Comment by tzs | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tzs | Hacker News Reader

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The first result when I Googled "cost per year to keep a horse" [1] claims that the average monthly cost is from $200 to $325, and notes that is on par with a car payment.

It's amusing to contemplate whether it would actually be feasible to have a decent sized modern town in which horses, rather than cars, are the main form of transport.

If that article is right, they would be about as affordable to the owner as a car. And note that they all come with better self-driving software than any car currently for sale to the general public, and probably better than any that will be for sale within the next decade at least.

They are generally slower than cars, though. A walking horse goes around 7 km/hr (4 mph). They trot at about 13 km/hr (8 mph), and can easily keep that up for hours.

They canter at 2 to 3 times trot speed, but can only keep that up for about an hour over reasonable terrain, which I'd hope a town would have. They can gallop a bit faster, but not for very long.

[1] https://www.moneycrashers.com/cost-owning-horse-alternatives...

It's amusing to contemplate whether it would actually be feasible to have a decent sized modern town in which horses, rather than cars, are the main form of transport.

The big problems becomes dealing with the huge amount of horse waste, both manure and urine, but mostly manure. A horse will create about 15kg of manure and 5kg of urine each day. For a small city of say 200,000 people, you'd need say 100,000 horses. That means 2000 tons of additional waste each day (the humans will be generating about 200 tons of biowaste a day).

This sort of problem was faced in the late 1800's. Some predicted the end of urban civilization caused by horse manure (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Horse_Manure_Crisis_of_1...). Automobiles saved us all from the horrible fate of being buried in horse poop.

$200 to $325/month if you maintain the horse yourself.

If you let someone else board the horse it's another $260/month on average. Assuming $10/hour that's 26 hours, or about an hour a day to maintain your horse.

How much time do you spend maintaining your car per day?

When cars where introduced, a significant sales argument was that they don't shit on the streets. City streets used to covered in many inches of manure. It must have been quite the olfactory experience, especially after the rain.

I wonder if it is possible to harness a stronger-than-human animal to power a wheeled vehicle. A couch potato human can bicycle faster than 13 km/h for hours after all. This could mean that a domesticated animal could get a big speed boost by using wheels instead of legs.

The normal bicycle posture might be hard for many animals but maybe something more like a recumbent, adapted for 4 limbs since animals don't have such a big hand/leg strength imbalance...

That's a good idea. As an alternative, we could rig a draft animal up to a device that charges up a flywheel-powered car.

I had stumbled onto an impact of horses in cities that doesn't get mentioned as often as the manure problem: their deaths and their carcasses. Instead of being lovingly cared for and gently used, horses used in urban transport apparently were badly treated and lived briefly. And their use left the streets a very unwelcome place for pedestrians.

This wayback link[1] comes from the Wikipedia article on horse cars [2]

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20140124204000/http://www.uctc.n... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horsecar

Note that $200/month doesn't count cost of buying the horse (sometimes they are given away, but a good horse that has been trained will cost you). If you go on vacation elsewhere for a month you still need to pay to feed the horse, while a car can sit around needing no extra fuel.

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