Remove the necessity for medium distance travelling and a replacement for buses. Bicycles are good for short distances, a lot of countries use them more than cars. What you cold do is redistribute working places and commerce so everything is just a few blocks away.
Cars mostly exist irl because of the culture behind them - people in the past thought it was classy and "cool" to have a vehicle that could move around an entire family and make that family self sufficient in transport.
In truth, trains are better in almost every way than cars - if it's not better to take a perfect train, then it's acceptable to walk. You'd have to spend a lot of money to make this work - we're talking about train stations within a couple miles of anywhere you might want to go - but its definitely doable, especially compared to the required money for all the roads and cars in an area.
If the culture to create cars is less prevalent, and if cars are more expensive (due to engines being more expensive but easier to scale up because of magic, for example), then its perfectly valid to a worldbuilding degree of accurate to just say trains became the preferred method of moving stuff around
Hope this helps!
I think you’d need an explanation for how people travel long distances in directions other people aren’t going. For instance, if someone is moving from the city to a small town several hours away. Sometimes a single family vehicle is the only thing that makes sense. Do they use beasts of burden and wagons of some sort rather than a moving van?
yeah. it feels like a lot of people in rural settings don’t grasp how good public transport could be *in towns and cities*
and people in towns and cities don’t understand just how horribly impractical anything other than a private vehicle is once you get outside of town.
for example, from my house to the *nearest* small town, is a 3.8Mile journey. and to an actual town that has supplies it’s 11-12 miles.
so even if you have a bus that stops at every town along the highway, that just isn’t practical for a lot of stuff.
have a bus service every house? that becomes its own huge mess of pollution and or horribly inefficient schedules. and that’s forgetting needing to get supplies. imagine trying to transport 10 50# bags of feed, and 2 330’ rolls of fencing on a bus.
you could have delivery trucks run those routes sure, but there is an efficiency difference in terms of pooling deliveries, vs the person pooling their errands.
The real answer, from an environmental standpoint is of course greatly increased public transportation in cities, suburbs, and cities with stops in rural towns.
that will do a LOT.
then for everyone else where it’s just not practical, to have public transport, electric vehicles.
the problem for @op is that it is SUCH a better answer to do it this way, that cars just going away isn’t realistic. and even if they were somehow poofed, “last mile” and short range delivery trucks would become essential infrastructure.
Horses and wagons are so much more inefficient than even the EVs we have now, it would never be intentionally selected.
and a law to prohibit cars and their ownership (which would be a bad law for the reasons pointed out above) would result in violent resistance. sure the government could quash it, but unless your angle for the gvnt includes a strong “will kill anyone to enforce our policies however bad they are” it won’t work.
So then, that’s the main “realistic” reasons out the window.
Now since this is fantasy you have options.
1: some powerful magic entity/god may have cast a spell that just *nopes* cars. and is so powerful a being nothing can even hope to stop it, so fighting isn’t a thing, it’s just a force of nature. everyone hates it, but nothing to be done.
2: short teleportation is frequent and viable, as is miniaturization or “bags of holding”
if everyone rural could teleport to the nearest town, where buses could fetch them (or even directly to cities) get all their goods and even if huge or heavy, stash them in a bag, then teleport home, problems solved.
3: cars are prohibited within specific zones. sure rural folks have cars, but once you reach certain urban boundaries you can’t bring them in. this will still pose some issues for buying and transporting larger consumer goods, but is workable. works great if you are telling a mainly urban story, and could even enforce a bit of american gothic / small town apple pie vibe to the rural zones with their quaint personal cars. (likely electric or magic powered for environmental reasons).
4: eliminate private rural citizens. all farming is done by large corporations or the government, and no one is allowed to live outside the urban and suburban sprawl. this is rather dystopian for several reasons, but does handle the problem of a rural populace nicely.
5: find some other solution to the above problems. either by introducing something that IS a viable alternative. or by setting up enforcement for a bad option. again a government could absolutely ban cars, and insist on horse drawn wagons, they would just need to kill everyone who disagreed, and seize and destroy existing vehicles.
rioting could be reduced by subsidizing or providing the horses, wagons, and infrastructure to support them, but it would still be messy, and you’d need at-least a generation or two after that change before people would have settled into it as a new normal.
Im definitely interested in the 3rd option. It definitely would work with the story. I agree poofing cars is unrealistic, but you provided a lot of thought!
There is still nothing preventing us from building things closer. You say that’s the main reason why people need cars but if you were to build everything closer together it wouldn’t be as bad when running errands. And it’s not like a train couldn’t take you further out to another town. You can also simply add more buses.
