I figure it’s been a while since my notifications blew up due to some logistical enlightenment, and since you can only have so many pinned posts, I figure my blog is the best way to preserve it for posterity (and probably blow it up less; people barely read this thing).
I’ve gotten a reminder that Mastodon is still *gasp* incredibly anti-car, so let’s talk about a little transportation history, in the form of a mixtape of the revolutions as they came.
Don’t Go Chasing Waterfalls
You know what people rarely talk about when they want to get rid of cars? Boats. You wanna know how to tell where people set up camp forever ago? Just look at where the water is. Look at almost any city that’s ever been commercially important and they have some sort of river, lake, canal, sea, or ocean to work with. London has the Thames; Paris has the Seine; Milwaukee, Green Bay, and Chicago all have Lake Michigan; New York has the Atlantic. Water has a number of benefits for transportation, but honestly when was the last time you hopped on a ferry to get from place to place?
The answer here is that putting something on a boat is still the cheapest way of shipping something, but when it comes to moving people, getting on a plane is so much faster that there isn’t a whole lot of demand for it, just like there isn’t a whole lot of demand for passenger rail in the US, but we’ll get to that. The point here is boats used to be the transportation method of choice and they are still stupidly efficient, but not for anything you want right away.
While I’m at it, you may remember that graph of what it takes to get canned pears or whatever and it’s like Peru, China, and finally the US or whatever, but boats are so efficient that it’s still the most efficient way of doing it. Seriously, boats are mind-bogglingly efficient. If you start one at the source of a river, you basically have a free ride all the way downstream. If you’re on the ocean, you are taking the flattest route this world has to offer and you can put it on one vehicle that can carry more tons of whatever than you can probably wrap your head around. It’s hard to overstate just how efficient water is, okay?
Country Roads
Before you ever got cars, you got roads. The Roman roads that people still use today, dusty paths for the wagons, roads are one of the oldest methods of getting things from one place to another when water isn’t involved. I’m not saying to make like the Amish and return to horses, but I am saying it was important enough that a horse’s @$$ determined the dimensions of our rockets, but we’ll get to that.
You are not going to fully get rid of roads. And it’s not just because the US has been held hostage by the automotive industry. There will always be a need for roads and it predates the automobile, by, oh, just take whatever year it is and triple it, that’ll do for the next few centuries. Any time someone’s plopped down somewhere for a while and someone else has plopped down nearby and there hasn’t been water between them, someone or another has worn a path.
It’s hard to say whether the watercraft or road came first and honestly the answer probably depends on where you look and how you define a "road," because a "road" is a relatively formal thing where there were certainly "paths" before that. Point being, there is always going to be a need to transport things over land and roads formed out of the need to do it more than once, no matter how you slice it.
Sweetly Sings the Donkey/The Ox/A Horse With No Name
By the time you get the cart, you pretty much have the "road," and carts work great with beasts of burden.
Wikipedia seems to disagree on exactly when donkeys and oxen were domesticated and the answer probably depends on where you were, but people were using them in some form for thousands of years longer than the horse, so they get a name drop. Donkeys were okay to ride, but oxen were your heavy lifters. Neither of them is necessarily all that fast, though, so horses got very popular for anyone who could afford them, while oxen and donkeys eventually didn’t make it away from the farm very often.
Horses were domesticated somewhere around 3500-2000 BCE, which is to say depending on the species available, only one of which is still around, people kind of independently looked at them and said "bet you I could jump on its back." This worked much better for some than others. Obviously, zebras look a lot like horses, but zebras haven’t been domesticated and it’s not for lack of trying. What makes something easy to domesticate boils down to a number of factors, but the one zebras don’t have is a concept of "family." Their herds aren’t really a social structure. In this "every man for himself" setup, there is no incentive not to kick your teeth in if you try to approach. Horses, on the other hand, have a sense of loyalty, and domestication can work with that, and are a fairly managable size that isn’t too hard to feed, unlike the elephant. Like, the elephant is used for transportation even today, in the same sense yachts are used for transportation today, but it was never going to actually be a revolution.
