Do away with cars
- Thread starter Tyr
- Start date
Old Airman
Banned
Yes, but load would be much lower (hence somewhat lower maintenance cost), and commercial fleet tends to be much more tolerant to road imperfection, so many of those roads can be gravel.
I didn't say it is too realistic, I've said it is POSSIBLE.
Yes, so pre-1900 POD. However, a lot of Europe is village-based for one reason or another.
It depends on population density. Central Russia of 1980 got the type of the service I've described and it covered like 90% of the territory. As far as the "who's going to pay" issue is concerned, remember that transit systems were revenue generators, not revenue drains as late as 1950s in most Western countries. Scarcity of cars would allow them to continue to be self-sufficient.
Well, Commie Moscow was 30 miles across, housed 8+ mln inhabitants and you was able to get point A to point B in 1.5 hours. Leningrad was half as big with the half of population. The key here is spacing between transit stops (they have to be far enough apart for a bus/train to actually accelerate between stop). 2000 ft from one bus stop to another and a mile or 1.5 miles between subway stops on the same line. Farthest distance between 2 lines is about 3-4 miles. This way you don't walk more than 5 mins to transit stop, don't ride bus more than 20 mins to a subway stop, don't ride a subway for more than 50 mins. So,100 mins TOPS.
My father would beg to disagree, his parents him and his sister all fitted on the same bike, albeit with a sidecar, and both him and his sister were kids at the time.
Then may be leave cars for the rural areas, but associate them with farmers and country bumpkins in such a way that city folks would avoid having to use one at all cost... Lest they'd be seen as backward. All it needs is some well placed cartoons about folks driving into town with a Model T carrying hay bales and the car would forever have the stigma of just being a faster kind of tractor.
If we can hold on to this until the dis bowl years, we've pretty much won... Pretty soon we'll see signs go up saying: No cars, no Okies allowed. And after WWII, cities might forbid cars like they forbid motorcycles because of the stigma of car= country boy riding into town to raise hell..
You can tell people that all you want, but sooner or later someone is going to realize that going where ever you want whenever you want and not being at the whim of public transit is pretty fantastic.
The only way cars aren't becoming popular is the world gets struck by a meteor and knocks humanity back to the stone age. Even in that world cars might still crop up a thousand years later.
Either a world Communist revolution (cars were a rare luxury in Warsaw Pact nations) or a full-scale nuclear war.
Pick your poison, comrade.
Pick your poison, comrade.
..unless that by the time people want to go where they want to by doing their own driving we would already have the personal helicopters they been promising us for the last 65 years....
Ha ha ha, NO. See, even if you don't get cars after WW1 you're getting trucks, and then after WW2 there's going to be a lot (see, tens or maybe hundred of thousands) who've gotten used to driving, and wouldn't mind doing it afterwards, plus with a sudden glut of war surplus, they're going to be able to.
As others have said, there's no way you can do away with cars without basically making cars impossible to produce. Even if you can't get petrol, you can still power it via steam or battery.
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Yes, paved roads existed.
But they tended not to go from a to b. They went from a to b via x, y and z.
Roads connected settlements, to travel from one end of the country to the other you had to go through every town along the way. To get across England would take days.
But then came motorways and new roads built specially for cars.
Hmm... Have emerging modern attitudes of cars being for poor people emerge earlier? That could be interesting. Though I'm not sure how to get it to work without suburbs already in place.
The auto companies did not kill mass transit
I am a big big big train buff and historian. I love trains and anything running on rails. But you can't make mass transit so great that you will get rid of cars.
Show me one place in the world that the people that can afford cars dint buy them.
Even in Europe or the old USSR if you can get a car you will get a car.
And outside of cities it is all but ASB to do away with them.
I also don't think the math is adding up. Someone said Moscow a city of 35 miles across could get anyplace in and hour and a half to 1.75 hours. But someone said stops are far apart. If you assume a network of stops 1 mile apart you have a grid 35 stops wide by 35 stops. Or 1225 stops. You also have a walk of up to 1/2 mile. Average walking speed is 3 3 miles an hour so you need to be able to travel 34.5 miles in 1 hour and 25 min so you can walk. Ignoring waiting for the trolley or waiting to change trolleys you also have 33 stops to do. Assuming a ridiculously short 1 min stop and you are down to 53 min of travel time.
Or an average of about 38 mph. Now if you assume a 5 min wait, 5 min for a transfer and 1.5 min per average stop you are down to the point were we are going an average of about 75 mph. Good luck with that.
Now apply this to the USA and to get the required density of stops means you need 35 to 40 million stops. And even with that you grand mother us walking home an average of half a mile in bad weather with two bags of groceries.
