zlacker

>>amathe+(OP)
The issue of quiting cars is nowadays far from just a matter of values as the article seems to be implying.

Cars are by now a hard to reverse environmental and urban planning disaster across the world. We are stuck with them. As a mode of transport it has grown uncontrollably at the expense of all others (except the airplane) and practically everything has been shaped to accomodate it.

Reversing that development, limiting car traffic to where its really needed is like trying to perform a complete heart and arteries transplant on a living person. Even if there was a will (which there is not) it is not clear if there is a way.

In the best scenario it will be an excruciatingly long transformation (~50 yr) as car oriented cities (or city sections) get slowly deprecated and the car-free or car-lite segments become more desirable, more livable.

>>nologi+Mz1
What came before cars?

What utility do cars provide?

Do zealots even consider these basic questions?

>>easyti+CQ1
> What came before cars?

Horses

> What utility do cars provide?

They don't shit on the street.

>>SoftTa+kT1
Nobody talks about horses, even though we have tons of footage proving that we had "horse-centric cities" long before Benz started doing his thing.

>>bombca+oh2
For the most part people didn't ride horses to get around town (despite what Westerns depict). Horses were mostly used to pull carts moving goods around like trucks do today. The average city dweller walked or rode trams.

>>jhbadg+sn2
In England in the 1600s it was perfectly normal to get a hackney carriage around town. Boats for longer distances.

Until 1976 the law was still extant that they had to keep a bale of hay in the vehicle.

The prices were even regulated

http://www.londonancestor.com/stow/stow-hack.htm

Indeed the Romans even had regulations about road width to ensure drawn carts could pass each other

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_roads

>>easyti+uP2
Even so, that's just using a cart and a hired one at that. I mean the analogy of a horse to a car (as in something you owned personally and rode around on) was never really true, at least in cities. Also, speaking of London, the Underground is surprisingly old -- the first parts of the system opened in 1863. Yes, Sherlock Holmes is often depicted as going by hackney, but had he really existed, he could have ridden the Tube.