So basically horses were the best transportation you could have from roughly the time Egyptians were building pyramids until modern times. Oxen might still have been great for shipping if you needed power over speed at a more reasonable price, and donkeys and mules filled other niches when you needed something sure-footed more than fast, for example, but you probably wanted a horse if it was in the budget.
I’ve Been Working on the Railroad
If you ever want to know what really revolutionized shipping, it was the steam locomotive. Suddenly you could transport a load of stuff for long distances at the break-neck speed of… a brisk walk or so. Yeah, trains kind of sucked when they first came out. You know the caboose? That was basically the train staff break room. Maybe some cots, maybe an office, but a very important place to have people hanging around, because if you wanted to go down the right track, someone had to jump off, outrun the train, throw the switch, and then jump back on.
Oh, wait, you thought someone shot the switch with a six-shooter? No. As Iconic as that is (OMG, yes, I hope to use it in my own stuff), it’s pure fantasy. They might have shot at the switching indicators as targets just to prove they could hit it, but a bullet has nowhere near the force to actually turn the switch by just the indicator and if it did, the indicator would have had to be like, I dunno, three inches thick or something to survive it. I’m sure someone’s done the proper calculations, but it’s pure fantasy.
That aside, the important thing was that you were moving probably literal tons of stuff at a brisk walk, with maybe some people from town to town like it was a bus service, along with freight, mail, livestock, and whatever else you might need to move. It may have been a brisk walk, but it was a brisk walk that took way fewer rests and could happen in your sleep. That alone was revolutionary, because you know what a horse doesn’t do? Keep walking in its sleep.
That’s not to say horses were made redundant; most people still got their transportation by riding or stage coach. They specifically were great on roads, even if you could off-road with them. I would like to point out that roads didn’t go away just because trains happened; they were still needed because like rivers, trains only went specific places. Train tracks basically became the new rivers where rivers weren’t happening naturally and unlike rivers, they were operable in all seasons.
So when did people actually start relying on rail for travel? Wellll, there was more of it once the Trans-Continental Railroad was finished, and it’s not like people didn’t ride before it, but most people also didn’t travel all that far, or all that often, for dedicated passenger rail to really be a thing. If you were on a long haul, there were sleeper cars and dining cars and they could be pretty luxurious, but you were really only seeing that if you were going somewhere either on business or to set up a new life. Moving out West was actually prescribed for chronic respiratory disease because the dry air mitigated it. There were reasons to pack up your life and head out. So as for whether the train was ever actually the primary mode of transport, there are two answers: for people, no, but for stuff, absolutely.
But fun fact, the train tracks were based on the wagon ruts, which were based on the Roman roads, which were based on the width of two horses and the small gap they needed to avoid tripping over each other, which was most easily judged from the chariot by the rear ends. When it came time to be building rockets, they were to be transported by train, which means yes, you can thank a horse’s @$$ for how we got to space.
Daisy Bell
Oh, wait, you thought the bike was invented before the train? Haha! No. The velocipede was actually invented a couple decades before the car, or maybe a couple more if you go into disputed territory, but about 60 years after the train. Okay, the first bike-like thing was invented a couple decades after the train, but it was really more of a weird scooter. If you’re a fan of Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman it makes an appearance there.
The point being here that bicycles did get popular, were a thing, but were not really a thing you could transport anything with or really reliably go very far on, relatively speaking. They were compared to horses, but it was really more of your "novelty around town horse." Sort of like having "inside shoes." If you think about where you’d bike today, yeah, that’s pretty generous for where you’d bike back then. Trust me, nobody was doing BMX on a Penny-Farthing. Just trying to stop on one of those could get you flipped straight over onto your noggin and going downhill was generally done with your feet over the handlebars so when it came to an abrupt stop and threw you, you could land on your feet instead.
