Comment by bluGill | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bluGill | Hacker News Reader

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> People travel via horseback because how else would they travel?

Walk. Seriously, people walk in general, not ride horses. You use the horse to carry cargo, or haul a wagon (oxen would be better for pulling a wagon - they eat less so despite being slower they are more economical, plus the anatomy of oxen make a harness easier). The people though don't ride in the wagon they walk behind. Wagons without modern suspension are rough rides and you can walk farther than the horse or oxen can in a day, and just as fast. Thus horses were only rarely used for human transport through most of history.

The only time horse transport makes sense is when you have a regular system of change points and so the horses "run" (probably at a trot not a run, but I'm not an expert on horses so if details matters do your own research) faster than you can for an hour or two then you trade horses while the first horses rest until tomorrow. In this way you can travel a lot faster than you could by walking, but it depends on the whole system which is very expensive to setup/run. Anyone who needed to save money would walk even when that system existed. Thus such systems - where they even existed - were often used for mail where spread across thousands of letters the cost was cheap enough that you could afford the speed.

Right —- I find it interesting that Hollywood and modern life (horse racing and our own sedentary existence) has skewed our perception of this.

An averagely fit horse can travel maybe ten miles further than an averagely fit person in a day. But not as far if you expect them to maintain a pace faster than a person, with a person and belongings on their back.

At the limits of our endurance, human ultra-runners perform about as well as horses over very long distances in terms of simple endurance — carrying our own weight without stopping. It’s only over short distances that horses have such obvious advantages.

If you had a horse and you needed to cover great distance, you spent as much of that time as you could doing your own walking.

I think a lot of that comes from the perception where the horse was replaced by the automobile for casual travel.

Logically when you then are creating media where cars don't exist, you're going to need to create an equivalent and it's "common knowledge" that horse carriages were the big thing cars replaced. So you instead get a horse, something that whilst obviously much slower than a car, still gives the impression of "this lets you move faster" than how a human would walk on foot.

There's also the image of the most famous start/stop horse network of all: the Pony Express, which probably played a part in setting up this imagery - for an onlooker, postal workers would travel from one side to the other on a single horse, permitting (for the time) very fast deliveries. In reality it was a series of well maintained stables and lots of start-stop segments to keep a horse in good condition, but that's not something you're going to notice if you're not a mailman.

(The Pony Express also wasn't sustainable and went bankrupt rather quickly, but it's legacy is pretty lasting.)

The car took over from the horse plus train if you were rural (most of the population was farmers), or only the train (calling the streetcar a type of train as both ran on tracks) if you were urban.

Horses work well for trips to town. When it isn't far to town a a horse really is faster, then the horse rests in town all day while you do your shopping. Town is also where the train station was, so if you were going on a long trip you would take the train which was faster than a horse, but you had to get to the train station.

> Horses work well for trips to town.

That's actually an important point which gets skipped over frequently. Often these time/distance comparisons are done as if commoners are traveling across entire continents frequently. Except your normal commoner is maybe a couple miles from where they want to go. That leaving your local area makes you "unusual" at the very least.

Fantasy and recreationism often have that issue, where they're still looking at the situation from the prospective of humans who can "relatively" easily travel from America to Europe in a day, and where large portions of the population regularly travel 100's, perhaps 1000's of miles for Holidays or similar reasons.

> where large portions of the population regularly travel 100's, perhaps 1000's of miles for Holidays

Pilgrimage for 'holy-days' was moderately common in the Christian middle ages, and would frequently involve journeys of more than 100 miles (e.g. the Pilgrims Way https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilgrims'_Way from Winchester to Canterbury) and be undertaken by a good cross section of society including commoners (see the Canterbury Tales). Less commonly, but still not unknown, a pilgrimage might involve journeys from England to Rome (maybe 1000 miles) or Jerusalem (more than 2500 miles, e.g. Margery Kempe).

Indeed, though Canterbury pilgrims generally walked. For the majority, walking it was part of the religious point of the journey.

> Logically when you then are creating media where cars don't exist, you're going to need to create an equivalent and it's "common knowledge" that horse carriages were the big thing cars replaced. So you instead get a horse, something that whilst obviously much slower than a car, still gives the impression of "this lets you move faster" than how a human would walk on foot.

This is very well put. It's a sort of category error with an associated conceptual leakage.

One thing I only recently learned was that Stagecoaches also relied on subbing out teams of horses at stations.

I've heard this before, and it seems reasonable enough (and also that a horse must be rested at least one day a week to recover from the march). Does it also hold true when the human is also carrying camping gear, food, extra clothes, etc? Or is the more realistic comparison human + pack animal vs human on horse?

I don't know. I suspect they are proportionately as well as absolutely better at carrying large loads at slow speeds than we are; momentum is in our favour as we're on two legs.

But I do know there's a guy currently training to run the London Marathon with a refrigerator (OK a British one, but a refrigerator) on his back.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy7wq4y9w5jo

We have a really distorted view of what humans are capable of!

Loggers hired humans to haul 200-400lbs packs over rough ground that horses could not handle. Those humans were able to go all day with that much weight. If you have the proper way to carry it (on your head not your back!) humans use surprisingly little energy to move heavy loads. It is hard work though. Overall a horse can move more mass in a day if that is the goal, but humans are probably more economical just because humans eat so much less than a horse. (it wears on the body though)

Its been a long time since i read lord of the rings... but isn't that how its depicted in lotr?

The hobbits are mostly walking and they have a pony (Bill) to pull their stuff.

Major exception being shadowfax running all over the place, but that is not a normal horsey but a divine being.

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