America’s skepticism toward the first automobiles (1930)
saturdayeveningpost.com
saturdayeveningpost.com
[0]: Et land på fire hjul, by Ulrik Eriksen
What's missing in this analysis is a comparison to the numbers of injuries and fatalities caused by horse drawn carriages. Also, cars didn't leave horse poop everywhere on the streets, with all of the health and sanitation implications.
It's good to remember you can't see the smell in old photos!
A bunch of horses in a big city on a rainy day is a recipe for spreading disease.
I would venture to guess that since stop signs, lane markings and traffic signals were all deployed after cars started killing people, there were a significant number of people annually run over by horse-drawn vehicles, thrown from horseback, or run over by pre-car vehicles like trolleys and trains. Urban streets looked something like this: https://www.wisconsinhistory.org/Records/Image/IM24987
But also, this is pure straw man. The modern alternatives to cars are trains, bikes and busses.
Yeah, I adjusted them. The population has tripled.
1. Open Source - auto inventors shared ideas because of their desire to prove skeptics wrong about their new industry, and in response to being sued by a patent troll.
> I believe I am entitled to say I have never collected a cent in royalties from them, nor will I. Lawyers have tried to argue me into bringing suits for infringements, but it so happened we pioneers always worked together. We loaned ideas. We loaned tools. We loaned patents. If we worked out a good idea, we loaned that.
2. Lots of Companies - most were either scams or too small to support their products.
> When you know that more than 500 automobile companies came in and went out in those first few years, you will better understand some of the forces working against those of us who were honestly trying to succeed.
AI is the new hotness now, and both of these patterns are in full force.
Worth contemplating are the unforeseen negative externalities of the automobile as they reached scale. The article, written 30 years later, didn't even mention any. Makes me think about what we won't be able to perceive and believe in our current tech. Just think of what we're still learning about the web's externalities some 30+ years into it!
That is an overly broad characterization. We can look to the Wright brothers as pioneers who vigorously enforced patent.
As the Wikipedia entry puts is: "The Wright brothers did not have the luxury of being able to give away their invention: It had to be their livelihood. Thus, their secrecy intensified, encouraged by advice from their patent attorney, Henry Toulmin, not to reveal details of their machine." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers
http://wintonhistory.com/ adds "[Winton] was also generous in passing the technology along to competitors when safety was an issue." The steering wheel described fits that characterization.
https://archive.org/details/1001inventionsth0000unse/page/49... goes on to describe how other companies of the time were no so eager to share in the "over 1 00,000 patents [that] went into the creation of the first practical automobile."
] Unfortunately, Winton's local competitors were simultaneously working on a very similar system and beat him to the patent. The Ohio Automobile Company, later renamed the Packard Motor Car Company, added their version of the steering wheel, based on Winton's early developments, to the second car they launched in 1899. It was immediately successful, and Winton, whose company custom-made every vehicle, found the competition difficult and was forced to stop production in 1924.
"Of all the men who attacked the flying problem in the 19th century, Otto Lilienthal was easily the most important. ... It is true that attempts at gliding had been made hundreds of years before him, and that in the nineteenth century, Cayley, Spencer, Wenham, Mouillard, and many others were reported to have made feeble attempts to glide, but their failures were so complete that nothing of value resulted." ~ Wilbur Wright, 1912
In that case, Winton also was not a pioneer in the automobile industry, as he too built on previous work. The Benz Patent-Motorwagen came out a decade before Winton's first car, which in turn built on previous work.
Yet Winton called himself a pioneer.
And people at the time definitely considered the Wrights pioneers. Eg, the Aero Club of the United Kingdom gave them gold medals in 1908 for their "pioneer work".
The first cars were looked upon with skepticism in 1893 to 1895. But the article makes it clear that the American public was accepting of the idea by the 1900s.
We're looking at a period of 5 to 8 years to go from skeptical of an idea to accepting. This lines up with my experience with smartphones, internet, and other inventions of my lifetime.
There are other... inventions... which have had more than 10+ years to prove themselves. Maybe they'll prove themselves soon, but I have my doubts.
