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I posted this because I started thinking about what it must’ve been like living in a world where we only had horses and trains and what the absolute freedom tha

I posted this because I started thinking about what it must’ve been like living in a world where we only had horses and trains and what the absolute freedom that cars brought must have felt like. It must have felt miraculous. There’s a lot of conversation in this thread about all of the horrors cars have brought into this world, and I can certainly attest that I’m a person who greatly wishes most cities were modeled like European cities with abundant public transit and walkable neighborhoods. I also really liked the “hacker” nature of Winton who sounds like an SV developer from the early-mid ‘10s. I miss the days when we just built shit and shared (knowing full well the days when we _really_ just built shit and shared happened like 40 years prior).

dragontamer 3y ago
Do you know what 100,000 horses did to the streets of New York in the 1890s? Poop. Lots, and lots, and lots of Poop. Not only that, but to feed those horses, you needed a horse to pull a carriage full of horsebread (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horsebread https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horsebread). Those horses that pulled the horsebread into the city also pooped. IIRC, 30% of all traffic was horsebread, supporting the other traffic that was going on. I guarantee you. A horse has more environmental impact than gasoline. In particular, one-ton of gasoline moves more gasoline than one-ton of horsebread moved horsebread.
- dclowd9901 3y ago
  I’m not sure if that’s true. We’d have to account for all the externalities of “harvesting” a gallon of gasoline and frankly that seems like an actually difficult thing to do (either unintentionally or entirely intentionally). Regardless, it still seems like it would’ve been incredible to live in a time where cars didn’t exist, and then they did exist. I have to imagine the next leap like that would be around the time humans couldn’t regularly travel off planet, and then they could. Probably outside of my lifetime.

dragontamer 3y ago

Do you know what 100,000 horses did to the streets of New York in the 1890s? Poop. Lots, and lots, and lots of Poop. Not only that, but to feed those horses, you needed a horse to pull a carriage full of horsebread (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horsebread https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horsebread). Those horses that pulled the horsebread into the city also pooped. IIRC, 30% of all traffic was horsebread, supporting the other traffic that was going on. I guarantee you. A horse has more environmental impact than gasoline. In particular, one-ton of gasoline moves more gasoline than one-ton of horsebread moved horsebread.

dclowd9901 3y ago
I’m not sure if that’s true. We’d have to account for all the externalities of “harvesting” a gallon of gasoline and frankly that seems like an actually difficult thing to do (either unintentionally or entirely intentionally). Regardless, it still seems like it would’ve been incredible to live in a time where cars didn’t exist, and then they did exist. I have to imagine the next leap like that would be around the time humans couldn’t regularly travel off planet, and then they could. Probably outside of my lifetime.