I think everyone must have felt this way about automobiles. And by and large, it's worked out just as horribly as they imagined: our communities are divided by dangerous moats we call "roads" -- death traps which we must painstakingly teach our children to avoid, if we dare let our children wander outside on their own anywhere near them in the first place.

"more deaths per capita in horse accidents in NYC in 1900 than in auto accidents today"

https://legallysociable.com/2012/09/07/figures-more-deaths-p...

I don't get the point - are you suggesting we'd be better off without automobiles? Would we go back to horses? What about global logistics? Agriculture?

We'd be better off with dense cities where automobile is not the primary means of transportation. Like e.g. NYC or many European cities.

Cars and large trucks should mostly belong to highways and country roads.

NYC is a very far way from being a carless paradise. Yes, lots of people walk or take transit. But, especially in Manhattan, many streets are choked for a good chunk of the day.

Far more people use the subway than drive to work.

Only 28% of people in NYC commute by car/truck/van. 55% take public transit and 10% walk, 1% bike, 4% work from home, and 2% take a Taxi or other. https://www.nycedc.com/blog-entry/new-york-commute

PS: The van thing is also closer to a bus than a private car.

It's not a paradise, but it's a city where you can live nicely without a car, and without a slightest desire to own it. Public transportation (non-ideal as it is) and the occasional uber / lyft / cab trip cover the needs of daily commute. Also, walking is easy, and a lot of things are within an easy walking distance, not only on Manhattan but also in most of Brooklyn and Queens.

I live in a major city (Toronto) and don't own a car, but this is still something of a fantasy - major cities are incredibly reliant on automobiles for moving goods in and out of the city even before you consider moving people.

And with that said, Toronto is far from being a city where we could live without cars for human transportation - without Uber getting around would be hell.

Cars as a secondary transport are fine. In NYC I take a cab / lyft once in a while, but it's like 3% of my trips.

Delivery trucks are, or course, incredibly important in a city. But they are also much more efficient than cars moving 1-2 people, so they need a bit less road capacity.

Also, city traffic is pretty favorable for electric vehicles with recuperative braking, so the coming crop of city buses and delivery trucks is going to have a significant portion of all-electric or hybrid vehicles. This helps the air pollution problem.

Very much a personal opinion. I hate living in dense cites. Dealing with owning a car in the city makes it worse, but I prefer living in a less dense area and owning a car. In fact I own 5.

Not having to drive a car daily is freedom. Living in a city with functioning and affordable public transport is, well, a blessing of sorts.

I didn't read the comment as a suggestion of being better off without automobiles - merely an observation that the same reservations were felt by people transitioning from horses to automobiles...

It's not a binary choice between "current system" and "no cars whatsoever".

We might not be better off, but the rest of the planet sure as hell would be. Not to mention that the history of overpopulation would be very different without those things.

>I think everyone must have felt this way about automobiles. And by and large, it's worked out just as horribly as they imagined: our communities are divided by dangerous moats we call "roads" -- death traps which we must painstakingly teach our children to avoid, if we dare let our children wander outside on their own anywhere near them in the first place.

Yep, JFYI, an excerpt from "Autophobia":

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/467412.html

Those rackety automobile contraptions! Don't get me started! :)

I am half serious though, cars are annoyingly loud and (obviously) dangerous. I'm loving the eerily quiet electric vehicles. And cities creating carless areas of town or carless days.

I don't know. Just because I haven't been exposed to it yet and it's not the new normal doesn't necessarily mean it's an objectively better world.

And speaking of automobiles, I feel like a lot of cities are actually fighting back against that now, creating pedestrian-only areas etc... I like the autonomy and mobility that cars offer as much as anyone else, but I sure do enjoy the peace of a quieter country side, and I'm afraid with this technology, even that would go away: there would be no place left to escape the madness.

In my opinion, progress is what makes the world a better place overall for humans, as in better quality of life, not what makes the world a shinier place with new toys, even though we might be getting better and better at creating those.

At the end of the day, the cons far outweigh the pros here for me.

I still feel that way about cars. Those horse riders were right.