[runarberg]

The car did not replace the horse and cart. This is an oft cited and widely believed myth. It replaced mostly walking, but also cycling, trollies and trains. And it didn't do so until after a huge build out of infrastructure to accommodate drivers at the cost of everything else.

After the building of highways and roads cities were no longer walkable, people had moved out into the suburbs, their jobs were now a couple of towns over and they couldn't even walk to the grocery store. Cars enabled that, but politicians and capitalist were the ones who did that.

[bcjdjsndon]

> It replaced mostly walking, but also cycling, trollies and trains.

And everything was carried on people's heads, yeah? The horse and cart was in use right up to the 20th century my man...there was no other way to move heavy items across land until the combustion engine (or canals thought that's not technically over land)

[runarberg]

Yes, true. You found one thing that people used mostly horse and cart for which they now use lorries and vans for today. However since the invention of car (after it stopped being a toy for rich people) cars have by far been mostly [like overwhelmingly so] used for personal transport. And I simply assumed that is what you meant (because that is what most people mean).

[bcjdjsndon]

> You found one thing

And you found one other "thing"

Actually even today it's 80/20, but lorries carry far more stuff than cars do, so you need less lorries.

And the inverse is also true, horse and cart was used for personal transport as well

[runarberg]

Horse and cart was used for a personal transport very rarely, by a tiny subset of the population for a minority of their trips, the vast majority of the population lived within a walking distance for the vast majority of their trips, the invention of the steam engine ruined that and suddenly people started living within a tram-ride for vast majority of their trips, and started using trains to go on longer trips they simply couldn’t do before. The car took this to the extreme, and ruined the cities on a scale which the tram was previously unable to.

[bcjdjsndon]

> and ruined the cities on a scale which the tram was previously unable to.

Industrial era London was not a utopia. Read a Dickens novel. It was a hellhole. The car also made the suburbs possible. They kill millions every year but the benefits massively outweigh it (or at least society has effectively voted for that).