Bikes never actually replaced horses, and while they’re still very much an option, they have problems a horse doesn’t. For one, you really can’t ride them in winter because snow is messy and ice will absolutely make you eat pavement, where a horse is more stable. They also kind of never developed the same dedicated rain gear, so they’re a pain to ride in the rain. And you can’t transport much cargo on them unless you have a trike, which solves some problems while creating others. If you’ve never ridden an adult trike, let me tell you, they’re pretty heavy, and you’re going to want pedal assist, which means an even heavier battery.
Don’t get me wrong, I love bikes. My bike used to be my main method of transport; it just can’t carry groceries and I have little reason to go out for anything else anymore with the pandemic still going. People act like a bike murdered my village sparking a quest for revenge or something. We need more bikes and, frankly, we just need better bike culture. My area still has the worst cyclists in the world, but that just also makes me pro-separated bike lane, because it would take electrified razor wire and helicopter enforcement to stop them from weaving everywhere from the left lane to jumping into the crosswalks to run reds. It’s not bikes’ fault they’re almost exclusively ridden by horse’s @$$es here. Driving in Madison was eye-opening because cars, bikes, and pedestrians actually have a shared culture there. Etiquette. Remember etiquette? It feels like our country has less and less of it these days.
Highway to H-E-🏒🏒
WARNING: Grossness for a paragraph in 3, 2, 1… Skip to the kitty!
On the topic of horses and their @$$es, the horseless carriage was initially hailed as a solution to pollution and kicked off a revolution. Uh, yeah, you know what horses do do? Make doo-doo. And there are economies of scale to this, because to a point, it was a valuable commodity that a city could sell to farms as fertilizer, but as cities grew and horses filled them, let’s just say supply outpaced demand, and people just had to live with that. Before the car was invented, buildings had raised doors for carriage drop-off so you didn’t have to step down into the slurry of the stuff in winter. You can’t wear white after Labor Day because it wouldn’t stay white for very long with it all hanging around all season. In summer, you were lucky if it was dried out into horse-apple powder and kicked up as dust on the wind, which is to say in the air, and blown away, for certain values of "blown away." In practice, every apple pie was a horse apple pie as soon as it hit the windowsill and people went along breathing enhanced air because germs and masking were not something the common person understood. The alternative was it might be piled up on the corners, or just left ankle-deep in the streets and shin-deep in the gutters. Not that there weren’t other awful things, but you can trace slipping on a banana peel as a gag to the comedy of the time because bananas were ludicrously popular (see also: "Yes, We Have No Bananas") and were just about the cleanest thing you could hope to actually slip on in real life. Chances were you actually slipped on a horse apple. So yeah, you were basically swimming in and/or choking on horses’ @$$es all year round. If you find all that positively revolting, congratulations, you would have been celebrating the car, and should still be celebrating the car. If you don’t, please stop reading and don’t ever talk to me again?
Palate cleanser:
The first cars were hilariously bad and absolutely toys for the rich, but by the time Henry Ford came around and started mass producing the Model T, they were actually kind of okay.
There is a lot of dirty laundry when it comes to everything after that, from the way the automotive industry killed the trolley (which, let’s be fair, was basically a car pretending to be a train car) to the invention and later criminalization of jaywalking (a term that could be translated as "country bumpkin walking"), to the invention of the suburb as a place where people too poor to afford a car would be hard-pressed to go, red-lining, building bridges intentionally too short for buses to cut off access at the hardware level, and all the lovely racism that comes with all of that. Cars have always been and will always be a luxury good. That has made them a tool for use against systemically marginalized people. If you’re from Fedi, you probably don’t need me to re-hash all of this because you hate cars and have an encyclopedic knowledge of every problem they have ever caused.