So the system is huge, costs a fortune and still sucks. I will clue you in, no one given a choice is going to walk a half mile in sleet.
Now let's try and put to rest one of the myths that keeps popping up here and elsewhere.
The auto companies did not kill a successful and profitable mass transit system.
I will us Detroit as an example as that was home to the three largest auto companies in the world at the time.
The DUE operated at max 587 miles of track, 400 of them being interurban. To put this in perspective it covered what is now an area about 35 miles on a side plus long distance runs to Ohio and Lancing. In order to get our mythical 1/2 mile stops you would need about 80 THOUSAND miles. As the grid has to be laid out with a track ever half mile in one direction or the other.
Anyway this system was something sold except for the freight lines to the City of Detriot in 1922 or so. Now like any good business they did NOT sell somthing making money. The sold it because it was losing money. The city added busses in 1925. By 1952 busses had replaced all but 4 lines. The last went away in 1956. The system has pretty much ran at a loss up until today when I am taxed to pay fir a system that does not come within 10 miles of my house and on which I have never in my life set foot.
As for the idea that the auto companies bought and crossed it that is pure rubbish. GM did buy some of the street cars as they were abandoned. But there was a reason for this. First off they took some as trade in on the busses that GM sold. Also some of these GM refurbished and sold to other systems. Some in the US and most elsewhere. Keep in mind that GM was the largest maker of railroad diesel engines in the world at the time.
So in conclusion, you could not build a system to cover the US.
If you did you could not afford it.
If you somehow did build it anyway, it would suck.
If built to any realistic size you would need something just to get TO it.
Also lets quit blaming the auto companies fir killing mass transit. They did not. We did because the car is in general a better easier and faster way to travel.
And frankly anything that allows for roads and trucks but gets rid of cars in a democracy and or capitalist system is as close to alien space bats as you are going to get.
I will now get down from my soap box.
Please note I would love to have street cars and such but it is just not practical.
And just a fun fact but a ballpark number for stops for the entire world is 200 to 230 million. The average world population density is 120 per sq mile. Needing 4 stops per sq mile to get an average distance of 1/2 a mile means that on average you are paying fir a stop that is used by 30 people. In the US it is less the 20.
And yes I know these are crude numbers but they are based off easy math using real world numbers. Even cutting things in half gives numbers that just don't work.
I am a big big big train buff and historian. I love trains and anything running on rails. But you can't make mass transit so great that you will get rid of cars.
Show me one place in the world that the people that can afford cars dint buy them.
Even in Europe or the old USSR if you can get a car you will get a car.
And outside of cities it is all but ASB to do away with them.
I also don't think the math is adding up. Someone said Moscow a city of 35 miles across could get anyplace in and hour and a half to 1.75 hours. But someone said stops are far apart. If you assume a network of stops 1 mile apart you have a grid 35 stops wide by 35 stops. Or 1225 stops. You also have a walk of up to 1/2 mile. Average walking speed is 3 3 miles an hour so you need to be able to travel 34.5 miles in 1 hour and 25 min so you can walk. Ignoring waiting for the trolley or waiting to change trolleys you also have 33 stops to do. Assuming a ridiculously short 1 min stop and you are down to 53 min of travel time.
Or an average of about 38 mph. Now if you assume a 5 min wait, 5 min for a transfer and 1.5 min per average stop you are down to the point were we are going an average of about 75 mph. Good luck with that.
Now apply this to the USA and to get the required density of stops means you need 35 to 40 million stops. And even with that you grand mother us walking home an average of half a mile in bad weather with two bags of groceries.
So the system is huge, costs a fortune and still sucks. I will clue you in, no one given a choice is going to walk a half mile in sleet.
Now let's try and put to rest one of the myths that keeps popping up here and elsewhere.
The auto companies did not kill a successful and profitable mass transit system.
I will us Detroit as an example as that was home to the three largest auto companies in the world at the time.
The DUE operated at max 587 miles of track, 400 of them being interurban. To put this in perspective it covered what is now an area about 35 miles on a side plus long distance runs to Ohio and Lancing. In order to get our mythical 1/2 mile stops you would need about 80 THOUSAND miles. As the grid has to be laid out with a track ever half mile in one direction or the other.
Anyway this system was something sold except for the freight lines to the City of Detriot in 1922 or so. Now like any good business they did NOT sell somthing making money. The sold it because it was losing money. The city added busses in 1925. By 1952 busses had replaced all but 4 lines. The last went away in 1956. The system has pretty much ran at a loss up until today when I am taxed to pay fir a system that does not come within 10 miles of my house and on which I have never in my life set foot.
