I sometimes wonder, from a science fiction point of view, how cities would be designed if we somehow had foresight of the consequences (social, environmental, etc.) of building infrastructure centered around the usage of cars for daily transportation. We don't really hold much resentment for how things started since people just didn't know about the problems that over-reliance on cars would cause decades down the line. Would people still consider the convenience/economic opportunity the automobile afforded to outweigh the problems?
(Also, there is a body of fiction set in a future Earth where, since people several decades ago did have knowledge of the problem of climate change, they end up being collectively resented by their descendants for their inaction/ignorance in addressing it.)
I would love to see a parallel universe, where collective transportation obtained the upper hand. Where countryside railroads are still operating, and where roads/highways haven't consistently led to the expropriation of millions of people worldwide, and to the current car-oriented urban nightmare. See Ivan Illich for a demonstration that car-oriented urbanization is hostile and counter-productive, as opposed to what he calls "convivial tools" (empowering technologies).
Would we still have the problem of climate change?
Yes but that never caught on - your premise is flawed. The polluting, antisocial, and climate effects of the car meant is was no more than a fad, popular for a few generations in the early Anthropocene before dying out. Perhaps if teleportation had not been invented in the early 2100s… IANAH.
Counterfactuals are complicated, but I didn't realize how complicated until I wrote all this. The basics have already been invented for other reasons (internal combustion engine, battery, electric motor, etc) so any sort of car should work fine aside from the infrastructure (power distribution, roads). Which sort is best depends on e.g. whether there's cheap oil (there might be if we hadn't used so much oil already) and what people are using cars for (people would be used to another mode with different capabilities; I've read that humans regardless of transit mode tend to prefer about an hour commuting per day and the distance of an hour depends on the prevalent mode). Random thoughts follow:
If the automobile were invented in 2013, we wouldn't have range anxiety, because we'd be used to getting around on horses. (Without range anxiety, electric cars might be the cheapest.) Or we would have range anxiety if there were lots of functioning places that would exchange your horse for one that wasn't tired (and no car recharging/refueling stations, of course).
Or maybe trains would still be the way everyone gets around. The streetcar would be ubiquitous, and would be the only reason we'd have quality roads (with rails in them). The streetcars might run on electricity or natural gas, judging by modern bus and light rail. Bicycles might be popular, and suburbs would have developed around streetcar lines rather than along interstate highways (I'm US-centric).
Cars might not need charging/fueling stations, if they could piggyback on an extensive electrical streetcar network's power lines. Then they would probably be electrical and have battery for short off-network trips.
The probable lack of a good road network is going to be a problem. We'll have to design a car that's good off-road. Preferably we will avoid annoying bicyclists by wearing away their dirt roads (if bicycling is in style and horses aren't); but we'll fail, because just having an enclosure for a person (I assume an enclosure is necessary to count it as a "car") is pretty heavy, and we can't improve wheels/tires terribly much.
Which parts and energy sources would be cheap? David Archer's _Global Warming: Understanding the Forecast_ (2007 edition, p.101) tells me that about 2/3 of US oil use is in transportation. The world might not have as much oil production capacity if the car hadn't existed (thus higher prices; then again, a newly invented car wouldn't suddenly be used by everyone, so oil production could ramp up over time along with demand); or the world might still have lots of easily extractable oil (lower prices).
Who would buy/use this car: rich? middle class? People who already travel a lot? People who are content? Individuals? Businesses? Transit companies (along the lines of ZipCar or self-driving cars)? Taxi drivers (there would probably be taxis powered by horse, bicycle, or some sort of engine)? How would people learn to drive this car? Probably most people wouldn't be used to operating a dangerous piece of machinery, and there wouldn't be laws regulating it (or there would be strict industry-focused laws).
The lack of experienced drivers suggests self-driving cars are a good idea; but the lack of well-marked roads means our AI tech needs to be a bit further ahead and we might have to wait 5 years.