The American highway system is probably the best thing we ever got back from the Nazis after they copied our model of institutional racism. With its rings around major cities to divert traffic around them that doesn’t want to actually go there, to the straightaways that act as emergency runways for aircraft, to the fact it closes the gaps that our passenger rail system leaves, it’s a solid, if imperfect, system. Is driving dangerous? Sure. Will trucks still be needed to get things between towns? Also yes. Are deer a problem? My bumper certainly says so. Are there solutions to that? Nature bridges have been pretty successful where they’ve been installed. Is there work to do? Absolutely. Does any of that involve horses? NO!
At any rate, no matter how you wrap it, the gift left to us by years and years of bigotry, fossil fuel and automotive lobbying, and erosion of infrastructure is a country where buses can’t get you where you need to go, only the very largest cities have any sort of subway system, bike lanes are an afterthought in most places if they have them at all, pedestrian roads are so rare as to be a novelty, and you can’t even get hired at a gas station across the street from where you live if you don’t own a car on the off chance they want you to pick up a shift across town. You need a car to be a full member of society. It’s not that I don’t understand that, like so many car-haters seem to think. It’s that I DO, but I don’t see any way to easily unwind it without twice the time and five times the money to restructure everything as it took to simply build it that way when things were being built new.
Hit Me With Your Best Shot
The biggest problem I have with car-haters is the same problem I have with anarchists in that it’s a results-oriented mindset for a single issue that fails to plan for all the myriad realities of getting there or addressing anything outside of "I WIN!" What comes after "happily ever after?" By all means, remove every car from the road. Now what? How do people get from city to city, because I spent a decade with an hour commute across multiple counties. Does that sound like a great problem to eliminate? Sure. But it kept me fed. How do you fix my mom’s old job working across town third shift where the bus could drop her off as a last run, but wouldn’t do its first run of the next day until hours after her shift ended? You took the cars off the road; you didn’t fund the buses. Frankly, what about the line that goes from the shelter to the Goodwill that’s engineered to take long enough that they need to hop on the last bus back at 4:00 before anyone with a comfy office job has to look at them? It may not be technically racism, but by GOD do we have similar problems with the destitute. Are you fixing society for that?
Cars are necessary in this country. You can hate it all you want, but until you FIX it, it will still be the case. I’m still waiting on a viable plan. Thrill me.
Just a Song Before I Go
No, we’re not quite done yet, but it’s time for the passenger plane. I’m counting this based on the first that anyone started flying anyone else rather than the Wright Brothers because this is ultimately about transportation.
I’m not going to go too in-depth here because even when you pack a million people into all but a quantum superposition in the things, planes are highly polluting. Fast, but highly polluting. And that only gets worse with the rich and their private jets. You could live your whole life and not come close to polluting as much as one rich person and their private freaking jet for a year. They use them like taxi service.
Flying has always been a luxury, but it used to REALLY be a luxury with airlines competing on who could serve the best food and offer the most comfortable experience (which came with a heaping dose of sexism toward the stewardesses and ads were bold enough to claim you could marry yourself off to a rich businessman within 2 years as a "feature"). Even what First Class is today pales in comparison to the on-board French chefs and multi-course meals of yesteryear. And that’s before today’s modern Coach that gets you a baggie with half a peanut in it. Airlines knew they were expensive and they catered their experience to that so you felt like you were getting a deal.
I don’t hate flying or anything. I’ve done it a handful of times both before and after 9/11 and I could leverage a mountain of criticism against the security theater the airports run that took literal decades for the TSA to finally stop their first bad guy and which could be easily abused by blowing yourself up in the massive queues that are standing there before you ever reach the first security checkpoint if all you cared about was body count, or the fact the TSA stole my class ring in a "random" search out of Phoenix, but the actual experience of flying is okay.
But any time I order something and know there’s no way it’s getting here that fast without going on a plane, there’s a pang of guilt. Slow shipping is always cheapest anyway, but sometimes air mail is your only option and there is just no real way to make flying fuel efficient. There is a reason heavy things normally don’t fly and it’s because it takes a ton of energy.
Moving on.
