It was terrible. People bought cars anyway because it was still better than walking.
In 1919, the US Army ran a truck convoy from Washington DC to San Francisco. It took them 56 (!) travel days, driving 10 1/4 hours per day. The roads were lousy in 1919. But even then, it was better than a mule train.
People bought into cars early because they could get around quickly to more destinations, not because walking was uniquely awful.
In Philadelphia's paper in the early 1900s there was a daily column about "pleasure drive" routes and constant advertisements appealing to new drivers with destinations near the city.
That advantage of being able to "get out of the city" is still there, but it's further and further away. For day to day life the experience of walking / transit / biking in a pre-car US city or a modern US city is somewhat comparable in terms of time and enjoyment.
However US cities and suburbs, due to car-centric scale, allow more people to live on larger plots of land.
Walking was uniquely awful in many situations as soon as the alternative of cars were available. Peoples' options were "get a car", "suffer what you now realize is awful", or "don't do those things". Unsurprisingly, many people chose the first option.
You think they - we - chose wrong. To put it charitably, we who disagree with you do not feel the need of your opinion on what we should want and should choose.
If you have a better way, show us the better way, and make us want it. Don't tell us the advantages we experience from having cars don't exist. We live them. Don't tell us the parts we enjoy don't exist. We experience them. Don't lecture us, entice us with something we perceive as more valuable.
Cars were better than horses, not walking, and you conveniently forgot the "use the streetcar/bus" option. Why is that?
I lived in the suburbs from West Mass, I lived in downtown Boston, I lived in Manhattan. Guess where I was the most miserable?
> Don't tell us the advantages we experience from having cars don't exist.
The point is less about "cars vs no cars", but car-centric suburbia development vs higher density urban planning. Do you live in the suburbs? Have you ever considered how much your lifestyle is subsidized by those who live downtown? Would you be willing to keep your car if it meant having to pay for all its externalities and extra infrastructure costs?
> entice us with something we perceive as more valuable.
Ask anyone in Amsterdam (which was in the 70s on its way to become as car centric as most North American cities) if they would like to go back to their ways.
> Would you be willing to keep your car if it meant having to pay for all its externalities and extra infrastructure costs?
This is such a weird line of inquiry.
Yes! It is the largest single QoL improvement I have after my house.
Almost everyone who can afford it buys a car as soon as they can. Yes, even in the UK, even in Europe. It is such a huge boon.
If cars were made more expensive I would sooner work harder to keep the car than give it up.
I don't know what sort of answer you're expecting? Why would I possibly not want a car? The only reason I can think of is if it became so expensive that just paying a personal driver was cheaper.
First, kind of weird of you to associate the idea of having no car to losing your penis. I'd joke about it, but I learned to avoid making jokes about potential psychological issues.
Second, I don't think you are aware of how much of cities' financial troubles in North America are related to the budget imbalance between suburbs and downtowns.
Third, I'm talking about all the externalities. It's not just gas or street parking. It's also the cost of all those parking lots doing nothing productive. It's the health cost of having an overweight and sedentary population who can't even walk to get groceries. It's the cost of increased air pollution that brings hundreds of thousands of people to the hospital with respiratory issues. It's the cost to a city's economy that wastes a sizeable portion of its GDP to car traffic. Car owners pay only a tiny fraction of that.
It's not weird at all. Both vastly improve my quality of life. I could get by without either, but I'd rather not. I'll edit it out of my reply since you seem averse to analogy.
Cars are everywhere. American choices to have huge multi lane streets everywhere and parking lots the size of cities are optional.
It's a false dichotomy. Across Europe we have cars, even in London, a public transport mecca with tiny roads, >50% of households have cars.
They are great. Properly super useful. I think that people who deny that utility are ideological zealots to be honest.
Your car improves your quality of life. Every other car reduces your quality of life by a small delta: they reduce walkability and bikability, they are deadly, they cause traffic and slow down public transit, they reduce visibility, they are noisy, smelly and hot, they occupy space that is ugly, radiates heat and could be used for other purposes, and so on.
Let me put it this way: if I decide to walk to a restaurant, I would get there faster if there were no cars, and I would enjoy the terrace more if it wasn't for their noise or the ugliness of the parking lot. You can have your convenience, or I can have mine, but it isn't really possible to have both, at least not to the fullest extent.
And that's the problem we have to come to grips with: all the cars you don't drive make your life less pleasant. What is the balance? If the balance is that global quality of life is optimal when 10% of the population of a city has cars, who gets to be in that 10%?
I don't really agree with your premise because you are not incorporating the positive contributions of additional users.