"But in the alternate world where we didn't design for cars first, you'd be more used to other forms of transit, and a lot of things would be closer together."
You don't need an alternate world as you can just look at history. Then we would have to consider why the people chose to adopt and promote cars to bring us into this age.
I subscribe to reddit's /r/retrofuturism and I've formulated a hypothesis about this. The future we used to want was full of what I like to call "garden cities" [1][2][3][4]. Massive structures spaced far away from each other and in between carefully curated green spaces. The obvious problem with this vision is that getting around anywhere turns into a huge problem. This appealed to transportation companies and car makers came out on top and we ended up with the rest of the problems, without ending up with the garden cities. It turns out these visions of the future are bad for a whole host of reasons, transport was only one.
Of course you're imagining the world we have now with all the cars simply removed, instead of one that had developed without cars in the first place. A lot of competing infrastructure was deleted, or never made in the first place, because of cars.
If cars were invented today, we would not have the infrastructure to support them. We were able to build massive car infrastructure as a result of the economic expansion following WWII. We built out our environments to a huge extent in order to support car dependent lifestyles.
If cars were invented today, I would hope there would be discussion as to whether or not that infrastructure should be built, and if we would have the money to support. As of now, tons of maintenance costs are associated with our sprawl, and many communities are saddled with debt that they'll struggle to repay.
We probably would limit them to niche needs, and only build out enough infrastructure to support our needs. Making every street and road accessible to cars would be a huge undertaking, as it was then.
Well it depends on your perspective. I like how the article makes a statement not for today's world but for the future. I have always been of the mind that cities are for people, not for cars.
Cars, as great as they are, did disrupt and significantly negatively impact cities. They remain incredibly dangerous and kill and injure shockingly large amounts of people every year.
The widespread adoption of automobile technology without much thought in the 20th century should be a cautionary lesson for tech enthusiasts.
Automobiles. I think the future will be horrified that people transported themselves around in two-ton machines that polluted the air and fatally crashed into things (and each other) a lot, especially when both before and after the invention of automobiles we had safer and cleaner options, and especially when a lot of people spend hours a day sitting in their cars in stop-and-go traffic.
I have an SUV myself, and the freedom and joy and romance of driving appeals to me as much as anyone, but at some point, if energy is expensive enough, all of that will be forgotten, and it'll turn into a horror story.
Consumer vehicles are definitely getting there, at least for high income and/or high net-worth people.
And while that is a relief, it is still very troubling to think about the implications for our transportation infrastructure as a whole (where consumer vehicles represent a minority fraction.)
How will we power our ocean freighters, our freight trains, our 18-wheelers, and our high capacity airplanes without high energy-density hydrocarbons (or with prohibitively expensive hydrocarbons)?
I can imagine nuclear and electric solutions (hand-wavy or hypothetical) to some of these modes, but could they be implemented on a global scale in time?
It makes me wonder what our transportation infrastructure will look like 100 or 200 years from now.
-In what non-obvious ways will we look backwards to people of the future?
-Will these people envy how cheaply we moved goods across the globe?
-Will they laugh at how expensive it was to move things across the globe?
-Will they even have the luxury of thinking about these things?
This is a conversation that I think we all need to have. In the future... creeps up faster and faster. Our mind's eye vision of how fast technology evolves is fixed. Looking back only a few generations, people will conflate that this can describe our inherit humanity for the foreseeable future. I don't think it does.
As an example, I often read opinion pieces by local well-to-do progressives; a topic that comes up often is our transportation infrastructure and how we should start buying, living, working local. For a variety of reasons, all of which I agree with for the most part. I can't help but ask myself – will it matter when every car drives itself and is propelled by emission-less energy? Far off, right? Maybe. Or maybe it's 10-15 years away.
To me, what would be interesting about a world without cars (or even with cars, but vastly more attractive public transport) is that it would partly reverse a sad isolationist trend that's come along with the power and control given to us by modern technology.