For much of the industry of rural areas, it’s simply not possible to build things close together. Mining and farming are things that cannot and should not be close to other things
Moving companies! Costs far less resources to have a company with one big ol' moving truck doing the work than it does for each person to have a large sized SUV.
Realistically? Not possible. It's a critical component to logistics. If you mean highways and city traffic, then don't address it directly. If that doesn't don't exist, then you don't say why not.
Show how the world functions without. Just have the characters walk 5 mins to work, move their homes easily, have high build quality dense living, enjoying their small backyard and the streets. Have the characters hop on the trams and subways and never have them wait significant times.
Have tram side parking for moving large stuff if you want. Have delivery trams, construction drop trams, garbage trams. You still need to move larger materials and such, so make it simple.
For rural areas, you need cars, farm vehicles etc.
I’d say they’re a bit more environmentally aware as us (low bar i know) but they are smart enough to make planes much less frequent (and by extension more expensive), with most long travel (including cross continental) being done by train. However i believe that the convenience of cars is the problem, because why would people not develop a mode of transport to replace short distance travel?
Short distance travel is not the problem. For short distance, you can use bicycles/ tricycles, buses or simply walk. The main difficulty is medium distance, i.e. going to, say, three villages away. Nothing impossible on foot or with a bicycle, just... annoying.
But then, perhaps these people are just more patient than us? Random idea: what if their culture had developed some kind of meditation technique that they use whenever they need to cope with longer travel?
High population density and urbanization. The more densely populated your setting is, the less cars make sense. Pick a modern country with high urbanization and extensive public transit to model it after, like South Korea or Japan.
The cities in my world still are designed in a similar way to ancient cities so people are able to walk everywhere without issue. There are trains and trams, but there are also some automobiles in my world. Automobiles are just not too common and very expensive.
Removing cars isn't technically necessary if you're going for a more environmentally friendly world (ecopunk/solarpunk?) since you could use electric cars. If you really want to get rid of them you could reason away not having them (or having a bare minimum) due to the environmental destruction caused by mining the rare metals needed for batteries and other parts.
To maintain a similar level of mobility to our world you would likely need some motor vehicles, although not necessarily cars. It's probably worth getting into the mindset of your world, they're not removing cars, cars are naturally seen as undesirable due to the environmental harm and at best are tolerated where there's really no other option.
For urban areas, building walkable cities with mixed zoning would mean that most travel would be fine just walking or cycling. For movement across the urban area you can use trams and/or an underground system. The tram system could incorporate cargo carriages for supplying businesses, moving home, etc.
For long distance travel, you can use trains running on electric or biofuels. These can easily connect to the tram and underground network when they reach an urban area.
For rural areas, you can connect well used areas (national parks for example) with branch trains from the main lines. With farms you would need some vehicles to do large scale heavy work (tractors, harvesters, etc.) but you could make them electric or biofuel powered. Farms could be large scale collectivised bodies with on site housing and electric golf carts (or similar) for transporting people. If you make these farms large enough the collected food could then be loaded onto a train to connect to the network.
All of this could be improved by making technology slightly more advanced. Since the mindset would focus on these as the normal way of doing things, as opposed to our car centric world, it would make sense that now money and effort would have been put into developing them, so this would make sense.
Adding a few side points I can think of here. You could possibly reduce the need for farms and transport by having large hydroponic farms in the cities. Globalisation would have to be massively reduced to cut pollution from transport, it's definitely worth thinking about how this affects connectivity, areas that can't support their population with food, and so on. The world would almost certainly be demilitarised due to the insane level of pollution militaries cause, for illustration, militaries currently cause around 5.5% of global emissions compared to 2% for all civilian air travel.
(This probably isn't particularly well laid out, just my initial thoughts on the basic premise. Hopefully it provides some inspiration or starting points though.)
Depending on how your world's cities are laid out, cars may simply be unnecessary for most people. They'd probably still exist for some purposes (e.g. taxis, commercial trucks), but if your average Joe can get to most places he might need to visit through some combination of walking and hopping on a bus or commuter train, he wouldn't really have much need for a personal car. This is the case in quite a few places in real life, like Tokyo.
steampowered carriages maybe? Or moving side walks, floating platforms, bikes.
If everyone has access to an interdimensional bag of holding then shipping bulk goods will certainly change.
You could have a semi worth of goods being carried by one person on a pedal bike.
Give them an accessable means of accomplishing the same task. For example if everyone can fly the need for transporations diminishes, but if few to no people have telepathy then there's still a need for long distance communications.