As for the idea that the auto companies bought and crossed it that is pure rubbish. GM did buy some of the street cars as they were abandoned. But there was a reason for this. First off they took some as trade in on the busses that GM sold. Also some of these GM refurbished and sold to other systems. Some in the US and most elsewhere. Keep in mind that GM was the largest maker of railroad diesel engines in the world at the time.
So in conclusion, you could not build a system to cover the US.
If you did you could not afford it.
If you somehow did build it anyway, it would suck.
If built to any realistic size you would need something just to get TO it.
Also lets quit blaming the auto companies fir killing mass transit. They did not. We did because the car is in general a better easier and faster way to travel.
And frankly anything that allows for roads and trucks but gets rid of cars in a democracy and or capitalist system is as close to alien space bats as you are going to get.
I will now get down from my soap box.
Please note I would love to have street cars and such but it is just not practical.
And just a fun fact but a ballpark number for stops for the entire world is 200 to 230 million. The average world population density is 120 per sq mile. Needing 4 stops per sq mile to get an average distance of 1/2 a mile means that on average you are paying fir a stop that is used by 30 people. In the US it is less the 20.
And yes I know these are crude numbers but they are based off easy math using real world numbers. Even cutting things in half gives numbers that just don't work.
nathan2
Banned
Umm.....scientists didn't come up with the global warming theory until the 80s. Unless you could somehow make it so that they come up with it earlier.
Not at all.
Loads of people actively choose to live car free lives. Cars are an unnecessary inconvenience and annoyance in life.
The way things are these days cars are increasingly just for those who like cars choose to live in the countryside, have a job involving driving, or the poor who have no choice but to drive.
I think its the 'those that choose to live in the countryside' people that are the real problem.
We need to do something to encourage earlier slum clearances and positive development of cities. The war didn't help with the view of city life either.
James May...Captain Slow off off Top Gear...did a serious on cars some years back where he traced their history
He finished with a missive about how the car could not have been built in today's health and safety concious mind sets i.e just look at how potentially dangerous they are - and full of Petrol !!!????
So have a law that makes cars / road vehicles only usable by highly trained specialists due to a more concious health and safety attitude in the 1910s etc in Europe and America.
Drivers like pilots would have to pass stringent training and medicals etc.
A driver today would proudly wear his drivers pin like a pilot would his wings.
He finished with a missive about how the car could not have been built in today's health and safety concious mind sets i.e just look at how potentially dangerous they are - and full of Petrol !!!????
So have a law that makes cars / road vehicles only usable by highly trained specialists due to a more concious health and safety attitude in the 1910s etc in Europe and America.
Drivers like pilots would have to pass stringent training and medicals etc.
A driver today would proudly wear his drivers pin like a pilot would his wings.
Lost Freeway
Banned
Have all the governments of the world get taken over by radical Luddites. Of course, you'd lose all other modern technological conveniences, but I suppose it would be worth getting rid of your hated cars.
Or people who regularly go where public transport doesn't. Also, waiting for public transport in places that face extreme weather is contraindicated. Try catching a bus in Moscow in the winter for example.
Red flag laws didn't hold, driving licenses are still a legal requirement etc. etc.James May...Captain Slow off off Top Gear...did a serious on cars some years back where he traced their history
He finished with a missive about how the car could not have been built in today's health and safety concious mind sets i.e just look at how potentially dangerous they are - and full of Petrol !!!????
So have a law that makes cars / road vehicles only usable by highly trained specialists due to a more concious health and safety attitude in the 1910s etc in Europe and America.
Drivers like pilots would have to pass stringent training and medicals etc.
A driver today would proudly wear his drivers pin like a pilot would his wings.
I'm not sure what's to stop people who want to sell cars from advertising back about the incredible benefits their product would provide the average consumer. They definitely have a huge profit motive to do so. Automobiles were a playboy item before they were mass-produced, not the other way around.
I've seen several views like these (from both inside and outside the USA) from people who seem to have NO CLUE as to how impossible it is to live without cars in our smaller cities and towns... public transportation is just not feasible for everyone in these places, economically or practically. The only real POD that would 'do away with cars' here is if we somehow did away with our smaller cities/towns/villages, and had everyone living cheek to jowl in big cities, so that public transportation would be feasible for everyone. And how you would accomplish that in a nation that is as big as ours is beyond me....
marathag
Banned
Don't believe any nation was ready for that kind of dictatorship to control personal lives that way.
You could still mail order Heroin, recall.
Nanny State cannot be born full born, like Athena from Zeus's brow