I used to catch a bus every day through the city, and there were a lot of strange people on those trips. Gangs of 9 year old gangster kids drunk up the back. Little old ladies muttering racist slurs at asian students. A guy who hadn't showered in so long his clothes had gone partially transparent from the grease. I don't think I was ever in any danger, but it sure was uncomfortable sometimes. I work pretty close to home now (in fact, mostly at home), so it's not really an issue anymore. But strangely, I find myself missing that chance to interact with people who I didn't choose to interact with.
It seems like every time we get more power (like by inventing an engine that can move us around) we use it to get more control (now I can encase myself in a metal shield that prevents any accidental congress with the outside world).
A bunch of technology has gone the same way. Efficient worldwide shipping and postage means you don't need to go outside to shop. Communication moving online means you can block people you don't like rather than have to deal with them. OKCupid means you can pre-screen your dates to avoid accidentally meeting someone unpalatable. You can GPS track your kids so they won't ever end up lost or at the wrong sort of party.
And those are all good things that give you more control over your environment. But they also isolate you. Unknown experiences are fundamentally scary; so scary that we feel more afraid of walking in a dark alley than we do of heart disease. Like every generation before us, we strike out against danger with the power of our tools. But our dangers are, at this point, largely invented. We're getting to a point where instead of being safe, we'll just be cocooned in a real-world filter bubble, where we never have to fear the unknown, uncontrollable, unsanitised real world that gets forced on us when we get on a bus or walk around a city. I suspect, for all our newfound safety, we'll just feel a bit unsatisfied.
I guess I've just argued myself out of believing that the future without cars is ever really going to happen. Maybe there'll be a virtual bus MMO.
I can't read the article, but if it leads to widespread adoption like the automobile was, I can see this being much worse for society than the car was. Some examples of the sort of things we can see:
- Suburbs times 100. Now, the suburbs would be even less accessible as they wouldn't even be connected by roads. Coincidentally, they could be anywhere, which would spread out utilities and make them even more inefficient as they are now due to sprawl.
- Much, much more expensive, both due to the complexity but due to insurance. Already cars are deadly and destructive, flying cars would lead to all sorts of accidents and property destruction given the difficulty of driving them especially by non-professionals. This too would probably be normalized like automobile destruction is but the actual cost will still exist and need to be subsidized by sky high insurance premiums
- Further destruction of cities. Now, like wide streets and highways that demolished neighborhoods (often black and immigrant communities), we'd see calls for destruction of tall buildings for "the sake of safety" due to the common place destruction discussed earlier. Streets and walkways like sidewalks today would fall into disrepair, trees and monuments would be cut down or removed for safety, and so on.
Then again, I don't think we'd get that far due to climate change, but this is just based on a historical understanding of what happened to the US since the 30's. I can see a much more atomized and disconnected society.
Naw, due to climate chaos, we'll have widespread civilizational collapse and the plain breakdown of the car-supporting infrastructure within less than 50 years.
Imagining the future of energy and transportation naturally leads to a collision of those worlds. I've discussed some of the impacts that I think this might have on everyday life and business. What are your thoughts?
I expect in the future cars will be used for fewer but longer trips. Commuting to work should not be a thing, and most cities will adapt to the new reality where the home is also the office.
On the other hand people will seek better living quality in less dense areas and this makes the car necessary, however infrequently. Maybe the news of their demise is greatly exaggerated
One of the problems we're facing today is building a ton of public infrastructure around the assumption that everyone own a car. This leads to sprawling suburbs and horrible public transportation.
I wonder if we're building a future where everyone owns a smartphone which is going to lead to many problems down the line.
(Also, there is a body of fiction set in a future Earth where, since people several decades ago did have knowledge of the problem of climate change, they end up being collectively resented by their descendants for their inaction/ignorance in addressing it.)
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