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.

[RyanW]

Originally Posted by 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.

Gasoline was actually a fairly late entry to the race. Indeed, most speed records prior to 1900 were held by electric cars. They lacked range, but considering roads suitable for motorized traffic didn't exist outside most major cities, it wasn't that big a problem.

[RogerBW]

Originally Posted by RyanW

Gasoline was actually a fairly late entry to the race. Indeed, most speed records prior to 1900 were held by electric cars. They lacked range, but considering roads suitable for motorized traffic didn't exist outside most major cities, it wasn't that big a problem.

One of my small contributions to Britannica-6 was the idea that, with inventors focused on making their particular contraption worth betting on ahead of everyone else's, there won't be the historical pressure to have good roads, because they make everyone faster: instead, the ingenuity goes into making cars that don't need good roads.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by RogerBW

One of my small contributions to Britannica-6 was the idea that, with inventors focused on making their particular contraption worth betting on ahead of everyone else's, there won't be the historical pressure to have good roads, because they make everyone faster: instead, the ingenuity goes into making cars that don't need good roads.

The thing is, while automaker ingenuity might go into making cars that don't need roads, inventors of construction equipment are motivated to create devices that produce roads Faster and Better.

[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.