I personally don't make great use of crypto other than some speculations (disclosue, I have made a non-life-altering amount in crypto speculation) but that doesn't mean there aren't interesting, valuable things being done with the technology. I see things like https://atalaprism.io/ that seem really interesting as well as more institutional things like bonds being issued on the blockchain (happening in the EU) as things that have potential to continue adding value.
Also the highest trading volume of NYSE is close to 300 billion in a day. The highest trading volume of crypto is something like 500 billion with some estimates saying 51% of all crypto volume is artificial. That still puts crypto's trading volume peak only ~40 billion off from NYSE trading volume peak. So by that metric alone crypto as a financial instrument is successful.
There’s a lot of conversation in this thread about all of the horrors cars have brought into this world, and I can certainly attest that I’m a person who greatly wishes most cities were modeled like European cities with abundant public transit and walkable neighborhoods.
I also really liked the “hacker” nature of Winton who sounds like an SV developer from the early-mid ‘10s. I miss the days when we just built shit and shared (knowing full well the days when we _really_ just built shit and shared happened like 40 years prior).
Poop. Lots, and lots, and lots of Poop.
Not only that, but to feed those horses, you needed a horse to pull a carriage full of horsebread (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horsebread). Those horses that pulled the horsebread into the city also pooped. IIRC, 30% of all traffic was horsebread, supporting the other traffic that was going on.
I guarantee you. A horse has more environmental impact than gasoline. In particular, one-ton of gasoline moves more gasoline than one-ton of horsebread moved horsebread.
Regardless, it still seems like it would’ve been incredible to live in a time where cars didn’t exist, and then they did exist. I have to imagine the next leap like that would be around the time humans couldn’t regularly travel off planet, and then they could. Probably outside of my lifetime.
That's a very odd metric.
The success of the NYSE is its ability to raise money to new (or experienced) companies.
https://www.whitecase.com/insight-our-thinking/global-ipos-m...
That is, NYSE doesn't exist to trade stock. NYSE exists to raise money (and as a side effect, trades stock). Companies who need servers, factories, or other equipment go to NYSE (or Nasdaq, or other exchanges around the world) to IPO (for new companies), or Secondary Offerings (for established companies).
We measure the amount of money raised each quarter in the tens-of-billions. This creates new companies, new factories, new equipment and catapults our economy into the future.
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In many ways, the trading activity is a side-show, just there to enable the raising of new money. (The easier it is to trade stock / exit a position, the more likely people are to buy stock in the first place).
There was a time a few years ago when cryptocoins were trying to be a new grounds for raising money. But that effort failed ("Initial Coin Offerings" are so full of scammers and rug-pullers you'd be an idiot to participate in one today). But even at its peak, it never succeeded at raising money like the NYSE does.
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So now I ask: what value does coin volume have for society? I posit, not much value at all. Its a distinction without much importance.
The other measure of success is maybe transaction-volumes. But this too is under decline. I'm pretty sure "peak cryptocoin" was ~5 years ago when Steam and other webpages tried to use BTC to buy video games, fund microtransactions and other such services. Alas, $50 transaction fees put a dampener on that, especially since video games were $20. It turns out that the system cannot support a large number of transactions.
It can only lead to bankrupting country or cities, drive on barely maintained roads and suffer traffic and lose precious time every day.
If prices are any indicator, people highly value walkable neighborhoods, which is why they tend to be much more expensive than less walkable suburbs.
Also there are barely any walkable neighborhoods in America
“freedom is slavery”
“ignorance is strength”
There aren't enough, a lot more walkable neighborhoods would be quite welcome.
But it's an oft-repeated exaggeration that they don't and can't exist. There are tons of walkable neighborhoods in the US. Every place I've lived in California (four) has been a very walkable. My current suburban location is extremely walkable to pretty much anything I could need (and it was built in the 1990s, so it's not some pre-car era relic).
[1] https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/all-injuries/preventable-death-o...
And you can’t ignore benefits with any cost. Giving someone cancer drugs has a chance of killing them but we don’t stop using them because a chance at a cure outweighs the costs.
100 kids walk to school, drivers kill 5 of them.
Situation B:
98 kids are driven to school (because walking is dangerous!) 2 kids walk to school, drivers kill 1 of them.
