How does it matter how they were used? It's not like they shrunk when used for "noble" causes from your PoV and required narrower roads (and from my reading of classics, horse-drawn carriages were used by city dwellers for individual transportation just like cars nowadays).
It matters because there are far fewer delivery of goods than people getting around for day to day trips.
If you look at the average amount of space taken up by a person traveling around if they walk, or take transit, for most trips then they'll on average take significantly less space than using a car.
And a car takes significantly less space than a carriage with a horse so I don't see what are you trying to say here. You compared length of a car to the length of a foot and made far reaching conclusions but when offered to compare a horse carriage with a car and make the same conclusions you seem to compare cars and feet again.
My point is about the average space taken up on a trip.
In the far past some trips were taken via horse + carriage but tons more were taken via walking and transit. Our built world has scaled to account for that increase in space used on trips.
I am sorry, you are still making little sense. The space taken by a car is the same no matter how many people walk, crawl or stay at home and don't go anywhere. It's more than a man but less than a horse carriage. And since you still refuse to compare the space taken by the horse carriage to the space take by a car, I figure you understand now that your logic is not sound, which is good enough result of this thread.
A horse carriage takes up similar space to a car, yes.
But if 80% of day-to-day trips are walked and 20% are horse-carriages that's much more efficient in terms of space than a world where 80% of trips are via car and 20% are walked.
That additional space manifests in more wider roads to reduce bottlenecks and more large parking lots to store cars at different destinations.
I've phrased this multiple different ways. The concept isn't complex: a car (or horse carriage!) is much bigger than a person walking so if we design a world that encourages more travel via car (or horse carriage!) that world will be less spatially efficient.
But, as I've pointed out repeatedly, in the past far more people walked to take trips than take a horse carriage.
> that's much more efficient in terms of space than a world where 80% of trips are via car and 20% are walked.
I feel like you are trying to say that it will require less space? Like roads can be made narrower or shorter? Why though? The road width is defined by the vehicle size and the number of lanes, and you don't want to cut the number of lanes below 1 but realistically you want 2 so a broken vehicle won't block traffic for everyone. And there are already not many 3 lanes in each direction roads so you are not saving much. Also most 3+ lanes roads I see are arterials and interstates, people driving those routes usually cannot walk them physically as they are tens if not hundreds of miles.
In the low traffic volume world of carriages, one lane in each direction is ample or even excessive for most roads. Many pre-car roads aren't wide enough to even accommodate one carriage in each direction at the same time.
The pre-car Europe and the US were not low traffic. E.g. the main street (Nevsky Avenue) in St. Petersburg, Russia is 200 feet wide since 1760s (and it was expanded from the original 65 feet because that was not enough for traffic).
If every destination needs parking for nearly its peak capacity then that creates substantial sprawl.
Similarly if an area gets a high volume of peak car traffic then over time it will tend to get more arterials and interstates connected to it.
As sprawl and road networks increase it becomes more difficult to get around without a car, incentivizing more cars, which requires more large parking lots / roads.
I don't know where you live but in every city in the US I had been there are minimum lot sizes and setbacks to prevent fires and flooding and those leave plenty of room for parking so I don't see how walking could change that (it's not like fire propagation and water absorption cares about your mode of transportation).
Not really, they existed before cars. As I said they are dictated by the fire safety, flooding danger and nuisance concerns. All the stuff you read on Reddit ("people want to live in tiny apartments but those are illegal to build", "it's illegal to have mixed commercial and residential use", "lot sizes are blown up by parking requirements") could be proven to be completely insane with few minutes of research.
