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Comment by flyinglizard | Hacker News Reader

It's different though, because horses are developed and manufactured by nature. They don't require a huge enterprise and depth of engineering to mass produce them, nor do they require fueling infrastructure. When the supply chain supporting the mass produced internal combustion engine dies, the internal combustion powered enthusiast car dies with it.

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If for some reason, we had as many horse riders as drivers, none of that would be true. Horses would be as much a part of modern industry as chicken and cattle already are. IOW, there would be huge enterprises to ensure only good genes went into new horses, enterprises to ensure a steady supply of fodder to keep the horses of megacities fed, proportionately larger sewage system, and so on.

Um Horse drawn transport requires a large amount of infrastructure

> large

Animal drawn vehicles have been in use for millennia with nothing but nature to provide infrastructure. Relatively flat terrain for the path, a watering hole, whatever plant the animal ate. This was improved over centuries with actual infrastructure (a well) but you have to admit we're talking vastly different scales compared to anything auto.

So horse-drawn carriages don't need roads? I guess the Romans just built these for fun, then.

Snark aside, no... the roads definitely helped but the vast majority of such traffic for thousands of years was done over "ad-hoc" roads, basically a beaten path. A road implies a base - pavement, stones, etc. For most of the history of carriages they used mostly beaten paths. For most (all?) of the history of the automobile they used roads.

And I'm pretty sure that at any point in history probably until a century or two ago there were more "beaten paths" in the world than actual roads. Which isn't the case now.

My point stands, highlighted by the quote: "large". The network of roads built for carriages pales in comparison with the scale of the current infrastructure for cars. Which I assume was the whole point of the comparison in the comment I replied to. I just objected to the unnecessarily vague or misleading use of "large". There was a road infrastructure. Whether it was large depends on how creative you get with the reference point.

And I'm not even counting the fact that the infrastructure for cars includes far more than just the roads. In this context almost any other infrastructure of any kind built before the 20th century is absolutely tiny.

For a much smaller population that the point at the scale we are currently at you start to run into problems.

In places like Edinburgh's New Town - which were built at "peak horse" you have entire streets of mews properties that were originally built as stables for grand houses:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mews

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Town,_Edinburgh

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