Political humorist Frank J. Fleming poses an interesting thought experiment: what if the car was not over a century old but was just invented recently? Would societies and governments permit the private, gasoline powered automobile?
Imagine if cars hadn’t been around for a century, but instead were just invented today. Is there any way they’d be approved for individual use? It’s an era of bans on incandescent bulbs; if you suggested putting millions of internal-combustion engines out there, you’d get looks like you were Hitler proposing the Final Solution.
Even aside from pollution, the government wouldn’t allow the risks to safety.
“So you’re proposing that people speed around in tons of metal? You must mean only really smart, well-trained people?”
“No. Everyone. Even stupid people.”
“Won’t millions be killed?”
“Oh, no. Not that many. Just a little more than 40,000 a year.”
“And injuries?”
“Oh . . . millions.”
There’s no way that would get approved today.
Driving is basically a grandfathered freedom from back when people cared less about pollution and danger and valued progress and liberty over safety.
Fleming’s perspective that we live in a much more constrained society is not new one, nor is it necessarily based on political ideology. Frank is on the political right. Leftist British historian A.J.P Taylor opens his English History 1914-1945 with the following passage:
Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman. He could live where he liked and as he liked.
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When he’s not busy doing custom machine embroidery at Autothreads Ronnie Schreiber edits Cars In Depth and contributes to The Truth About Cars and Left Lane News
I certainly hope so, because the principle mode of transportation before the car was the horse and buggy, and New York couldn’t handle all the horse shit, and it would be down right ripe and stinking year around in sunny LA.
Yes, the auto was seen as a antidote to pollution (from horses). One should also point out that coal literally poisoned London on at least one occasion – a native WMD.
While the “precautionary state” may have prevented the automobile but had they known the auto as a path to freedom, it would have been suppressed post haste. Here is what Frederick Lewis Allen had to say about the advent of the automobile in America in his book, “The Big Change”:
And we would be limited to 30 mph on the interstate.
Frank misses the point. It isn’t about the automobile, it IS about the personal freedom. Before cars there here horses and wagons and various type of horse drawn vehicles.
Freedom on a basic level is being able to go elsewhere, leaving your troubles, or what is causing your troubles behind.
Can’t you remember what is was like to turn 16 and get your license?
Any politician trying to force citizens to give up the most obvious symbol of freedom would end up scanning the want ads. Frank obviously has no experience with horses beyond the weekend ride. Horses are very labor intensive. That is why they were replaced by the ICE.
You would have better luck banning cell phones.
Plus the litany of evils from automobiles are much less then the positives.
Frank needs to fly to Asia or Europe. a few hours at 30,000 ft can make one aware of just how large earth is and how small the works of man are.
I think Frank very well knows that it’s about freedom.
Driving is basically a grandfathered freedom from back when people cared less about pollution and danger and valued progress and liberty over safety.
I’ve found almost identical descriptions of the car’s capabilities from both auto enthusiasts and anti-car activists. The car lets you go where you want to go when you want to go there, no matter how far away. Anti-sprawl activists bemoan the fact that cars let you live farther than a 30 minute walk from a rail line.
As for horses, you can travel a lot farther and faster in a car.
Anti-sprawl activists want us non-affluent types to go back to the days of the NYC tenements. They are truly evil people.
I’m not sure you could have missed the point of Frank Fleming’s article by any wider of a margin.
You should append a “\Sarc” tag after anything Frank publishes. Kind of sad that it’s needed, but let me help: it’s not about horses and buggies being superior or inferior to cars… it’s about the state of our national soul and the sacrifice of freedom for an illusion of safety (YMMV).
“Is there any way they’d be approved for individual use?”
Yep. Next question?
