Petrol power: an eco-revolution
The rise of petroleum-powered transport was an environmental boon.
Apart from their stench, urban stables and the manure piles that filled practically every vacant lot were prime breeding grounds for house flies, perhaps three billion of which hatched each day in American cities at the turn of the twentieth century. With flies came outbreaks of deadly infectious diseases, such as typhoid and yellow fever, cholera and diphtheria. Workhorses’ skittishness in heavy traffic also meant that they stampeded, kicked, bit and trampled a number of bystanders. According to one estimate, the fatality rate per capita in urban traffic was roughly 75 per cent higher in the horse era than today. The clatter of horseshoes and wagon wheels on cobblestone pavement was also incredibly noisy. They also created significant traffic congestion, because a horse and wagon occupied more street space than a modern truck, while a badly injured horse would typically be shot on the spot or abandoned to die on the road, creating a major obstruction that was difficult to remove in an age without tow trucks. (Indeed, street cleaners often waited for the corpses to putrefy so they could be sawed into pieces and carted off with greater ease.)
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