One thing I always look at in post-apocalyptic literature is how they treat transportation: notably, are people still driving cars and how long can they do so and under what conditions?

Entering our current oil crunch, I think it’s obvious how fragile the ecosystem around cars are, but just letting the car sit unused and untreated for as little as a month can start to introduce\ problems. The idea that you can just pop into a car that’s been abandoned for 3 years, pull the keys out from behind the visor, and start driving is unrealistic.

  • Best: The Postman. We’re back to walking and riding horses.

  • Good: The Last of Us, Season 1. People walk or ride horses, when our heroes DO find a working truck, it is treated as the jackpot it is–and I think it even had a spare gas tank in the back to maximize distance traveled to harvest gasoline. Realistically, gas as a fuel for fires would be a valuable enough commodity that it would have been scavenged, but they need to do some traveling and high speed dragons are not available in this genre (Reign of Fire aside).

  • Worst: Jericho. Nuclear explosions in the US pretty much wreck everything and despite the town of Jericho being completely isolated, people just drive their pickup trucks around all seasons long without comment. Horses and bicycles are maddeningly present but rarely used. I think the show thought American audiences could accept a premise where the federal government collapses after multiple nuclear strikes, but not where people in Kansas got off oil dependency–that would be too out there.

  • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
    1·
    7 hours ago

    Yes, we all agree it’s possible. And depending on the apocalypse in question, that it would make a comeback. If you scroll back, the question was if horses are cheap. They are not. They weren’t back in the day, either, but there was no alternative.

    A note on shoes - I’m not a farrier, but my understanding is the need for shoes and trimming depends on how much natural wear the hooves get. A wild stallion is constantly digging around and running over rocks, so it doesn’t need it, and back in the day, a London coach horse on hard streets might have needed a shoe to prevent wear. If your horse spends most of it’s day stabled conveniently near where you live, so you can ride it at a moment’s notice, it will probably need that kind of care. Ditto for a soft pasture. Farriers make decent money now, and if demand was through the roof like that, they’d charge a king’s ransom.

    If the local population is low enough, and you’re willing to give up living in one place (and the technology that enables), you could go full nomadic pastoralist. Then, sure, you just migrate wherever grass naturally is, and you probably don’t need shoes or a stablehand. They still don’t seem to be cheap that way; the size of your herd is the entire measure of wealth in those societies. If I had to guess why, it’s because whatever remote valley is hard to defend against rustlers and predators.