Cars solved very pressing problems of their day, mostly related to the huge amounts of horse shit and corpses that once covered city streets. Solving those problems wasn't the mistake, assuming that technological progress is always positive and failing to anticipate the inevitable new problems was. - ThreadSky

niedermeyer.online • 527 days ago

Cars solved very pressing problems of their day, mostly related to the huge amounts of horse shit and corpses that once covered city streets. Solving those problems wasn't the mistake, assuming that technological progress is always positive and failing to anticipate the inevitable new problems was.

Reposted from The War on Cars

If 100 years ago we knew that the automobile would decimate our city centers, melt the ice caps, and kill 40,000+ Americans annually, would we have still wanted the automobile? Episode 112 is about "Unintended Consequences with author Steven Johnson." thewaroncars.org/2023/10/10/1...

Comments

abracadocious.bsky.social•527 days ago

Heck, Gilded Age electric cars were a thing. Large important companies were highly enthusiastic about them, e.g., Westinghouse. But electric vehicle technology stagnated while gas vehicle tech rapidly advanced following the turn of the century.

niedermeyer.online•527 days ago

I try to share this perspective with tech founders as often as I can, because they tend to be so fixated on today's problems and so blind to the potential for their solutions to create new, even worse problems. The inventions themselves don't cause problems, naïve modernist views of "progress" do.

artisanloaf.bsky.social•527 days ago

IIHS says 2021 deaths from motor vehicles was 12.9 ... so idk what point he's making.

veryshuai.bsky.social•527 days ago

Doesn't the word "progress" automatically imply "good"? Or is any expansion of the ways of doing something progress? For example, were the invention of the iron bull and the credit card skimmer technological progress?

conjugateprior.org•527 days ago

Not very enthusiastic on the unconditioned use of "cars" here. As I see it, ubiquitous personal cars were and remain an enormous mistake. Taxis, buses, rentals and similar were and remain an enormous win.

niedermeyer.online•527 days ago

Yeah, this is my point almost exactly: it's not the invention of four-wheeled powered mobility devices that caused the biggest problems we now face, it's the reification of cars as universal personal mobility devices. The runaway ideology that accompanied the invention, and fed/was fed by it.

conjugateprior.org•527 days ago

The analogy I would usually use here is to personal weapons. No one has to walk down the street armed anymore because we outsource security to infrastructure, social payments and as a last resort, armed police. You just don't need a weapon.

Alas, the analogy is rather less compelling in the US 😕

moldybasil.bsky.social•527 days ago

Exactly

snowgall.bsky.social•527 days ago

Not having tons of horse shit all over the streets would have been seen as a huge win.

But I am confused about the corpses - do you mean horse corpses? I never realized that would be the case. (If other types of corpses, I am even more confused!)

vafnord.bsky.social•527 days ago

Yes, horse corpses. They were very hard to move and were often left to putrefy until they were easier to cut into pieces, which was the only practical way to get them out of the street (eventually).

chestnutfez.bsky.social•527 days ago

Now *that* is yewwwww

snowgall.bsky.social•527 days ago

Fascinating! I had no idea!

(my great-gf was a horseshoer, and the invention of cars literally sent his family into poverty, so I know he at least wouldn't have wanted them)

molegria.bsky.social•527 days ago

I read your tweet as "my great-girlfriend", followed quite soon after by a record-scratch sound

vafnord.bsky.social•527 days ago

So imagine the putrefying horse corpses, six foot piles of horse manure, rats merrily scampering in the dung, and the relentless din of metal horseshoes and metal-rimmed carriage wheels on cobblestone. It was hellish.

basquiatball.bsky.social•527 days ago

Maybe they could have found a way to not base the cars on leaded gasoline though

acknetz.bsky.social•527 days ago

I wouldn't concede so readily to private automobiles, there were mass transit systems in the early 20c that had a much larger impact, electric streetcars were a huge thing

moldybasil.bsky.social•527 days ago

Yeah ideally we'd have gone whole hog for electric rails to transport people, and saved IC vehicles for freight, replacing horse drawn carriages for last mile stuff

golikehellmachine.com•527 days ago

also not sure how many people want to acknowledge that most people would answer that question with a yes

niedermeyer.online•527 days ago

yeah, that's the real black pill here... realistically, I think you'd have to work hard to find someone in (say) 1905 who'd be like "oh, word, let's just not do cars then" even if you could somehow prove you were from the future.

skoryy.bsky.social•527 days ago

The Model T pretty much bankrupted the interurbans.

very-simple.com•527 days ago

Cars were a phenomenal invention that opened up vast swaths of this giant country to millions of people. The problem isn’t cars. It’s thinking that cars (a) are the only solution and (b) can’t evolve into something better.

bfr74.bsky.social•527 days ago

Possibly but on the other hand, walkable neighborhoods are much more expensive and a lot of vacation spots are quite walkable so there's conflicting evidence that people prefer a car-oriented world.

niedermeyer.online•527 days ago

At the time wealthy people were already abandoning cities due to crowding and the horse shit/corpse problem... the car just made it easier. Today the wealthy seek walkable neighborhoods to escape the century of car-derived problems that trend unleashed (traffic, pollution, blight, alienation).

