Current Events > What do you think the world will be like if cars weren't invented?

(+) Yeah! (+)

I'm thinking lot of packed cities with subway systems, and then lots of non human areas in between with just train tracks.

Wild West level tech still

Larger.

A lot of the major US cities would be built right off of large bodies of water.

Boat travel would be a super huge thing. I could imagine the great lakes area being one of the busiest in the world.

Legal prostitution

I from time to time think about this when i drive 3 hours to visit my relatives. Like if i had to get there by horse, id probably take days. All the transportation inventions, cars, high speed trains and planes definitely made the world smaller.

1) There would be more horses & carriages
2) We wouldn't have Airplane Air travel since that depended on a Internal Combustion Engine to make the Wright Brothers Plane fly, which was a bi-product of the Automobile Revolution and Internal Combustion Engines.
3) Hydrogen AirShips might've remained popular despite the Hindenburg incident due to lack of other forms of Air Travel.
4) The world would be far less diverse and less people would've left their country of origin or emigrated outside of where they were born.
5) Technology might still be more primitive with no modern computing due to many of the follow through effects that came from AutoMobiles being a keystone to the development of many other technologies.

Horse shit everywhere.

Questionmarktarius posted...

Horse shit everywhere.

That too, nobody ever cleaned after their horses pooping back in the day.

It would feel like any random city in Italy. Except everywhere. Honestly? I'm all for it. Cities are too big to begin with. I would much rather see a city with actual structure rather than just being big for the sake of being big. Give me a nice town designed to look like Death City from Soul Eater.

The Fast and the Furious would probably be a lot slower.

Still the same fury.

Ivany2008 posted...

It would feel like any random city in Italy. Except everywhere. Honestly? I'm all for it. Cities are too big to begin with. I would much rather see a city with actual structure rather than just being big for the sake of being big. Give me a nice town designed to look like Death City from Soul Eater.

Yeah that's closer to what I imagine than all the horses. I'm thinking of my time in Paris and Boston, and you can get pretty much anywhere in the city without a car. Get on the subway, make a few transitions, and you should be within walking distance of where you want to go.

The US and Canada would be effectively useless without cars.

Questionmarktarius posted...

The US and Canada would be effectively useless without cars.

They would have been built differently without cars though.

Squall28 posted...

They would have been built differently without cars though.

Wyoming and Yukon would be pretty much the same, though

-Fuckloads of trains. We still have robust train networks in almost all major USA cities and even in mid size and some smaller areas. Train workers have poweerful unions or at least did at one point.

-Owning or riding horses would still be at least semi common. Probably near omnipresent for the wealthy and certain professions and more common the less dense the population/infastructure of an area is.

-Less air pollution

-Less mobility and economies would be more local overall. Airplanes and advances in seafaring do still come about so immigration and the economy still are more globalized but no cars changes a lot still. We can't send as many goods as far or as fast without trucks so the makeup and logistics of the economy are quite different. We would have less options in stores and mass produced processed food would be less common except maybe in large cities.

-Online shopping never becomes huge. It will still happen but be more of a luxury service probably only used somewhat commonly in large cities, or by the very rich. The internet will be even bigger in some ways though as the lesser mobility gives it even greater value in some regards. Remote work may take off earlier.

-Video games take a drastically different path. They don't really emerge out of being a niche market until widespread digital distribution becomes viable.

-Less megacorporations and international companies. Its simply a lot harder to build economies of scale and omnipresence without the mobility of cars.

There would have to be a lot more stores for essential goods. Imagine driving a horse 2 hours just to get to Walmart.

I think we'd still be seeing lots of industrial towns where people can get employment close to home. That hour commute some people make to work wouldn't be happening on Mr. Ed.

LeoRavus posted...

There would have to be a lot more stores for essential goods. Imagine driving a horse 2 hours just to get to Walmart.

Sears may even still exist!

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]

Dirigibles, most likely. It's always dirigibles in these alternate settings, that's how you know you've really screwed the timestream.

We may have invented wood gas cars, which were a big thing in WW2 when gasoline was scarce.