Tbh they'd have been right. Cars are expensive to buy and to maintain. They are difficult to operate—people die every day. They do smell bad, and the particulate matter they emit is extremely bad for you. And they are slow: Traffic is an unsolvable problem in urban centres.
Redesigning our cities around cars was one of the big mistakes of the 20th century.
> They are difficult to operate—people die every day. They do smell bad, and the particulate matter they emit is extremely bad for you. And they are slow
Sarcastically, one might say that horses are even harder to operate (they have minds of their own), they smell worse that automobiles (esp EVs), and the particulate matter they excrete would be unhealthy to consume. They are also very slow.
More seriously, the trajectory that our imagination pushes towards seems to be “overcoming” biological limitations. Perhaps a symbiosis of machine and biology and consciousness will take us to the next level by opening up vast new universe state.
The more pertinant observation is that cars are a great tool for mobility, but going _all in_ on cars causes a whole bunch of issues at society scale. If you zone cities and design infrastructure with the assumption that everyone drives, it forces everybody into the least space efficient mode of transport. You have to designate huge amounts of valuable real estate to keeping all those cars somewhere. People who _can't_ drive will have much more difficulty navigating life. When cars arrived, some parts of the world made sure their cities were still easy to navigate by foot, bike and transit, and I'd argue they're more pleasant places to be.
The point isn't to say that new tech is bad, but that there can be adverse consequences to jumping in wholesale.
>Redesigning our cities around cars was one of the big mistakes of the 20th century.
Cities have been designed around Carriages for millenia. You can go and walk in Pompeii and observe pavements for pedestrians, roads for wheeled carriages with crossing spots of elevated stones for pedestrians.
It turns out that cities require a lot of goods to be moved through - more than a pedestrian can carry, and over inclines that human muscle power doesn't like.
The reason why cities are designed around cars is that cars were designed to fit in contemporary cities and they co-evolved over the 20th century. It was the slow kind of evolution, with each step being easier and cheaper than the big redesign.
> The reason why cities are designed around cars is that cars were designed to fit in contemporary cities and they co-evolved over the 20th century
No, the switch to car-centric infrastructure was a deliberate policy choice lobbied for by the automotive industry. [1] We ripped up a lot of good transit to lay down roads this wide and fast.
> It turns out that cities require a lot of goods to be moved through - more than a pedestrian can carry, and over inclines that human muscle power doesn't like.
Hence the utility of public transit, which kills substantially fewer people and is much cheaper. Though goods are mostly moved with trucks, and trucks aren't my concern. Urban congestion isn't caused by 18-wheelers.
Horses weren’t cheap when they were a primary mode of transportation. Lots of people have died riding, driving, and breaking horses. They definitely smell bad, and their “particulate matter” was so bad that houses had to be set back and elevated from the street.
Cities designed around cars are far superior to cities designed around horses.
Cars replaced streetcars, not horses. Few people in big cities were getting on horseback to commute to work in the morning in the early 20th century. People generally walked or took the streetcar.
No, they were not. Trains are good for taking large numbers of people from one place where they don't want to be to another place where they don't want to be. In certain situations that can be a useful thing to do, but you can't design a city around it. In every case you have in mind, rest assured, the city was there first.
??? No, they don't. They only smell bad when they're kept standing in their urine, which is still not worse than a hairdresser. Compared to dogs (or ICE cars) horses smell way less. They do sweat to regulate temperature, which has a distinct smell, but it's way less irritating to a human's nose than the sweat of the rider.
There's a set of distinct smells associated with the horses, but other than the piss, none of them are particularly "bad". In my experience, humans tend to smell way worse overall (from food to body odor to the excrement) than horses.
Redesigning our cities around cars was one of the big mistakes of the 20th century.