Which is safer?
The purpose was to show the effects that car over-reliance has on public safety and quality of life.
In the second scenario, everyone thinks the roads are too dangerous for kids (becuase they are, as evidenced by half of them getting killed) so they all drive their kids to school in oversized heavy vehicles making the roads even more dangerous.
It’s not hard to understand.
I think you messed up your analysis somewhere. LOL
> While gun and motor vehicle deaths increased substantially in 2020, the latest year for which final numbers were available, claims that more children and teenagers die due to guns than motor vehicles only hold up when 18- to 19-year-olds are included, a group that accounts for nearly as many gun deaths as 1- to 17-year-olds combined do, according to an NBC News analysis of data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The gap between vehicular deaths and firearm deaths is narrowing among 1- to 17-year-olds, and may close entirely, according to the CDC’s provisional and incomplete 2021 data.
from https://www.nbcnews.com/data-graphics/child-gun-deaths-car-d...
I'm not sure the word "kid" is legally defined anywhere, but for minors, it would appear that automobiles still are the leading cause of death
(or at least they were as of the time of that report, and from a quick search I'm not finding any more recent analyses. Traffic fatalities increased by a notably higher rate than homicide in 2021, and homicide decreased notably more than traffic fatalities in 2022. Would need to analyze the CDC's data to verify if the overall trends are present for minors too, but my guess is that they probably are.)
Not that which is #1 has much impact on resolving either of these issues, as cars were unquestionably the largest killer of kids for many years with politicians and even the general public seemingly unconcerned. The U.S. has an extraordinarily high traffic-fatality rate compared to other developed nations (higher than any other developed country in the world per capita [1]), with it being a leading cause of death in the U.S. for people ages 1–54 [2]. The U.S. has over 2x more traffic-related fatalities per 100k people than Canada, New Zealand, Poland, Greece, South Korea, Italy, Australia and France, over 3x more than Portugal, Germany, and the Netherlands, over 5x more than the UK, over 6x more than Spain, Japan and Sweden, and over 12x more than Norway. In other words, of the 42,915 people who died in motor vehicle fatalities in 2021 in the U.S., the overwhelming majority of them died unnecessarily.
The solutions aren't a mystery: passenger rail has exceedingly few passenger deaths, and rarely ever causes pedestrian deaths. More walkable and bikeable cities would also help as well, as obviously not every street is going to have rail on it. In the meantime, lower speed limits, enforced both by law and by design of the road, as well as lighter vehicles, would also help mitigate the issue.
Some say it's an unfeasible pipe dream to have good public transit and walkable cities in a country as geographically large and spread out as the US, but the US had excellent public transit and walkable cities 80-100 years ago. Many small towns from that time period had significantly better public transit and walkability than many major cities do today. One of my relatives grew up in a town of 25,000 people and her family had no car growing up, so she walked nearly every place she went. She tried saving up for a bike, but every time she could almost afford it, the price went up, so eventually she gave up and used the money she was saving to take a trip to New Orleans. Her town of 25k back then was more walkable than Columbus, Ohio — a city of 900k people — is today (it also had passenger rail, which Columbus does not have at all anymore, and has no plans of bringing back.)
I don't know what it is that makes people so insensitive to car deaths. I have a relative who lost her husband due to a car crash, and she herself suffered permanent injuries from being hit by a car as a pedestrian, but despite all of that when I talk to her the thing she always seems worried about is the crime and violence she hears on the news, despite the fact that you're far more likely to die in a car crash. I hear people complain about violence all the time (rightfully so, it's inexcusable) but I don't know that I've ever heard someone say they're worried about car crashes, despite being a far greater danger. I think people just think it's a natural part of life that is unpreventable, when it is neither natural nor unpreventable.
1. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/pdfs/mm7126a1-H.pdf 2. https://www.cdc.gov/injury/features/global-road-safety/index... 3. https://www.itf-oecd.org/sites/default/files/docs/irtad-road...
Anyway it took 10 years but our plan to move somewhere better (Netherlands) is nearly done but you shouldn't need to move 6,000 miles to find one damn place that isn't completely given over to machines that crush kids.