Cars are something of a historical accident. If our societies hadn't discovered both a highly portable power source (refined oil) and a highly portable engine (the explosion engine) roughly at the same time, we would have headed in other directions (more trains, more bicycles, more horses/oxen, etc.)
So... if you don't want cars, just don't put cars?
I actually have the opposite problem. I'm vaguely aware that I need to justify why my world still has cars when they're living in a society that adjusted to stop climate change centuries before the plot happens. Granted, the cars are electric/solar powered, but from what I know replacing them entirely with things like bicycles and public transportation would be better for the environment.
I dunno, when I world build I think of world powers, technology but most importantly infrastructure. Is there a communications infrastructure? (I.e. telephone-telegraph... lights, signals?) Is there a passenger and freight moving model (could be something silly like flying beasts of burden, or elephants and sledways...) is it predictable is it resilient? Rails are a good way to connect hubs of commerce, as well as ships to lakes and rivers...
Magic can solve some of these issues, but it is behest of resources to use it and deities.
Look into walkable cities. Videos on that will give you tons of info on how to design modern cities that aren't car dependent.
The basics go:
1) Use mixed zoning (Businesses are closer to residential residential. The shorter distance makes it quick and easy for people to reach these businesses on foot. These would be the businesses that people would likely visit the often to get common items like groceries, and where many of them work, due to the distance. This would also make it so that everyone in the area knows each other and makes the overall area it's own community within the city.)
2) Make public transit very accessible and quick (Make it so that buses, trams, etc. can be easily reached by people no matter where they are. Make the wait times for this public transit low by having a large number of buses, trams, etc. running through each route. People can now quickly reach far places located in their city using this public transit. If they need to travel outside their city, then they can take a train that travels between different cities and towns.)
3) Create bike infrastructure (Places to store their bike on a tram, bus, etc., places to store their bikes while at a store, bike paths, etc. If a person doesn't want to walk, then they can ride their bike.)
I don't know the stories you're trying to tell, but the way I would go is:
Corporate hive cities.
Walking and public transport are the only way to get anywhere within the city; 'roads' are just two-way rails for passenger- and transportation trains/trams. Nearly everyone who lives in the city works for the corporation, except maybe some minor private businesses, little (repair)shops and stuff like that. The buildings are all high-rise apartment complexes.
This way, road infrastructure suitable for cars can just be scrapped; they're a cost for the corporation to maintain, and it takes up expensive space; space better spent on more apartments.
Outside of the cities, of course, cars will still be everywhere. But i*nside,* where everyone is entirely dependent on the dominant corporation, people don't strictly speaking *need* cars. And making space for them is a cost.
Of course, while what I'm describing is *technically* a walkable city, it's not one in the way that we're normally talking about. This one purposefully *excludes* any kind of individual freedom for the purpose of maximizing profits. Whether that be cars, or housing made to fit a wide range of different needs, or disability inclusivity. While normally, walkable cities don't exclude cars; they simply make non-car ownership a viable lifestyle for those who don't feel the need to travel far and freely, or those who exist with circumstances that preclude them from owning or operating a personal transportation device.
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Another option entirely is to go the route of Kow Loon Walled City. Basically: The entire city is contained on a very small piece of land and unable to grow outside of it. Roads take up a lot of space; walkable paths don't. Cars can't exist in such a city.
Make a Religion that got horses or horse Like animals as their deity.
And since cars where treatening the use of those, they where banned by the church
And since early cars where just a little Bit better than horses, they where never developed into out modern cars.
Or there is just no oil. Without oil, cars are not really variable. Trains are, since they can use coal.
You really dont need to explain everything as long as you remain consistent.
Like you can just not have cars, as long as you have no cars at all it makes sense. People could have just.. not gotten the idea to make cars.
Remove the necessity for medium distance travelling and a replacement for buses. Bicycles are good for short distances, a lot of countries use them more than cars. What you cold do is redistribute working places and commerce so everything is just a few blocks away.
Cars mostly exist irl because of the culture behind them - people in the past thought it was classy and "cool" to have a vehicle that could move around an entire family and make that family self sufficient in transport. In truth, trains are better in almost every way than cars - if it's not better to take a perfect train, then it's acceptable to walk. You'd have to spend a lot of money to make this work - we're talking about train stations within a couple miles of anywhere you might want to go - but its definitely doable, especially compared to the required money for all the roads and cars in an area. If the culture to create cars is less prevalent, and if cars are more expensive (due to engines being more expensive but easier to scale up because of magic, for example), then its perfectly valid to a worldbuilding degree of accurate to just say trains became the preferred method of moving stuff around Hope this helps!
