alt-hist: a world without cars

[Johan Larson]

How could you get a world very much like the modern first world, but without cars? Or maybe there are cars, but they aren't used much.

Would having no oil do it? Without oil, there would still be coal and water power and nuclear plants, all of which do just fine at producing the electrical power that the modern world runs on. But until very recently, it was hard to store electrical power in a form anywhere near as dense as gasoline, which made electric car distinctly disappointing.

Or would we need to get rid of natural gas too? Big tanks of pressurized natural gas aren't as convenient as gas tanks full of liquid, but maybe they'd do well enough to get cars on the road in the early twentieth century.

[Anthony]

What do you want to replace them? In the end, wheels are more efficient per ton-mile than legs, and combustion engines are more efficient per unit work than muscle power, and if you can produce food you can produce biofuel, so unless you come up with an alternative that is more efficient than either one, you're going to wind up with motorized wheeled transport, and it's generally easier to lay out roads than lay out rails. You could make them used less if fuel was quite expensive, but that's more likely to just result in small and slow vehicles.

[Þorkell]

About one hundred years ago cars with steam engines were a thing. So you don't really need a gasoline engine for a car.

[Johan Larson]

Originally Posted by Anthony

What do you want to replace them? I

I would imagine trains for medium/long distance travel, and streetcars and subways for getting around cities. Not really sure what people would use in the country-side. Perhaps the farmers would, reluctantly, use those awful expensive unreliable auto-mobiles that no self-respecting urbanite goes near.

Or, heck, since this is an RPG forum, let's just suppose people ride dinosaurs.

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by Johan Larson

How could you get a world very much like the modern first world, but without cars? Or maybe there are cars, but they aren't used much.

Would having no oil do it?

Nope. What _could_ do it is having no rubber. If tires aren't invented, then rail continues to be a lot more comfortable.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by Johan Larson

How could you get a world very much like the modern first world, but without cars? Or maybe there are cars, but they aren't used much.

Individual mobility is a pretty important features of the "modern first world", so you need a replacement. The most likely one is simply good public transportation. A lot of places in the actual first world - particularly cities built before automobiles and hence not well laid out for them anyway - manage with relatively low rates of automobile ownership but good public transport.

Lack of good roads is possible - highway systems are expensive and automobiles weren't all that popular until Germany and the US started building a lot of them.

Fashion is a reasonable justification too. Which technologies everybody rushes to adopt and which they don't often fails to make a lot of sense. A lot of the takeoff of automobiles probably depends on them becoming a status symbol, which got enough of them into circulation to encourage building the road (and fuel distribution and maintenance services) infrastructures that allowed them to become ubiquitous.

Regulation is certainly possible. Most places allow people to drive automobiles with a lot less training and a lot less regard for safety than virtually any other piece of machinery of equivalent power. If it took as much effort to acquire a driving license as it does a pilot's license, they'd be a good deal scarcer. If you were as restricted where you could operate them, or at what speeds, as you are for airplanes even moreso.

Dropping out a technology isn't a particularly good approach, substitutes probably exist for every technology required to build a self moving personal vehicle.

[The Colonel]

You could vastly reduce car usage by increasing regulation and taxation and avoiding the 1950s era decision to design cities for motor vehicles.
Avoiding WW1 and WW2 with their huge jumps in mechanisation might also help.
A combination of localised communities and good public transport could then account for most people's transport needs, leaving motor vehicles for local freight and the elite.

[Johan Larson]

OK, so,
1. A string of celebrity deaths in car crashes early in the century impress upon the public and lawmakers that cars are dangerous and need to be carefully regulated. Accordingly the standards for drivers licenses are set high, and even early cars come equipped with important safety features, at significant cost.
2. The autobahns and interstate highways never get built. Logistics experts point out that rail moves more people and cargo than even very elaborate highways do, so mid-century governments focus on building extensive and modern rail networks.
3. After WWII, governments face a housing crisis for returning servicemen, but solve it by encouraging construction of spiffy new apartment blocks served by buses and streetcars, not by subsidizing loans for suburban Cape Cod houses.

Yes, I think that might work. There would be cars, but most families wouldn't have one. The automotive industry would focus on making trucks, delivery vehicles, and luxury cars. The road network would be designed for local use in cities; it would be possible to drive across the country, but doing so would be quite an adventure.

[RogerBW]

In the UK, the major move to fully paved roads came from the 1870s onwards and was driven by bicycling enthusiasts. If you don't have bicycles for some reason, and rail is working well, maybe you don't have the same ready-made network for cars to use.

[Irish Wolf]

Reputedly, the US Interstate Highway system originated when a young officer by the name of Eisenhower had to take a military convoy from the East Coast to the West Coast in 1919, to practice deployment of materiel in the event of an invasion of US territory. It was a struggle, taking two months to cover the distance (the first highway across the country, the Lincoln Highway, later known as US 30, was largely a notional thing once they got west of the Mississippi River). Later, during WWII, Eisenhower got to see how the Reichsautobahn improved the efficiency of German deployments; these two factors were apparently foremost in his proposal of an interstate network of autobahn-style freeways.

Remove Eisenhower from the equation (either he isn't the one in charge of that convoy, or he isn't elected President in 1950), and the network of freeways may not be constructed; however, it's difficult to imagine anything like what we call a "first-world" lifestyle without automobiles. (Major cities may be able to get by just fine with limited car ownership - but try to imagine a metropolis the size of modern-day New York with transshipment of foodstuffs and other supplies limited to rail traffic and horse-drawn carts...)