[1] Illich, Ivan. "Energy and equity." (1974).
I've never read too much of him (no time, I have many of his books), but his argument that cars, on average, have an effective speed of 5 kph blew my mind.
That flipped my understanding of cars.
The irony is that he was a far left hippie who flirted with getting defrocked and I am supposed to be a "far right" conservative (whatever that means).
Have you read E.F. Schumacher? "Small is beautiful" is right your alley.
Thats why I insist that this is a 100+ year project. Our current infrastructure is built around 80mph cars (I drive 90!) and it will take forever to build sustainable infrastructure.
I drive far; my folks and I get together once a month and they live 300 miles away. My in laws live 600 miles away and we see them relatively often, again by car.
I hate flying (Im tall and ppl smell), so I drive a lot. In fact I love driving, and I will never not own at least one car.
But lets be frank. I live 300 miles from my parents because cars enabled me to do so. Fast transportation has radically lowered the cost of living away from family, lowered the cost of not investing in our communal areas.
Besides, I make exceptions for motorcycles: no speed limit for them :)
/s
You might just ban them at that point. Why waste ANY resources on a car? We could return to horse drawn carriages, they are biological and therefore more environmentally friendly [1]
[1] https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/Great...
Most people did not own horses, especially not in cities.
They were generally limited to farmers, businesses (to draw carts/carriages), and the rich (Gilded Age).
For most of history most humans walked to their destination on a day-to-day basis. This changed slightly with the invention of rail roads and later bicycles. The automobile didn't go mainstream until roughly the 1920s:
* https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262516129/fighting-traffic/
Look at any pre-WW2 development and you'll see neighbourhoods built for human scale:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb
Design things 'properly' and neither cars, nor horse-drawn carriages, are needed by people for most of their daily tasks. This is evidence by the fact that humans lived like that for centuries just fine.
Less draft-y, better control temperature, and indoor plumbing with modern building science.
> I don't know why cities, streets and bicycles are needed.
Cities have less environmental impact, streets offer easier movement, and bicycles are probably the most efficient way of a human being moving.
I'm not sure how designing communities where private automobiles are a necessity improved upon communities where they are optional nice-to-haves.
Feces (including horse) spread disease. Motor oil leaking is mostly leaking on places where nothing grows anyway because all the traffic compacts the earth and so plants cannot grow (Deer in woods make trails where plants cannot grow, this isn't about cars at all) . As such I give the win to the leaking fluids for the local environment.
Cars generally are burning fossil fuels and putting more CO2 into the air. A horse is burning plants and so are net zero CO2 (assuming you don't use fuels to make the hay!) So for the earth horses are better.
Both cars and horses can kill people if they hit them. Car drives generally pay some attention, and horses generally will not run over people. However there are failures where both can kill. I don't know how to find statistic to tell which is worse in practice though.
A horse is a rich man's toy. Generally in the horse days humans walked, even the rich would walk most of the time - you can walk just as far and fast as a horse in a day. The horse was used to pull carts or carry heavy loads (though most people fail to realize just how much a human can carry and give the horse too much credit here). While a car is the common person's way to get around even when they could walk. Thus for human's the horse is a win because you exercise (though I'd really want to add a bicycle to this analysis)
To be a tad pedantic, it's more accurate to say a "rich woman's toy".
The vast majority of horse owners/managers are women [1].
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/388979/gender-distributi...
- Horses dont do 30 mph sustained
- Horses eat. A lot
- Horses need care
- More horse riding would be a good thing
Oddly many of the neighbors seem to already have golf carts in their garages ... I guess to tool around the neighborhood? (Christ, can't you even walk to the pickleball court, ha ha?)
By radically lowering speed limits [1] and slowly rebuilding our infrastructure to reflect that. It will take a long time, it took 100 years to build infrastructure that assumed a person could cross 15 miles of suburbia in as many minutes.
[1] I do mean radical; cars shouldnt be able to go faster than 30 mph. For folks with a need for speed (myself incld.), perhaps will exempt motorbikes