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 :)
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
@MrMakabar @Nyssa