Why do alt-history people never focus on infrastructure or innovation? What would have happened had bikes been invented centuries before cars instead of around the same time? How different would the built environment and our culture have looked?
Personally, I think centuries of more established bike use would have created an infrastructure that limits how well cars take off. Cities would have entrenched themselves in a cheap, dense manner of transit.
I could be wrong, lots of dense cities were wrecked by the car when it was commercialized. I’d love to hear any thoughts :)
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We literally destroyed perfectly working pedestrian neighbourhoods to make them better for cars. I can not see how having bicycles earlier would have changed anything. We had trains well before cars and at a massive scale and they did not stop cars either.
Not Just Bikes had shots of 1930s/1940s Houston in one of their videos and it was a pedestrian paradise that got bulldozed so cars could fly through neighborhoods at 40 mph
This is great - I kinda want to build one for hauling groceries now. There are sidewalks all the way to the big grocery store here but they’re so messed up that those collapsible shopping carts with their little wheels are more trouble than they’re worth. I’ve thought about getting/building a cargo bike but I don’t like my odds on that road, though it’d be useful elsewhere. Mostly we settle for just limiting it to what we can carry or driving once in a while. Might be a fun project though, I’ll have to look up modern designs.
I guess on modern paved side-walks these Chinese wheelbarrows don’t offer that much of an advantage, but I can easily see how great they would be on a typical well walked natural footpath.
Definitely agreed it’d work well on footpaths. I think given what frost heaves and the city budget have done to local sidewalks, it might still be useful (I’m not sure they count as modern or well-paved). If I can find some more square tubing, and some mesh or perforated metal for the guard around the wheel, I think it could be a fun bit of welding practice. It’s too bad the larger bike wheel sizes seem to be very expensive.
Maybe look for a modern horse-cart wheel. There are some pretty lightweight ones that are very tall.
That’s a good idea, I’ll see what I can find!
Something that blew my mind is that for a while bike were the fastest means of transportation !
@BastingChemina Biking is still faster than driving for many short trips, since you avoid congestion, routes can be more direct and you can park closer to your destination. Under one mile it is probably quicker to bike than drive. Under two miles if you live where cars clog the streets.
@lobsterofrevenge @BastingChemina under one mile wouldn’t you just walk?
@stark @BastingChemina depends on physical ability and how much you might need to carry home from the store. One mile bike ride takes me a few minutes—say 10 minutes including locking up, but one mile walking takes me about 20 minutes at least. That said I usually walk the half mile to the store if I’m just getting a few things. Less trouble than getting the bike out.
Bikes suck without rubber tires.
Early pneumatic wheels were made with a leather outer tube.
Not as good as rubber, especially in the wet, but better than walking and cheaper than a horse.
The bike industry doesn’t want to destroy society the same way the car industry does, so this wouldn’t have made any difference.
And it’s a combination of lobbying by the oil/gas industry + the car industry that created an unstoppable force. Just look at the tens of millions the auto industry spends lobbying.
Yeah if bicycles had been discovered before fossil fuels I think history would look very very different and it is a great point.
It is interesting looking forward too, 20th century might have been all about fossil fuel burning cars but the future is electric bicycles and tricycles. After all, the bicycle as a form of human powered transportation was perfected in the development of mountain bike, road bike and cruiser bike types during the later half of the 20th century, and so as a “cutting edge” technology electric bicycles take almost no new development and R&D to figure out what works.
Certainly a myriad of forms of electric bicycles will arise (like the bakfiets), but it is interesting how titanic a shift the adoption of electric bicycles will be and yet they didn’t require the development of totally new technologies to make this transportation technology function. Take a mountain bicycle, strap a battery to it and boom you have by far the most effective form of transportation ever developed in terms of a human carry-able vehicle that can transport you hundreds of miles over virtually any kind of terrain (so long as people have at least walked that route enough to make a trail).
The battery pack slots on electric bicycles will become the place people strap the power banks everyone is increasingly carrying around to power their mobile devices. I heard someone describe their perspective as a tank crewman about how infantry carrying around big heavy rifles is silly, they pointed out “why carry a gun when your gun can carry you?” and I feel the same exact way about electric battery banks on electric bicycles.
I know most of this reply has been in relation to the future of the bicycle, but the incredible explosion of electric bicycle use that is happening (and will continue to happen all over the world in rich and poor countries) I think necessarily points to the fact that bicycles were an innovation with a lot of latent possibility that was passed over by history for quite a long time (and bicycles just kept getting better mostly in the background). I think it points to the validity of your question, what would have happened had history focused on the bicycle sooner?
We had bikes before cars, that wasn’t the problem. People wanted the luxury of cars. You could go faster in heated comfort along with your entire family and cargo for hundreds of miles with next to no effort in virtually any kind of weather, something bikes still can not do.
Even if we had modern tech with bikes 200 years ago the rise of cars was inevitable due to their convenience and low cost at the time. Combine that with the push of the car industry and that most people were unaware of the true cost of the damage cars were causing, and bikes never stood a chance. Even now, bikes simply can’t replace cars for everyone but at least they can make a dent in the problems that got us here.
If bikes had been built earlier they would have been the exclusive property of the rich.
It’s like transistor radios and computers in the 1960s; you needed the same sorts of factories to produce both.
Bikes need a level of precision manufacturing that means cars and airplanes are just around the corner no matter what alternative history you come up with. If you sent a modern machinist back to 10BC they could maybe make a bike by hand (if they are lucky enough to get a rich sponsor - making a Gingery style lathe by hand is something a modern machinist would be able to figure out it takes a lot of time an materials that are were not cheap), but the cost would be such that the only people who could afford it already have slaves to carry them everywhere. There might be demand for a handful as a novelty for their young sons (sexist world, girls need not apply) but it will soon disappear as those slaves are cheaper than the bike. (it takes a lot of slaves to mine and refine the ore needed to make the bike)
In 10BC, it would likely be all wood - frame, wheels, crankset, everything - and be driven by a notched leather belt on toothed wooden sprockets.
I am thinking this:
One more requirement for cars in addition to the precision manufacturing is a mobile source of energy like the ICE.
Now I’m wondering if an alternative history with industries revolution powered just by water would be possible (once there is steam engine/turbine, internal combustion engine/turbine is just a matter of time).
There was a brief window where ICE cars, electric cars, and steam cars existed simultaneously and all sucked just about equally
The world would still be burning, though.
