Are you fucking kidding me? Have you ever had to transport anything jeavor or large in real life?
Of course they haven’t. That’s something for the help or their parents to worry about.
Oh great, how many cargo bikes would we need to carry a pallet of milk cartons to the local grocery store? How many would we need to replace one truckload?
Doesn’t matter because you also need a refrigeration system to keep the milk from spoiling. Good luck putting that on a bike.
Someone got lucky https://www.kleuster.com/en/produits/refrigerated-cargo-bike/
A government adviser has called for roads in cities to be “ripped out completely” to combat air pollution.
First paragraph.
So what did we do before we had widespread cargo trucking? Did we just not deliver any cargo ever? Everyone just wandered around dropping limes all over the place 'cause they’d only figured out how to carry them with their bare hands, until Henry Ford invented gas station sushi and revolutionized transportation forever?
Well, in the interest of not wasting everybody’s time, I’ll tell you: they organized their towns and cities around rail. This happened right here in the United States, with the stated example being in Philadelphia. Even the old West Coast cities were organized in much the same way for a long time. That was the only way they had available to them, and somehow, they still managed to have an economy.
We have a lot of retrofitting to do to regain that ideal. But it’s possible.
Trucks were invented in 1890s. By 1900 the world’s population was 1.6 billion, 5 times smaller than it is now.
But population numbers aren’t the only thing that has changed since then.
A hundred some years ago FDA didn’t exist. You could buy eggs, meat, etc. from your local farmers and butchers. Now, you need licenses and to comply with a whole bunch of different codes. Fewer people can comply with those, so the average distance things need to be shipped has increased.
There’s, also, a lot more things nowadays that were never possible to produce locally (or even just close by) to begin with. Semiconductors, medications, even fine fabrics for clothing require fairly complex processes and logistics. You can’t just plop a fab or a lab in every large-ish city - that is going to be even more of a nightmare to supply with resources necessary to keep it running, than shipping final product from somewhere else far away.
All of those are phenomenal arguments for heavily reinvesting in our freight rail.
So what did we do before we had widespread cargo trucking?
Agrarian society - wagons and hand carts.
they organized their towns and cities around rail
Towns and cities were significantly smaller and less complex. Rail does not scale. Adding new rail spurs is prohibitively time-consuming and inflexible.
Seriously, how would you propose to handle citywide garbage/recycling collection with light rail and no motorized vehicles? (Just for instance).
Your history is wrong. We had begun industrializing about 100 years before trucks were invented and more like 160 before they really became dominant.
And are you literally arguing that building rail is more cost prohibitive, time consuming, and inflexible than building roads? Like actually? Unironically? I’m sorry, buddy, but when you start getting into numbers, that’s my territory and you’re out of your depth. https://alankandel.scienceblog.com/2014/01/11/rails-vs-roads-for-value-utilization-emissions-savings-difference-like-night-and-day/
If only we properly invested in history education in this country. Then maybe people wouldn’t be embarrassing themselves by making arguments like yours.
