3 ms·

What about the large number of people who live in places where this isn't possible?

• thejohnconway 3y ago
  The problem is that cars made it possible for people to live in those sorts of places, cheaply enough. Not a solution, just an observation. If cars weren't really a thing, people would live in denser communities with walkable services (I include rural communities in this. Pre-car villages are pretty dense, and have, you know, things like shops, etc.).
  • tayo42 3y ago
    Is that really true? We were getting around with horses before cars. You have to go back real far to get to a point where we weren't getting around faster than walking
    • eesmith 3y ago
      Horses aren't that much faster than walking. Horses can go about 30 miles/day. (That's the reason the Spanish mission towns in the US west were spaced about 30 miles apart.) That's also about what people can walk in a day (Appalachian Trail through-hikers do about 3 miles per hour). Now, trained trail horses can go far further in a day, but they require specialized training, food, and care, making them a very expensive plow-horse or cart-horse.
• lotsofpulp 3y ago
  That is the intractable political problem. Short term pain is unavoidable to get to the long term fix, and voters have no tolerance for short term pain (still measured in decades).
• pharmakom 3y ago
  Reversing decades of creeping car dependency will be difficult.