Syt's Pictorial Collection of Stuff and Things (image heavy)

[Valmy]

Again I mean I'm not saying we do this now. My point is all of these things you're pointing out that cars are better for is because we have built our society around people using cars. We can make other choices and that may change the balance - as we've seen in the Netherlands or Denmark.

So back in the 1890s and 1900s cars weren't very useful because we had built our society around using horses and trains? No. They were useful immediately, we didn't need to construct our society around them. Now sure the way cities were constructed changed and were laid out changed due to cars but even if that never happened cars were still useful and popular before that. If we had to completely reconstruct everything to make cars work cars would have never caught on.

Although the disability and elderly is slightly weird to me because outside of the cities on country buses I'd guess 80% of the people you see are disabled or elderly users (plus the school runs). I think it's something like 60% of people with disabilities don't have a car, the elderly get free bus travel and often don't feel comfortable/safe driving. The bus services are nowhere near good enough for these people at the minute. But we should be improving public transport for them (and for everyone else too).

Well congrats on your elderly and disable people being able to climb up and down the massive amounts of stairs and elbow their way through the crowds one would need on most metro stations. Or I guess they just all happen to live on convenient bus routes?

And again what if I am hauling things around?

I mean I hate cars, I hate owning a car and I hate driving. But this seems completely out of touch with the reality of living anywhere but a very dense urban area which is a very tiny percentage of most countries.

[Oexmelin]

If we had to completely reconstruct everything to make cars work cars would have never caught on.

But we did. We tore down urban fabric, razed entire neighborhoods, extended gigantic urban sprawls to make cars work. Cars were not immediately useful. They were a symbol of luxury, and served  no practical purpose for a population  who lived in close proximity to their places of employment; who were already well served by public transportation; and  who certainly didn't have the real estate to house one unused for most of the day.

[Valmy]

If we had to completely reconstruct everything to make cars work cars would have never caught on.

But we did. We tore down urban fabric, razed entire neighborhoods, extended gigantic urban sprawls to make cars work.

We connected existing towns to city centers so more people could have access to employment and living that did not involve being controlled by their employers in company towns nor mashed together in tenements. People did this because the previous conditions were horrible. Cars enabled it, and it did come with a price, but last I checked most of those urban areas are still intact AND plenty of urban neighborhoods had been raised before to accomodate other changes that predated cars. Like Haussmann's Paris.

Cars were not immediately useful. They were a symbol of luxury, and served  no practical purpose for a population  who lived in close proximity to their places of employment; who were already well served by public transportation; and  who certainly didn't have the real estate to house one unused for most of the day.

Oh so Henry Ford went broke making a useless piece of equipment useful only to the luxurious rich? It was just much more convenient to move goods to and from the train station using horses than trucks?

[garbon]

Quick look suggests that it was about 20 years between when Model T was made available and 60% of American households had adopted the car.

[Valmy]

I mean we also greatly altered how society functioned and how things were built to take advantage of trains, but it wasn't like trains were not useful before we did that. Their were immediately beneficial, we did change things around to take advantage of those benefits and I am sure we paid a price for that.

[Valmy]

Interesting with all cord cutting of Telephones during the depression.

[The Brain]

The same graph to 2020 would be really interesting.

[Syt]

Speaking of public transport, Vienna is following the example of other cities, and is greening up some parts of the tram network.

[The Brain]

How do you mow areas without rails?

[Tamas]

And you Viennese got all uppity when Trump said you live in a forest

[Sheilbh]

And you Viennese got all uppity when Trump said you live in a forest

Clearly elves

[Oexmelin]

but last I checked most of those urban areas are still intact AND plenty of urban neighborhoods had been raised before to accomodate other changes that predated cars. Like Haussmann's Paris.

You checked poorly. Yes, Hausmann's Paris is a great example of how wide boulevards created to accommodate martial law and bourgeois sensibility could be repurposed without too much trouble for the car. So it was for most boulevards - large avenues created, often on the space formerly occupied by fortifications, and therefore, usually the  space of poor neighborhoods or squatters that were torn down without much opposition.

Many European towns however had the good fortune of having gone through a horrific world conflict that left their core devastated, ready to be rebuilt with the car in mind. It's not a coincidence that European cities that escaped relatively unscathed enjoy today high density and thick networks of public transportation. That is certainly not the case in the US. The core of most American cities has been gutted for the passage of highways. Scenic drives created for the purpose of leisurly strolls have become highspeed transitways; downtowns were fled en  masse once the states were fully committed to sustaining endless sprawl with considerable infrastructure.

Oh so Henry Ford went broke making a useless piece of equipment useful only to the luxurious rich? It was just much more convenient to move goods to and from the train station using horses than trucks?

Less shrill irony, please. Moving goods is certainly one use for motor vehicle but I thought we were discussing how they impacted city life. Corporate ownership of motor vehicle =/= personal possession of a car. Especially since "conditions were horrible" doesn't really fit with who got to own a car fast. The people who lived in squalor were not the ones who rushed to own a car.

[Malthus]

The graph reminds me that my grandparents owned a wood burning kitchen stove dating back to the late 1940s that was made up to look like an electric stove - my guess is that, at the time, owning an electric stove was a bit of a social step up. Poor folks made do with wood burning.

Nowadays, wood stoves sold in the first world are often made to look olde-Timey, In their all cast iron glory, because they are more of a luxury.

Anyway, that stove lasted until the late 1980s, then started to burn through and we replaced it in the cabin with a modern one ... which did not cook stuff nearly as well.

[Josquius]

That's the one time where cars fill a big need that it's hard to see being filled by something else, when buying big items like furniture.
Still, that's not exactly an every day thing. Not even an every year thing.

[The Brain]

I get around in a palanquin.