Consider that we’re just sitting on the edge of the beginning of the era of private space travel, and I don’t see anyone talking about regulation, let alone restriction. Europe continues to churn out cars that regularly do over 200mph (arguably in safety) and the US allows them to be imported. You can build your own jet pack if you want to, and fly it. Some french madman keeps strapping a 4m wing to his body, with a couple of tiny jet turbines, and zooms around over the grand canyon – and you can do that too, if you want to. And NONE of those things have any useful secondary economic benefit, whereas the private vehicle obviously does. If the world had really been doing without motorized transport for this long, then we’d all be gagging for it. Ok, somebody might ask what the point of a 6l v-8 is in a four-seater passenger car (particularly if it only generated a miserable 400hp, which in specific terms is pretty … space age). But there’d still be cars.
You might as well ask “if the internet were only just invented, would it be allowed?” Obviously the answer is also “yes”
“Anti-sprawl activists bemoan the fact that cars let you live farther than a 30 minute walk from a rail line.”
Yes, RS, & I would add greenie environmentalist wackos, population-bomb the-sky-is-falling-alarmists, and global warming nut jobs to the list as well. Public transportation is their goal for all of us inferior ‘worker bees’ but they’re the queen bees who get to ride in limos and jets.
The hearings colloquy above is good, but I can also hear:
Q: Now, what kind of safety equipment will these new-fangled cars have?
A: Well, they’ll have headlights and marker lights in the back for night driving, seat belts, air bags, and impact-absorbing front ends, among other things.
Q: Impact-absorbing front ends? You mean you’re planning them to crash?
A: Well, it’s not that we’re planning them to crash, we’re simply trying to build in safety features FOR when a crash does occur.
Q: Okay, and just what are these air-bag thingamajigs?
A: When a crash occurs, an air bag is built into the steering wheel & dashboard so that in the split second after a crash, they are deployed to prevent the driver & front seat passenger from being thrust into the front of the vehicle and avoiding injury that could result from that. The air bag, in essence, provides a cushion to prevent a person from striking the hard steering wheel, dashboard and/or windshield.
Q: And you’re telling me this air bag can be blown up, exit the steering wheel or dashboard, and prevent someone from hitting the front of the car, all in a split second?
A: Yes, sir.
Q: And you expect me to believe that?
A: Well, we know they work from the tests we’ve conducted, at considerable expense btw.
Q: I don’t know who you’re trying to fool, but you’re not fooling me!
A: I’ll be glad to get you the documentation, including video, so you can see for yourself.
Q: I want to come back to these headlights. You’re telling me you’re going to let people drive around in a 2-ton hunk of metal, at twice the speeds a horse can run, and AT NIGHT?
A: Yes, sir. The headlights will be incandescent bulbs that shine far enough ahead to see adequately at night, and as I mentioned there will also be marker lights in the back so they may be seen by other drivers.
Q: INCANDESCENT BULBS? OMG! Mr. Chairman! I move that we immediately cease these hearings and vote to ban these new-fangled contraptions called cars permanently!
A perfect illustration of what’s gone wrong with our country. One of the comments tries to use personal space travel as an example of why this is not so. I really can’t speak to that but I’m intimately familiar with the next best thing, personal air travel. The burden of federal regulation has made personal air travel almost impossible except for an extremely dedicated few.
A few weeks ago a friend was talking about a certain business he’d like to get into. A hundred years ago the regulatory hurdles were non-existent. Today however, the small mountain of regulations from OSHA, EPA, ad nauseum have made the barriers to entry prohibitively high and yet another budding entrepreneur gave up. Until we fix the problem of burdensome federal regulation, not much is going to happen.
I live near a showroom displaying luxury automobiles from the 1930s and 40s. What strikes me is how tiny the tail lights are on these cars that have huge proportions elsewhere.
Would glass be allowed if it had just been invented?
In 1890 there were over 100,000 horse in NYC. Given existing population growth rates (human and horse) by 1950 it was projected there would be 7 million people and 4 million horses living in NYC and that the manure in the streets would be 3 feet deep (NYT, 11 dec 1890).
Somehow car polution is better than horse polution. Horse manure dries up in the summer a blows in the wind. Makes talking difficult. Breathing too. Average life expectancy in NYC in 1890 was 39.