transit and maybe a bike. One mile outside the congestion of a city and you'd find that it's a very different world.
 
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I started this thread expecting to enjoy a buffet of imagination and speculation.

As can be seen, hardly anybody with a speck of vision has posted. ISFFers (we were JREFFers back then) seem to think that technological societies can't exist without consumer-grade private cars. For them, it's either the stink of gasoline or the stink (and flies) of horse manure. Odd, I must say.

Brain washing comes to mind.
 
Instead of insulting others and asking them to write feel good stories for you, why don't you recount your own vision?

Totally unclear on what this giggling schoolgirl vision would be if we removed something that gives us great practicality and freedom. Are we going to think about how wonderful things would be without electricity next? Then antibiotics?
 
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Oh tee hee, but you DO make me giggle. How could you feel insulted, dear country boy? However, if you MUST demand serious treatment:

Clearly, a world without cars would be cleaner, vastly more compact, less poisoned, and better preserved. And greener, and better farmed. Cities would not spread out in sprawling blights, their services scattered piecemeal.

Remember, the private automobile and its ugly high- and lowways are a mass transit system, and it would be hard to design a worse one, or one more wasteful of resources. Surely you can imagine better systems -- not that you need to, because they've existed longer than the car.

But I suspect that I've said all this years ago, and probably to no purpose.
 
I don't have an honest answer to this, but it reminds of a joke I heard a long time ago about a son trying to get a car.

Father: you need to cut your hair!

Son: Jesus had long hair.

Father: And he walked everywhere he went.
 
sackett said:
I started this thread expecting to enjoy a buffet of imagination and speculation.

As can be seen, hardly anybody with a speck of vision has posted. ISFFers (we were JREFFers back then) seem to think that technological societies can't exist without consumer-grade private cars. For them, it's either the stink of gasoline or the stink (and flies) of horse manure. Odd, I must say.

Brain washing comes to mind.
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I posted in a thread many years about about what modern history and the world today would be like if there had never been any fossil fuels. That would be a good starting point for discussing a world without cars specifically (especially since wood burning trains and ships existed first, but the limitations of the wood supply would have precluded most wood-powered private cars). If only there were some way of seeking, hunting, scanning, sifting, combing, foraging, questing for, or otherwise casting about for old thread titles or post titles.
 
Myriad said:
I posted in a thread many years about about what modern history and the world today would be like if there had never been any fossil fuels. That would be a good starting point for discussing a world without cars specifically (especially since wood burning trains and ships existed first, but the limitations of the wood supply would have precluded most wood-powered private cars). If only there were some way of seeking, hunting, scanning, sifting, combing, foraging, questing for, or otherwise casting about for old thread titles or post titles.
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Everything would chug along nicely until nuclear-powered steam engines replaced the wood-fired ones, and the sackett's pretty little world would be blighted by electric cars.

Also there would be nuclear plants *everywhere*.
 
sackett said:
Oh tee hee, but you DO make me giggle. How could you feel insulted, dear country boy? However, if you MUST demand serious treatment:
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Well, saying we are all brainwashed and none have any vision is solidly on the insulting side of the spectrum, yeah. So let's see how you fare:
sackett said:
Clearly, a world without cars would be cleaner, vastly more compact, less poisoned, and better preserved. And greener, and better farmed. Cities would not spread out in sprawling blights, their services scattered piecemeal.

Remember, the private automobile and its ugly high- and lowways are a mass transit system, and it would be hard to design a worse one, or one more wasteful of resources. Surely you can imagine better systems -- not that you need to, because they've existed longer than the car.

But I suspect that I've said all this years ago, and probably to no purpose.
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Pretty vague, almost meaningless. The 'vision' I put up actually contains practical realities.

But what are you actually asking? Your OP asks us to imagine "the small private motor vehicle" not existing, and later narrowing to the ICE car. I focused on the former, and we would be in bad shape on net, methinks, for the reasons I envisioned above. Personal transportation revolutionized society in ways we often overlook and take for granted. So do you allow for non-ICE for personal transport? Then ya sure, electric vehicles would have taken hold much sooner. Your vision seems to require the roadway system to still exist as-is, as you allow (for whatever reason) shipping as a necessity for modern convenience. Personal cars are actually the last in line for shipping, whether goods or people and their services. I'm not seeing how you remove the most direct part of the equation and don't see the problem it generates?
 
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