Redesigning our cities around cars was one of the big mistakes of the 20th century.
Sarcastically, one might say that horses are even harder to operate (they have minds of their own), they smell worse that automobiles (esp EVs), and the particulate matter they excrete would be unhealthy to consume. They are also very slow.
More seriously, the trajectory that our imagination pushes towards seems to be “overcoming” biological limitations. Perhaps a symbiosis of machine and biology and consciousness will take us to the next level by opening up vast new universe state.
The point isn't to say that new tech is bad, but that there can be adverse consequences to jumping in wholesale.
Cities have been designed around Carriages for millenia. You can go and walk in Pompeii and observe pavements for pedestrians, roads for wheeled carriages with crossing spots of elevated stones for pedestrians.
It turns out that cities require a lot of goods to be moved through - more than a pedestrian can carry, and over inclines that human muscle power doesn't like.
The reason why cities are designed around cars is that cars were designed to fit in contemporary cities and they co-evolved over the 20th century. It was the slow kind of evolution, with each step being easier and cheaper than the big redesign.
No, the switch to car-centric infrastructure was a deliberate policy choice lobbied for by the automotive industry. [1] We ripped up a lot of good transit to lay down roads this wide and fast.
[1]: https://www.fastcompany.com/90781961/how-automakers-insidiou...
> It turns out that cities require a lot of goods to be moved through - more than a pedestrian can carry, and over inclines that human muscle power doesn't like.
Hence the utility of public transit, which kills substantially fewer people and is much cheaper. Though goods are mostly moved with trucks, and trucks aren't my concern. Urban congestion isn't caused by 18-wheelers.
Horses weren’t cheap when they were a primary mode of transportation. Lots of people have died riding, driving, and breaking horses. They definitely smell bad, and their “particulate matter” was so bad that houses had to be set back and elevated from the street.
Cities designed around cars are far superior to cities designed around horses.
??? No, they don't. They only smell bad when they're kept standing in their urine, which is still not worse than a hairdresser. Compared to dogs (or ICE cars) horses smell way less. They do sweat to regulate temperature, which has a distinct smell, but it's way less irritating to a human's nose than the sweat of the rider.
There's a set of distinct smells associated with the horses, but other than the piss, none of them are particularly "bad". In my experience, humans tend to smell way worse overall (from food to body odor to the excrement) than horses.