It's not just kids dying, either. I want to be able to send my kid outside to play and not stress about it. That should be possible somewhere like Houten (which to be clear, still has cars! It's just much, much, much better designed). I don't know anywhere in the US I'd be ok with it, except -maybe- culdesac.com or one of the very few car-free or car-lite refuges like Catalina island.
A Brief History Of Gasoline: A Century And A Half Of Lies
Not to mention all the taxes paid for the road, interstates, etc. And the fact you now have a 1% lifetime risk of dying in a car accident in the US. Getting into a car is among the riskiest things you do on a daily basis.
Then, the way interstates tore apart communities and parking continues to ruin downtowns.
That's before we get to the impact on the planet.
At the time they had a wonderful network of intercity trains across the country (430,000mi by 1910), street cars and metros. A lot of which was torn up thanks to the car lobby.
If we built this we wouldn’t need traffic…
For an individual, it is better to have a car than to use public transit, but for society, it is worse that more public spending, resources and city design is geared towards accommodating more cars than public transit. However no one is going to sacrifice their personal well being via giving up their car.
The solution is to pay people not to buy cars.
Respectfully I disagree. Not only is it significantly more expensive, you have a lot less freedom. Freedom isn't the ability to drive to the middle of the desert, it's to get to where you want to go without being beholden to a metal box that's liable to kill you. We had that, and we can have it again. Not having to deal with parking, not having to deal with traffic, gas, etc, is actually great. Not having to worry about whether I can risk a drink and therefore increase the risk of murdering a family is great. It doesn't work for everyone, obviously those living in remote areas, but for most people, transit is straight up better in every way.
We sacrificed our wellbeing when we bought into car culture.
The fragment you quoted means it is better to each individual separately for themselves to have a car if it has no impact on what everybody else does. If everyone else already has cars, then it's better for you if you also have one because the infrastructure is geared up for that. If nobody has cars then your life is better if you (*only you*) have one – in fact it's great, there's no traffic!
The point is, in practice, for an individual choosing whether to take public transport or use a car, it's very often better for them to choose the car - even though that makes things a little worse for everyone else. Recognising that is an important part of making public transport work.
The rate of trains coming in in these cities is such that I rarely have to worry about a timetable. I just need to know which trains connect where.
The problem is the cities in between, which is probably the majority, where public transit is not used enough to warrant such high number of trains. If the public transit system was used more, you could schedule more trains, if you had more trains it would be used more.
It's kind of a chicken and egg situation where you need a lot of political will, or such density that it becomes necessity, to push for this.
This lines up with my own experience. On weekdays, trams go every 5 minutes at my stop. On weekends, they go every 7.5 minutes. And that's just enough over the edge for me that I'm tempted to check the schedule on my phone before leaving my home.
What happens with most of these, is light rail goes to the city for a few surrounding suburbs with 50-100k people per town. To get to that train station every morning, you need a car. No, you cannot have a bus circle the suburb for an hour to pick everyone up. No you cannot have many buses purchased by the suburb and stand still during off times - the taxes from 50k people cannot pay for that. No, no one is going to wait at a chicago suburb busstop for a bus while it's raining in October, or baking in July, or blasting -15 temp at 20mph winds, while the bus is late.
No one is driving cars to the desert. They are driving it to the mall, the restaurant, the rail stop.
They don't have to "deal" with parking. Towns have huge parking lots, and land is cheap.
What you did is make up a strawman, where people living in the dense city don't need a car. Guess what - most people there don't have one. I'm one of those people who has had cars in little towns, and no car while I live in the city.
Yes, there are two people who drive from the suburb to the city. Those are the minority. You see that traffic jam into the city in the morning? That's people's choice to drive. They can instead drive 10min to the rail or bus stop in or near their town. The option of which you speak, is already there. Selecting it or not, is the freedom.
No, I'm not talking about every city. Just most.
