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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.