PJ Vogt

Why?

There's this funny thing you lose when you move from the horse to the human-driven car, which is that in a horse-drawn carriage, the horse is not just going to run off a cliff if you let go of the reins.

You lose sentience in your vehicles.

When automobiles first arrived, these powerful and non-sentient cars, there was actually a passionate fight to keep them off the streets.

It was the 1800s, and people feared these new things.

The steam-powered vehicles thundering down the roads that soon evolved into gas-powered vehicles also thundering down the roads.

The fear was partly about jobs.

These vehicles were seen as a huge threat to a whole network of working class jobs.

Horse breeders and horse farriers, horse feed suppliers, horse manure haulers, horse carriage manufacturers, not to mention the teamsters.

Teamsters, today the word makes me think of the teamsters union, but originally the teamsters were the workers who drove teams of horses.

Teamsters were like truckers before we had trucks.

Cars seemed to imperil all these horse-related jobs.

And even if you weren't worried about these workers, the cars were also less safe.

Some anti-car activists battled to stop or slow the new technology, mainly with regulations.

There were red flag laws, which said if you had an automobile, you had to hire a person to walk in front of it, waving a giant red flag to warn people.

In Pennsylvania, a law was proposed requiring horseless carriage drivers who encountered livestock to stop, disassemble their car, and hide the parts behind the bushes.

The governor vetoed it.

But the thing about these crazy anti-car activists is that directionally, they were right.

Those cars did initially wipe out a lot of jobs, even if they created more.

And cars were very unsafe.