Not quite a ban on ICEs but nevertheless analog attempts were made:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_flag_traffic_laws

These laws didn't last long, fortunately, and ostensibly they were to protect cattle, horses and carriage riders but clearly the idea was to slow the car down to the speed of a pedestrian effectively hobbling it to the point that driving a car didn't make sense.

For what it's worth: this would still make sense today. It's insane how modern cities restrict the freedom and safety of people just so that a few people can drive SUVs more resembling a tank than a car in a city. Shit like Rezvani Vengeance should not exist, period.

It's insane that the top leader in accidental death of children and adolescents involves automobiles [1].

[1] https://medlineplus.gov/ency/article/001915.htm

We literally turned streets from areas for commerce and recreation in to killing strips.

Driving an SUV or anything else is freedom. Riding buses or walking in the freezing cold or boiling hot isn’t “freedom” it’s misery.

Walking in the freezing cold for a couple blocks is not a problem if you dress for it. Waiting for transit in the freezing cold is misery.

Riding buses that are quickly get you where you want to go is not a problem. Riding buses that take a convoluted route and thus make slow progress to where you want to go is misery.

You are correct for the bad state of transit most people have, but good transit is possible and then the things you are worried about are not misery.

Only vehicle I experienced freedom with was bicycle. Car is further from freedom. Driving in line of cars or finding parking place is not freedom. You are not completely free with bicycle either but everything is more instant with bike. Motorbike is close but since it is so heavy it can be bit of burden.

Quite a few places you would never even be able to even reach in a reasonable amount of time via bus/bike/walk. Would be like the part of the world accessible to you just radically shrank overnight.

Counterpoint: decent public transport could eliminate this - and make even more places actually reachable, as you don't have to take care of making breaks to not fall asleep on the wheel, refueling stops, or having to search (and pay for) parking spots.

But it depends on volume to make sense. If I want to be deep in a national forest somewhere with the intention of getting away from people and bring my horses, public transport just won't do it. With my own vehicle, that's not a problem. I love public transportation in places where it works and have used it a lot in the past, but I could never limit myself to it or totally depend on it - too many places it could never go. Freedom of having your own vehicle really is unparalleled.

Instead, we made our cities so unpleasant and poorly designed that walking doesn't make sense.

But we made it possible to get to a lot more things in our cities than you can by walking, and enjoy a lot more space. A walk only city is not a pleasant place to live.

Your counter to the above should be building more transit. However in the English speaking world we are incompetent in that these decades, and we refuse to learn from anyone else.

Transit, and bicycle infra. But sadly you're not wrong regarding incompetence in the English speaking world, which is why I'm visiting Freiburg in a week to help decide whether to move there or Utrecht.

In contrast, I'll be visiting Amsterdam in a week to help understand how I might bring that culture of human-friendly infrastructure back to America. There are plenty of people in the English-speaking world working to fix the problems that our forebears created.

Good luck! That's great news. I wanted to do the same but I have a 3 and a 5 year old and I need to be somewhere good now, before their childhoods are over. But I still hope the US (and Canada - notjustbikes is keen to point out they're horrible too) can improve.

> A walk only city is not a pleasant place to live

There's plenty of towns and small cities in Europe (specially the "center") that could be considered walk-only and people are pretty happy there, for example Toledo (Spain) or Venice (Italy).

Early cars were immediately killing innocent people in the streets and there was totally justified outrage. We've just become numb to the idea that it's okay to be cut down in the street because cars are just too gosh darn convenient.

Today in the US, cars are the number one cause of death for children and lag only firearms for accidental death overall. Excusing the daily human slaughter by saying, "Well, they're not _designed_ to kill people like guns are" is not a cunning retort.

> We could have equally banned internal combustion engines to protect the steam engine

That should actually have been done or better, Stirling Engines.