And no, we didn't have that which you describe. What we had is people having to work real close to where they lived. They are still free to do exactly that. I've tried that for over a decade, and don't own a car. As a consequence of that choice, I rent and sold the house. Maybe if you have a kid in school, you don't want to move too much. Maybe you get fired too and the next job's not that close. There was no fast subway or rail going all meshed between every town. Rail trips between towns were a thing you packed and dressed for. They were not a thing you took to work and back every morning. That thing, was the light rail to the city, is still there, and many people use it.
If the suburb is designed to be walkable then the bus is not needed in the first place:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0
Each individual community or neighbourhood can be fairly self-contained with regards to daily needs, and travel between them is done on rail or whatever. One could have all-day, frequent (e.g., every 5 minutes) service with trams (or buses) with-in an area, where you can travel with-in it, but also have connections to commuter rail to go to the Big City if the need arises:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commuter_rail
This is how things were generally built post-railway, pre-WW2. (Pre-railroad things were generally all walkable, but long distances being done on horses or boats.)
But you say (buses!). Again, I addressed that. A bus, at a bus stop, is not something you are going to be able to do half of the time in suboptimal climates in half the country. Even in the 1/4 of the time with bad climate in the other half of the country, you still need to get around 25% of the time when you can't be waiting at the bus stop in 120 degree heat to get to work. And for that, you'll still need a car. So if you already have a car for that 25% of time, why then can't you just use it all the time?
The walkable plans you reference completely ignores this issue, and pretends the climate is perfect every time you need to go somewhere. You don't need to design things to be walkable, if everyone already has a car for the times it's not "walkable" outside.
Those olden days you dream of weren't as rosy as you think. People would show up to work freezing, wet, uncomfortable, and get sick from being in the freezing wind for a half hour "walking." They were also a lot less mobile, and going between places was a thing, not a multiple times a day part of life.
Well, if we want to have a society, we should very much define "freedom for others" too, considering the whole tradeoffs and issues or benefits of a practice (that's how we decided to have laws and ethics and other stuff, of course).
Not just leave it at "anything goes", and let everybody else get the consequences of individual choices, even if it's not their choice or to the detriment of the society at large (like, destroying public health or the environment).
>we should very much define
the people whose freedom of choice you are taking away for the good of society, are part of society, are part of "we," and the majority can't take their freedom just because it's overall good for that majority.
What you did is take a part of "we," made it "them," and made them the enemy. Don't do that.
The solution, IMHO, is to tax car use, based on its areal footprint, its weight, and how much time it spends on roads. That directly addresses the dangers and costs cars pose and incur, respectively, and counteracts the negative sum arms race whereby people buy increasingly large cars to make themselves safer from other people's increasingly large cars.
Most importantly though, cities should not be designed around them but instead around people, bikes and transit.
> They also saved New York from mountains of horse poop.
Wedding's over, we don't really need the priest anymore ;)
Mobility for labor and commerce is also a big plus: any retail business can draw customers from much wider area just as well as employees. Large plants and factories can be built far away from the cities with cheap land and energy.
As opposed to what? Horse and buggy? They required constant work and had very limited range. Automobiles were the first innovation that allowed people to truly go anywhere, and conveniently.
They rarely are. Between walking to the stop, waiting for train/bus, time on train/bus, then walking from the stop - car is almost always faster. Not to mention, all that walking outside in foul weather and sitting in enclosed places with lots of strangers will get you sick regularly. That's my experience, from European cities with good public transport systems.
In my experience your immune system adapts. If you switch you will be a bit more sick for a year, but then you get a stronger immune system and it goes back to normal again.
Until 100 people want to do the same thing as you, each in their own car. Traffic congestion and parking are painful. Mass transit exists for a reason.
(And that's also ignoring how miserable the last mile problem is.)
Though it should be noted that roads had existed before cars (and were paved with the help of cycling advocates), and interstates/highways between cities are useful for commerce.
It is the extreme focus on making everything car-centric for personal transportation that is the problem. Having cars as an option isn't a bad thing; having them as a necessity is where most of the issues come from.
(What the Romans did in 1 AD is irrelevant to what municipalities did in 1901 AD.)
Aside from this Saturday Evening Post contribution, and the biography “Famous but forgotten: The story of Alexander Winton, automotive pioneer and industrialist”, there doesn’t seem to be much else to read about the man.
Anybody find anything else?