4 ms·

Last mile can be resolved with drones and bikes. I wouldnt even be opposed to consider going back to horses.

swores 3y ago
Are horses actually environmentally friendly? I know that having a pet dog can be one of, if not the most, un-environmentally friendly things a person can do due to the amount they eat, so I could imagine horses having the same problem and not being as good as electric cars yet alone electric bikes, but I don't know anything about horses so maybe they're very efficient eaters? I do know that back before cars, places like NYC had many tens of thousands of horses working in the streets, leading to huge amounts of horse shit everywhere (so much so that even though it does have industrial uses, it's value was practically zero), plus something like half a dozen horses dying on the streets every day and being left to putrefy - so some logistical improvements compared to last time needed at the very least, though 120 years ago people weren't caring much about the fuel efficiency comparisons.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- aksss 3y ago
  Yep, horses are massively expensive to own. Aside from required caloric intake, think living space, waste disposal, pests, specialized care (farrier), vet bills, tack, grooming. Ugh.
- dragontamer 3y ago
  Horses are far more inefficient at carrying than cars. That's why we switched to cars so quickly. This caused a cascading set of improvement. Horses needed *literally* tons of horse-bread to function well. And those *literal* tons of horse-bread turned into *literal* tons of horse-poop. https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-is-horse-bread https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-is-horse-bread > According to some estimates, medieval horses consumed about 20 pounds of food per day. Note: a "day" of travel was ~30 miles back then. It gets worse: you need horse-bread (and the waste / horse-poop) to _move_ horse bread into the cities, where all the horses were. Alternatively, consider that one-gallon of gasoline (~6 lbs) would also travel 30 miles today, but also carry far more load. What, our typical car is like 200 horsepower today? So one gallon of gasoline is roughly the strength of a 200-horse carriage?. Its an absurd comparison point. We're realistically looking at 1-gallon of gasoline (and its associated waste product) vs something like 4000-lbs (ie: 2 tons) of horse bread (and its associated waste product/2-tons of horse poop). ------------ Gasoline, for all of its faults, largely turns into CO2. Which escapes into the atmosphere and floats away. But imagine that for every gallon of gasoline you used today you created 20lbs of horse-poop somewhere instead. Horse poop is something you'd need to scrub out of the streets every night, and it would infect the local rivers each time it rained. The idea of horses being more environmentally friendly is a laughable myth. They're incredibly dirty creatures, and the poop problem alone would cause a significant rise in infections above-and-beyond anything this microplastics problem has caused, I promise.

Are horses actually environmentally friendly? I know that having a pet dog can be one of, if not the most, un-environmentally friendly things a person can do due to the amount they eat, so I could imagine horses having the same problem and not being as good as electric cars yet alone electric bikes, but I don't know anything about horses so maybe they're very efficient eaters? I do know that back before cars, places like NYC had many tens of thousands of horses working in the streets, leading to huge amounts of horse shit everywhere (so much so that even though it does have industrial uses, it's value was practically zero), plus something like half a dozen horses dying on the streets every day and being left to putrefy - so some logistical improvements compared to last time needed at the very least, though 120 years ago people weren't caring much about the fuel efficiency comparisons.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
aksss 3y ago
Yep, horses are massively expensive to own. Aside from required caloric intake, think living space, waste disposal, pests, specialized care (farrier), vet bills, tack, grooming. Ugh.
dragontamer 3y ago
Horses are far more inefficient at carrying than cars. That's why we switched to cars so quickly. This caused a cascading set of improvement. Horses needed *literally* tons of horse-bread to function well. And those *literal* tons of horse-bread turned into *literal* tons of horse-poop. https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-is-horse-bread https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-is-horse-bread > According to some estimates, medieval horses consumed about 20 pounds of food per day. Note: a "day" of travel was ~30 miles back then. It gets worse: you need horse-bread (and the waste / horse-poop) to _move_ horse bread into the cities, where all the horses were. Alternatively, consider that one-gallon of gasoline (~6 lbs) would also travel 30 miles today, but also carry far more load. What, our typical car is like 200 horsepower today? So one gallon of gasoline is roughly the strength of a 200-horse carriage?. Its an absurd comparison point. We're realistically looking at 1-gallon of gasoline (and its associated waste product) vs something like 4000-lbs (ie: 2 tons) of horse bread (and its associated waste product/2-tons of horse poop). ------------ Gasoline, for all of its faults, largely turns into CO2. Which escapes into the atmosphere and floats away. But imagine that for every gallon of gasoline you used today you created 20lbs of horse-poop somewhere instead. Horse poop is something you'd need to scrub out of the streets every night, and it would infect the local rivers each time it rained. The idea of horses being more environmentally friendly is a laughable myth. They're incredibly dirty creatures, and the poop problem alone would cause a significant rise in infections above-and-beyond anything this microplastics problem has caused, I promise.