Starting around 1890, there was a rapidly
growing chorus of complaints about the common horse throughout cities and towns
of all sizes around the world. A horse powered each taxi. Streetcars needed
twelve or more horses each day. Carts, wagons, buggies and so forth also
required horses. As many as 60,000, or more, horses would have inhabited a city
of 6 million people such as London. The streets of London would be covered with
roughly 20 million kg (22,500 US tons) of horse manure and 3.5 million liters (900,000
US gallons) of horse urine…each month! Besides the smell and mess, horse
pollution created breeding grounds for typhoid fever and the “typhoid fly”. One
1908 article even reported, "maladies that fly in the dust, created mainly
by horse manure", were responsible for the deaths of as many as 22,000
people each year in New York City.
Life for horses working in urban areas was equally
unpleasant. The average life span for a horse was less than 5 years with more
than 15,000 dead horses requiring removal from New York city streets as early
as 1880.
It’s easy to see why the concept of any
transportation means without a digestive tract was so appealing.
By the start of the 20th century, the
automobile industry was beginning a rapid and robust development especially in
France, where 30,204 vehicles were produced in 1903… almost 50% of world
automobile production that year. The Ford Motor Company started the same year.
We know that nothing is ever as easy as it
seems.
While cars were rapidly replacing horses,
there came another problem…parking! Early cars weren’t very weather resistant
with their open tops and leather interiors. Therefore, they needed indoor
parking and horse stables were converted readily into the first car parking
facilities. It didn’t take long for entrepreneurs to recognize the demand for
urban car parking that minimized the amount of land required.
An interesting factoid is that many of
earliest parking garages utilized elevators to move cars to upper floors for
parking…making them the precursor of the automated parking systems. The move
from elevators to ramp-type parking garages didn’t begin in earnest until the
1920s. There doesn’t seem to be much of a movement to eliminate cars by populating
urban areas with thousands of horses. However, there is a movement for more
efficient and environmentally friendly parking using smaller automated parking
systems.
Ride your horse to
see your local Skyline Parking representative to see how friendly and profitable
APS can be.
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