AHC: The privately owned car as a "Rich men toy"
- Thread starter ScorchedLight
- Start date
Foreign sources of oil were very much not an issue in the 1920s. The whole Middle East could have gone up in smoke, the US was a net exporter of oil until 1949.
traffic
I've read on a Khrushchev bio that when he was given an overfly of a large US city at rush hour (the DOS wanted to impress him with the large number of cars) he was horrified with the trafic jams and turned to his aides and told them he would never allow the USSR to invest on cars only to have people stuck in jams all day.
If you want to turn cars into toys just remove the massive state investment on motorways that made getting 100 000 cars into a major city everyday possible. Keep the roads narrows, and people will take the train. On weekends the rich will use the old narrow and twisty roads to drive their ferraris...
I've read on a Khrushchev bio that when he was given an overfly of a large US city at rush hour (the DOS wanted to impress him with the large number of cars) he was horrified with the trafic jams and turned to his aides and told them he would never allow the USSR to invest on cars only to have people stuck in jams all day.
If you want to turn cars into toys just remove the massive state investment on motorways that made getting 100 000 cars into a major city everyday possible. Keep the roads narrows, and people will take the train. On weekends the rich will use the old narrow and twisty roads to drive their ferraris...
oberdada
Gone Fishin'
please, it's the ussr, you were supposed to wait for everything, including pure textbook communism.
lol
I don't think getting cars to be a rich mans toy for the entire 20th century is possible. At least not in the US without an post nuclear-war scenario. And even than, since having cars at all isn't easy.
Wrong. The suburbs were built for the people who drove to work everyday.
In the USSR Khrushchev opted to build huge residencial blocks and put everybody living close to subway terminals.
The cycle of popular motoring was.
After WW2 people in motorized armies got used to drive everywhere.
Post war properity meant they could buy cars
Having cars, they could now live in suburbs. You could build cheap houses because they were built in inexpensive land away from established facilities. The governent supported this trend by bulding roads that lead to those new comunities and keeping the services centralized. For the first time lots of urban people were living out of walking distance from their public services.
This suburbs expanded and the governments, instead of expanding the railway and metro lines, reformed the access roads for the cities.
If the governments had expanded their railway lines, decentralized services, taxed housing away from existing lines, etc, cars as primary transport would have been a 1950s fad...
And the first cars were built for the existing roads. As cars expanded, more and better roads were built. Governemnts don't build roads to encourage people to buy cars, they build roads to ease the pressure the cars are putting on the existing roads.
Not possible. Even if you butterfly away the collapse/destruction of interurban railways and passenger service, you are still going to have widespead ownership of autos in the United States, probably at rates much higher than in Europe.
You are going to have some flight from the cities after World War II, even if you were to adopt some the zoning and other restrictions on development proposed in this thread (highly unlikely as those would be considered intolerable now, in many parts of the country, let alone in the post WWII years), the sheer size of the United States is going to encourage private car ownership. You cannot maintain European style public transportation outside the Northeastern United States, let alone West of the Mississippi River. The population is too spread out
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Khrushchev: "Comrades! It is horrible how the capitalists pack their workers like sardines into cars to go to work far from their homes."
"Let us instead pack them like sardines into tiny aprtments close to work!"
Commissar of Housing: "Da! Comrade chairman."
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What, that's about the size of it, dudicus.Khrushchev: "Comrades! It is horrible how the capitalists pack their workers like sardines into cars to go to work far from their homes."
"Let us instead pack them like sardines into tiny aprtments close to work!"
Commissar of Housing: "Da! Comrade chairman."
The problem is that by the time Khruzchev came to power cars were bought by the middle class for a long time in the US, not just the rich. The 1950s is far too late for this.
This, particularly between the Mississippi River and the West Coast the population is too spread out for cars not to be very popular.
I had that thought too. Maybe building cars is reasonably cheap, but the real bottleneck is finding cheap and affordable fuel source.
Either
a series of cases makes property owners very secure in their right to refuse ceding land to "eminent domain" as needed for road construction,
or a very communal-minded government assumes authority over and then stifles road construction of any substance.
a series of cases makes property owners very secure in their right to refuse ceding land to "eminent domain" as needed for road construction,
or a very communal-minded government assumes authority over and then stifles road construction of any substance.
Yeah
The Ford Model T is better for rough surface transport than most SUVs offered today.
When highway travel became more feasible and widespread, cars were made to cater to would-be "Turnpike Cruisers" etc.
Licenses?
The government could raise the standards required to get a driving license very high, making it difficult to get one to the point were it would turn into a minority hobby, like light aircraft flying?
But with the US being the great player in the auto industry and the role model for the post WW2 world that would be ASB.
An alternative would be a motorcycle utopia. Bike culture so popular it makes cars a minority option?
The government could raise the standards required to get a driving license very high, making it difficult to get one to the point were it would turn into a minority hobby, like light aircraft flying?
But with the US being the great player in the auto industry and the role model for the post WW2 world that would be ASB.
An alternative would be a motorcycle utopia. Bike culture so popular it makes cars a minority option?
That could be a lot of fun, especially since motorcycles would only have to worry about colliding with other motorcycles (and walls and trees but yeah) versus being run over by drivers of cars drowsing at the wheel.
My curiosity on this would be regarding seasons. A big chunk of the country does not have "winter" per se, but a sizable chunk of the country does. Would it be a matter of three-wheeled vehicles and wearing heavy travel-coats? Or folks with cojones of steel driving bikes with snow tires, studded tires, etc., or meticulous road-maintenance...?
mowque
Banned
The problem with the bike idea has one huge issue....the car is a family vehicle, the motorcycle never will be.
On motorcycle utupias most people are single, young and good looking anyway, that's why Utopias are such fun...
Perhaps a string of awful accidents gives the car a bad name? Picture politicians or royalty or celebrities killing themselves and their families incar accidents in, say, 1913.
While this won't eliminate the need for cars, it might delay it enough to create good public transports systems.
While this won't eliminate the need for cars, it might delay it enough to create good public transports systems.