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> Before the introduction of cars, “poor road engineering practices” wouldn’t result in those deaths.

Death by adverse horse encounter was very common before the 1920s. Not sure how many of those deaths can be blamed on poor quality road engineering. But putting a bunch of humans, carts, and excitable half-ton animals in the same crowded streets seems like poor engineering practice.

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very common here is a gross exaggeration compared to cars.

After vast improvements in safety ~1.3% of American deaths are still coming from automobile accidents. Horses were never close to that, meanwhile back in 1970 cars where around twice as likely to kill you.

This article states higher per-capita horse deaths in 1900 New York City than automobile deaths in 2023. This stat does not account for the significant disease caused by all that manure mixing with water supplies. Its unclear if automobile pollution is overall worse from a public health standpoint than mountains of horse poo.

https://horse-canada.com/horses-and-history/the-poo-conferen...

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