mattboxer94.bsky.social•527 days ago

Then again if the crime wave continues that trend might stagnate or it forces a return to a tough on crime agenda as I’ve seen here in SF (tho I do have a suburban apartment and am paying bay rent prices).

meelar.bsky.social•527 days ago

Crime is already declining from its pandemic peak in most places, and even that peak was substantially lower than average levels from the early 2000s. Fear of crime is driven much more by people's social media diets than by actual crime levels.

mattboxer94.bsky.social•527 days ago

Tho I’d say insane ppl on drugs being criminals seems to be a real thing post COVID tho Seattle local media was warning ppl back in 2019

smullins3000.bsky.social•527 days ago

Especially at the time. +40k deaths from automobiles may not sound like that many in a world without antibiotics or (many) vaccines. And city centers at the turn of the century I don't think were considered by most commentators to things worth preserving.

niedermeyer.online•527 days ago

For real, if you told turn-of-the-20th-Century people that Americans would eventually buy 16 million cars with just 40k annual road deaths, they would think you were bragging about how insanely safe cars are

bgluckman.bsky.social•527 days ago

675,000 Americans died of the *flu* in 1918 at a time when the population was only 103 million versus the ~330 million it is now.

smullins3000.bsky.social•527 days ago

TBF, that was a particularly shitty wave of "the grip", but the number of cases of "Papa started sneezing Tuesday and was dead by Sunday" in a typical year was also pretty high.

smullins3000.bsky.social•527 days ago

"You mean the Model T hardly ever kicks people in the head and kills them?"

sidfinancy.bsky.social•527 days ago

Not to mention icecaps, like old-growth forests, were something to be conquered/exploited, not preserved.

smullins3000.bsky.social•527 days ago

Oh, no, the frozen wastelands will become warm and habitable?

smullins3000.bsky.social•527 days ago

"How dare Robert Moses want to put a highway through this thriving city center" urban planners and social activists would have definitely said at the time.

danmarstp.marshallwords.com•527 days ago

Trains existed. Bikes existed. Subways existed. It’s an incredibly car-brained claim that cars “solved” the problem of urban horse manure. Cars weren’t invented to solve problems. That wasn’t anyone’s intent.

quick13.bsky.social•527 days ago

Hell, every spring and fall, #Minneapolis turns into #Manureapolis from the stench of manure applications on nearby farms.

danmarstp.marshallwords.com•527 days ago

Sure but nowadays that’s liquified cow & pig manure from industrial farms. Not composted horse manure.

danmarstp.marshallwords.com•527 days ago

Cities used to be surrounded by truck farms that grew fruits & veg with all that manure. Now those farms are all car centric suburbs and our produce comes from California & Chile.

niedermeyer.online•527 days ago

Trains, bikes and subways are urban modes, and people with any kinds of means were fleeing the crowds, chaos and disease of cities well before the invention of the car. So yes, cars were a "solution" to these problems in ways that those other modes weren't. Cars just made suburbanism more accessible

danmarstp.marshallwords.com•527 days ago

We had train “suburbs” here in the Twin Cities in the 1880s. You could argue that cars were a “solution” to the personal cost & inconvenience of keeping a horse & buggy on a personal level. But they were never meant or promoted as any kind of urban planning solution until much later.

niedermeyer.online•527 days ago

I live in a streetcar suburb! And yes, that is what I am arguing because "urban planning" as we think of it today was only just beginning to take shape in this time period. In fact the modern discipline emerged specifically because cities had become so undesirable that anyone who could was leaving

danmarstp.marshallwords.com•527 days ago

Yeah that’s revisionist history at best. Wealthy ppl had no problem escaping city squalor before the automobile. And urban planning and zoning was initially more of a racist & natavist response to influxes of immigrants and the Great Migration.

danmarstp.marshallwords.com•527 days ago

It’s like saying before the iphone people’s houses were polluted with alarm clocks and magazines.

maxdubler.com•527 days ago

Nobody understands how much poop was in the street and how many dead horses there were.

naparstek.bsky.social•527 days ago

This is probably not correct. Prof. Peter Norton found that the horse dung and corpses mythology mostly appeared much later, after World War II, as a kind of retroactive justification for why cities needed to be filled with cars. The advent of the automobile mostly happened for other reasons.

niedermeyer.online•527 days ago

I'm not trying to retread the reductive "cars were invented to solve horse shit/corpses" point here though. I'm saying the invention of the car turned pragmatic critiques of pre-car cities into a car-privileging conception of progress and modernity, which is where the modern problems come from.

niedermeyer.online•527 days ago

If cars were invented simply as a pragmatic solution to specific horse-city problems, developing the entire ideological apparatus that now surrounds them would have been much harder. The fact that they reflected and shaped existing anti-urban ideologies explains our cultural legacy much better.

bettybarcode.bsky.social•527 days ago

There's a saying I wish I could credit:
"Today's problems are the result of yesterday's solutions."

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