This article has been adapted from Saving Ourselves from Big Car by David Obst (Columbia University Press/Columbia Business School Publishing, September 16, 2025) It is provided courtesy of the publisher. https://cup.columbia.edu/book/saving-ourselves-from-big-car/9780231210423/

How Big Car Took Over The World (Part One)

In The Beginning…

In 1885, no human being had ever seen an automobile. The number of cars on the planet was zero. In 2024, the one billionth car will join our earth's traffic jams. The most amazing thing about that number is that nobody planned it. We all just let it happen. We quickly and happily adjusted to the world that Big Car created for us. They caused us to move into cities, then leave our cities and move to the suburbs. They became a world-accepted method of showing one's status. We began caring as much about our cars as we did our families. With very little resistance, we allowed Big Car to take over our economies and our lives. In the name of mobility, we changed how humans lived. We became addicted.

Here's how it happened.

It started around 3500 BCE when some genius invented the wheel. The fact that humans had existed for hundreds of thousands of years without the wheel is often forgotten. One of the most interesting things about humans is how long it took us to come up with the modern standards we now use to meet our transportation needs. For most of the time humans have spent on the planet, we were able to live without needing to roll.

The entire concept of time and distance we now live by would be incomprehensible for most humans who lived in that pre-wheel world. The distances between peoples, although not at all geographically great, were still vast. Spending generations within the confines of your own immediate space was how most humans lived. Travel was expensive, time-consuming, and most importantly, dangerous. People traveled sometimes because they were pulled by the lure of easier and more profitable ways of living. More often, they traveled because they were pushed and pulled by disease, natural disasters, or - most likely - other humans wanting to take their stuff.

Another distinctive trait of humans is that they like their own spaces. To find those spaces often necessitated going to new uninhabited territories. That meant having to travel. At first, all travel was done on foot. If you were lucky enough to own a horse,then you traveled on horseback. Later, another genius figured out that horses and wheels could work together. He invented the buggy, which evolved into the carriage.

The carriage became the must-have vehicle for the privileged few. By the sixteenth century, it was the status symbol of the ruling classes. Every European city was soon brimming with ornate, opulently decorated vehicles. The traffic jam had been invented, especially in bad weather.

These early carriages were on four wheels and were drawn by two to four horses. Short-distance travel became cheap and convenient for much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.You could buy your two-wheeled buggy for between $25 and $50 in today's dollars. Buggies could easily be hitched and driven by untrained men, women, and even children. Hundreds of different buggy companies competed for market share. The wide use of buggies led to the grading and graveling of main rural roads and the paving of streets in many cities.

All of this continued until the start of the twentieth century. More and more of the world's population was moving into metropolitan centers, except they now all faced the same daunting problem: transportation was dominated by horses, and horses relieve themselves whenever and wherever they feel the urge.

This had always been a problem for cities, but with population growth came an increase in the number of horses needed.

By the end of the nineteenth century, London had over 300,000 horses a day coming into town. New York City had 150,000, and these beasts produced more than two thousand tons of manur...