Take the metro as an example. Each additional user is another person in my personal space, they could be smelly, they might mean that I have to stand or scrunch me up in a narrow seat. They make it slower for me to exit the station when there are queues. They could give me airborne diseases like COVID or whatever.
Those are the negatives.
But without that scale the metro isn't viable, you can't have a train system that only one person uses, so the additional people are useful. They fund it, they campaign to have it put in, etc etc.
The same is true of the road network. Yes, cars being parked on my road affect my quality of life, but the fact that other people drive increases my quality of life because we collectively pay for the road network, petrol stations, R&D into new car designs, we agree that street parking is collectively useful even if that blue car across the road is in the way for me personally, etc.
There is a critical point for both systems at which there are just too many people. I would argue that most humans don't actually enjoy huge population density and are just forced into it by economic factors (e.g. all of the best jobs in the UK are in London).
No one is denying the utility of cars. The argument is against (a) car dependency and (b) the fact that its total cost is not fully born by their owners.
Also, you can re-read my original comment. Notice the "the point is less about cars vs no cars, but car-centric suburbia development vs higher density urban planning" part, and please realize that talking about London has nothing to do with the original point.
Holy shit, talk about reading things out of context.
You, dear sir, have absolutely nothing in common with the average North American who lives in the suburbs. The question was not directed at you.
If you want to at least try to understand the context before jumping to give your opinion and share with us your psycho issues, try watching https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVUeqxXwCA0
I am making the case that the advantages once enjoyed by cars have been substantially reduced, for day to day life where most people live, as most people need a car.
The irony of your argument is that very few people who want more car-light or car-free cities are "forcing" anything on anyone, but the inverse is absolutely not the case.
A tremendous amount of taxes are allocated only for highways or car-centric revenue. Federal and state politics prevents cities from putting that money elsewhere. Highways were plowed through US cities and are maintained there over the objection of city residents. States intervene to prevent cities from running bus priority lanes. Cars purchases are subsidized where bikes and transit passes are not. Federal road standards, which are applied in cities, are designed for cars and not pedestrians / bikes.
A prominent example is NYC being forced by NY State to cancel congestion pricing.
The list of ways car-centric decision making is forced on dense cities is very long. Very few people are trying to "ban cars" but are instead trying to let cities too dense for cars guide their fate.
Other common modes of transport that lack fixed schedule, route, or stops:
- biking
- micromobility (scooter-share, etc.)
- walking
- dial-a-ride transit options
But they have other cons as well. You need to have good bike lane infrastructure or to be confident taking the entire lane, whereas most everything is already created around the car or increasingly being created around the car (in the case of the developing world beginning its nascent highway networks). You have to have fair weather or be able to pack around gear like rainpants wherever you are going. You probably make use of the cargo capacity of your car once a week when you buy groceries and goods from stores that tend to size their products around that sort of interval of a trip. I ride my bike plenty but honestly when I go to the grocery store three blocks a way I am usually taking the car, because its easier when I realize oh crap I need milk, I need a gallon of vinegar, I need paper towels, I need toilet paper, I need olive oil, and that alone will overload the panniers and be nigh impossible to get on the bike, especially the paper products and their awkward bulk. I haven't used my panniers for groceries personally since I broke three eggs in a carton with them once. I either walk and grab a small handful of things or just take the car most times.
On first read, I was wondering why on earth did they not use a train? I looked it up and found this from a primary source:
> The principal objectives of the expedition were to servicetest the special-purpose vehicles developed for use in the first
World War, not all gf which were available in time for §uch U§e;
and to determine by actual experience the possibility and the
problems involved in moving an army across the continent, assuming
that railroad facilities, bridges, tunnels, etc. had been damaged
or destroyed by agents of an Asiatic enemy.
Another reason, not stated: The rail system melted down with the traffic load of World War 1. (Or with the government taking control, when they didn't know how to run a rail system.)
> In 1919, the US Army ran a truck convoy from Washington DC to San Francisco. It took them 56 (!) travel days, driving 10 1/4 hours per day.
They used the Lincoln Highway, which wasn't fully paved until the 1930s. In 1919, it was a (bad) dirt road except in cities. In 1919 there was an awful lot of space between cities, especially once you got west of Chicago (that not too far from the truth today, except you might say Omaha instead of Chicago). You can't really compare the convoy experience to walking-vs-driving in cities :)
In 1919, the US Army ran a truck convoy from Washington DC to San Francisco. It took them 56 (!) travel days, driving 10 1/4 hours per day. The roads were lousy in 1919. But even then, it was better than a mule train.