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 :)
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.