No Cars!

WI at the turn of the 19th-20th Century the United States of America had had the good sense to forbade the production of the automobile and forced Americans to be dependent on mass transportation. How different today would America be/function?

What would be missing; what would be gained?
 
Very near to if not actually ASB. Cars usefulness is obvious. Banning them, or even greatly restricting them, is virtually impossible. Any politician actually proposing this is going to lose his next election.
 
Sounds like Federal Overreach. Wickard v. Filburn is 40 years in the future.

For this period, the important ruling was Kidd v. Pearson, that while Congress could regulate Interstate Commerce, they could not regulate manufacturing within a State, even if those goods were later to be sold to other States.

Even the Enforcement of the Selden Patent wouldn't kill off cars, as the Association of Licensed Automobile Manufacturers,as they just wanted their cut, that on a Model T of 1908, would have been $12.50, had Henry Ford not fought that in the Courts.
 

Devvy

Donor
I’m interested as to what the “good sense” in forbidding cars is? They serve a legitimate need, and I’d be hard pressed to see any society wanting to ban what seems to be the next generation of transport?
 
Some engineers and some lawyers stick their heads together to construct a vehicle that manages to get through some loophole in that stupid law and start to sell those.
 

cpip

Gone Fishin'
United States's manufacturing takes a massive back seat to Europe's, being unable to efficiently transport raw materials and goods anywhere that lacks railways or rivers.
 
WI at the turn of the 19th-20th Century the United States of America had had the good sense to forbade the production of the automobile and forced Americans to be dependent on mass transportation. How different today would America be/function?

What would be missing; what would be gained?
R A Lafferty wrote an early "What If" short story about this where the TL point of divergence was an Edwardian investor (fictional) wondering whether to put his money into the development of automobiles or trolley cars (can't recall the title I am afraid). We live in the TL where he chose automobiles. The consequence in the ATL is a more neighbourly society with less urban decay and social atomisation than ATL. "And everything was as right as rails".
 
In the end, common sense will prevail.
Some engineers and some lawyers stick their heads together to construct a vehicle that manages to get through some loophole in that stupid law and start to sell those.
Just to give an idea, in certain legislations commercial vehicles are not the same object as private cars. So Pickups for agricoltural use are still a thing, and rightly so: private vehicles is something you can avoid, with proper planning, in cities, but outside once the concept is there and it can be paid for, you can't really do without.
 
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Not going to happen, not in the US, certainly not in the 19th century. There are and were huge areas of the US that are rural in nature and not worth connecting by railroad. Every farm state is going to vote against it and there are a lot of them. How in the hell are you going to sell this?
 
In the end, common sense will prevail.

Just to give an idea, in certain legislations commercial vehicles are not the same object as private cars. So Pickups for agricoltural use are still a thing.

In which case everyone buys a pickup. The people in the city would rightly resent there being something that convenient being legal in rural areas but not urban ones.
 
Explain to me how people who live miles away from any possible public transportation stop (a very large number of Americans, especially a century ago) would benefit from this, then explain how any party that proposed this would survive the next election, please!
 
Explain to me how people who live miles away from any possible public transportation stop (a very large number of Americans, especially a century ago) would benefit from this, then explain how any party that proposed this would survive the next election, please!
No clue. Maybe if, instead of being powered by gasoline, cars were powered by steam?
 
I've done timelines where the Interstate highways don't get built, that sort of thing, and I'm both a railfan and a huge advocate of rail transportation, but I have to agree with the other posters that it's almost impossible to imagine a TL in which there are no cars whatsoever.
 
Thats what the Cars were for.
Unlike Horses, they didn't leave piles of manure and puddles of urine everywhere they went
Oh agreed. Cars were certainly seen as cleaner than horses. I was thinking more in terms of straight congestion. Something like the congestion tax in London to keep car numbers down. I don't know what could be done in rural settings or more modern sprawling cities like LA. Cars are just too useful. At least until the numbers get big.
 
How to do this is difficult. I've thought of doing something along these lines as a what if, and could never get a plausible POD.

In the abstract, I think you could get a situation where the internal combustion engine is used almost purely for commercial and military use, and not for personal use by ordinary civilians, unless they are ridiculously rich. The situation would be analogous with that of planes today, used by the military, for freight travel, by commercial airlines to ferry masses of people, corporate jets, and personal airplanes for the wealthy, but we don't have a "Jetsons" situation where everyone uses their airplane to get to work or the mall.

However, to get this with ground transportation, you need to either make cars as expensive as airplanes to build, operate, and maintain, or have their use restricted by an autocratic government. The first would probably require a geologic POD where the Earth as a whole is just poorer with less fossil fuels and metals. You might do it with an industrial revolution that is cut short for some reason, so vehicles with internal combustion engines exist but can't be reproduced.

The autocratic government is a little easier. There is an argument that the internal combustion engine is so valuable that it should be limited to military and agriculture, and OK we will allow some trucks and rich and well connected people to own them. The peasants can take the bus. To my knowledge, no one, not even Russia or China, ever thought of trying that. The Nazis even went out of their way to produce cars to the masses.

The United States has banned easily manufactured, widely available, and popular products before, even to the point of shutting down entire industries, namely recreational drugs, including alcohol for fourteen years. However, this was done for quasi-religious reasons, and to get cars under this umbrella you need some sort of POD where the notion that moving away from your home town is somehow sinful gets ingrained in whatever religion Americans claim to believe.
 
WI at the turn of the 19th-20th Century the United States of America had had the good sense to forbade the production of the automobile and forced Americans to be dependent on mass transportation.
Ignoring the wild implausibility of such a law a) being passed and b) remaining in place indefinitely...
How different today would America be/function? What would be missing; what would be gained?
Horses stick around longer in urban areas, and in urban areas would probably still be around today. Emergency services are a major problem--if someone is having a heart attack, or if their house is being robbed or on fire, you want to get there as fast as possible, and taking the train isn't going to cut it. Perhaps it is all done by helicopter, or some form of light motor vehicle which is technically not a car.

On the upside, the suburbs as we know them never come into existence--cities are forced to be built for pedestrians, cyclists, and rail, and are accordingly much more compact and walkable, reducing pollution and urban sprawl accordingly.
 
Note for the United States, its even hard to get a POD that prevents personal cars from becoming almost exclusively the mode of transportation Americans were supposed to use, to the point of actively shutting down alternatives, even walking in some places. This is because of the USA

* being far and away the world's leading oil producer at the time,

* having just fought a war where mastery of internal combustion engine powered vehicles was critical

* desire to disperse the population away from central cities so they wouldn't get vaporized in a nuclear exchange

* having a serious post-war housing crisis that could most easily be remedied by just building lots of houses on the outskirts of cities and not bothering to connect them with street car lines.

Other countries didn't go as all out on this, for example in Russia nuclear bomb shelters were the preferred means of addressing the nuclear war issue, but given these factors its hard to even slow down the growth post World War 2 auto suburbs.
 
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