Runaway Train
Yep, we’re back to trains again, but this time it’s the sexy awesome fast kind that the US doesn’t have. Welcome to maglev!
Magnetic levitation trains work through the magic of alternating magnetic fluctuations pushing the train as it rides on a cushion of air and if that doesn’t already sound cool, I have no idea what to tell you. If at any point in this article the word "hyperloop" entered your brain, I do know what to tell you: maglev is better in literally every way. Maglev is a whopping 30% faster at theoretical max and over double practical operating speed, requires no exotic conditions, it’s proven technology, safer, other countries already have it, and if your main concern with highways was pasting deer, maglev offers the potential solution of being able to be built on raised platforms. A maglev train at record speed could get you from New York to Los Angeles in just under 7½ hours if it followed the fastest driving route. It would take 41 hours to drive the same route by car. At peak normal operating speed in the world today (China), with a straight track, it would still only take 9 hours and 8 minutes. And while a plane is faster than even that, a 16-car bullet train has roughly triple the capacity of a Boeing 747, the ticket to ride is much cheaper, and it produces as little as 10% of the carbon emissions.
There are many ways US infrastructure is a joke, but the three most glaring reasons are 1) it’s crumbling, 2) the telecoms fleeced the taxpayers with promises of building out connectivity they didn’t keep in exchange for tax breaks, and 3) our rail system hasn’t been extensive or modern since the rail barons went extinct. We barely have passenger rail and what rail we DO have is antiquated. But even one of our antiquated trains produces less than half the carbon of a plane.
There’s always the joke that people on the spectrum have a thing for trains, but I probably have significantly less of a thing for trains than the average Fedizen. Hold your Venn diagram jokes for the end, please. I’ve ridden a subway, though, and it certainly got me to and from the airport and around town well enough to walk to my destinations. I won’t say I was forever changed by the experience; in some ways it was banal. A thing that people did. It’s kind of hard to be dazzled by something that everyone around you takes for granted.
Carousel Man
And that’s kind of both the rub and the point. Society at large takes cars for granted, but it also used to take trolleys for granted. And rivers and horses and whatever path got worn between two places. I would LOVE for society to take trains for granted like Japan does.
Seriously, we are on a merry-go-round when it comes to cars. People are just so used to the way things are that there’s no real push to change it, in part because we’re so immersed in the world of the fossil fuel and automotive industries, among others. So under the thumb of Elon Musk because everyone assumed anyone who’s rich HAS to be brilliant rather than realizing money solves any problem brilliance might have been needed for. Everything has gotten so privatized that people have in many cases lived their whole lives without decent public transportation and are losing the ability to understand how their tax dollars actually pay for anything.
People have never had the luxury of walkable neighborhoods, a corner store, or a reliable way to get anywhere and back outside of all but the largest cities. The bitter irony is that if you poll people on it, they’re actually really receptive to the idea. You can draw them a picture of a neighborhood where everything is there for them, a veritable buffet of parks and shopping to take care of their basic needs, greenery and shade, fun in the sun, clean air, and have them breathing, "yes… yes…" right up until the point you say anything about a lack of a gas station, because anti-car peeps tend to not be able to help themselves and overlook the need for gas for stuff like lawn mowers. And as much as I can rant about how wasteful lawns are, unless you’re changing that, too, it is still something they have to worry about. Like, seriously, anti-car peeps, you have to understand how much you look like a well-intentioned liberal when you overlook this stuff. Just, cripes, this is why results-oriented thinking never freaking works.
I fully understand what it’s like to live in a walkable neighborhood. My family plopped down in my house specifically because we could live within a mile of our own home. If we were hungry, we got our shoes on and walked. If we wanted to visit friends, we biked.
But for work, or doctor visits, we had to get in the car, because the infrastructure just was not there to do anything else.
Build me a train to everywhere. Build me a bus system that criss-crosses town day and night. Build me bike lanes guarded by rock, steel, fire, and freaking tigers.
Heck, maybe you could put something on the car side of the divider, too.