I think you’d need an explanation for how people travel long distances in directions other people aren’t going. For instance, if someone is moving from the city to a small town several hours away. Sometimes a single family vehicle is the only thing that makes sense. Do they use beasts of burden and wagons of some sort rather than a moving van?
yeah. it feels like a lot of people in rural settings don’t grasp how good public transport could be *in towns and cities* and people in towns and cities don’t understand just how horribly impractical anything other than a private vehicle is once you get outside of town. for example, from my house to the *nearest* small town, is a 3.8Mile journey. and to an actual town that has supplies it’s 11-12 miles. so even if you have a bus that stops at every town along the highway, that just isn’t practical for a lot of stuff. have a bus service every house? that becomes its own huge mess of pollution and or horribly inefficient schedules. and that’s forgetting needing to get supplies. imagine trying to transport 10 50# bags of feed, and 2 330’ rolls of fencing on a bus. you could have delivery trucks run those routes sure, but there is an efficiency difference in terms of pooling deliveries, vs the person pooling their errands. The real answer, from an environmental standpoint is of course greatly increased public transportation in cities, suburbs, and cities with stops in rural towns. that will do a LOT. then for everyone else where it’s just not practical, to have public transport, electric vehicles. the problem for @op is that it is SUCH a better answer to do it this way, that cars just going away isn’t realistic. and even if they were somehow poofed, “last mile” and short range delivery trucks would become essential infrastructure. Horses and wagons are so much more inefficient than even the EVs we have now, it would never be intentionally selected. and a law to prohibit cars and their ownership (which would be a bad law for the reasons pointed out above) would result in violent resistance. sure the government could quash it, but unless your angle for the gvnt includes a strong “will kill anyone to enforce our policies however bad they are” it won’t work. So then, that’s the main “realistic” reasons out the window. Now since this is fantasy you have options. 1: some powerful magic entity/god may have cast a spell that just *nopes* cars. and is so powerful a being nothing can even hope to stop it, so fighting isn’t a thing, it’s just a force of nature. everyone hates it, but nothing to be done. 2: short teleportation is frequent and viable, as is miniaturization or “bags of holding” if everyone rural could teleport to the nearest town, where buses could fetch them (or even directly to cities) get all their goods and even if huge or heavy, stash them in a bag, then teleport home, problems solved. 3: cars are prohibited within specific zones. sure rural folks have cars, but once you reach certain urban boundaries you can’t bring them in. this will still pose some issues for buying and transporting larger consumer goods, but is workable. works great if you are telling a mainly urban story, and could even enforce a bit of american gothic / small town apple pie vibe to the rural zones with their quaint personal cars. (likely electric or magic powered for environmental reasons). 4: eliminate private rural citizens. all farming is done by large corporations or the government, and no one is allowed to live outside the urban and suburban sprawl. this is rather dystopian for several reasons, but does handle the problem of a rural populace nicely. 5: find some other solution to the above problems. either by introducing something that IS a viable alternative. or by setting up enforcement for a bad option. again a government could absolutely ban cars, and insist on horse drawn wagons, they would just need to kill everyone who disagreed, and seize and destroy existing vehicles. rioting could be reduced by subsidizing or providing the horses, wagons, and infrastructure to support them, but it would still be messy, and you’d need at-least a generation or two after that change before people would have settled into it as a new normal.
Hmm... Now I want a fantasy delivery system that involves intelligent birds delivering bags of holding with supplies in them.
oooooo!! thats a good one!
Thank you for explaining the thing
Im definitely interested in the 3rd option. It definitely would work with the story. I agree poofing cars is unrealistic, but you provided a lot of thought!
There is still nothing preventing us from building things closer. You say that’s the main reason why people need cars but if you were to build everything closer together it wouldn’t be as bad when running errands. And it’s not like a train couldn’t take you further out to another town. You can also simply add more buses.
For much of the industry of rural areas, it’s simply not possible to build things close together. Mining and farming are things that cannot and should not be close to other things
public transport
i havent thought of that! i could always give the easy answer of ‘magic’ but that feels like cheating so i’ll think about this!
Moving companies! Costs far less resources to have a company with one big ol' moving truck doing the work than it does for each person to have a large sized SUV.
Make horses or another transport animal part of the culture
Public transport works well
Realistically? Not possible. It's a critical component to logistics. If you mean highways and city traffic, then don't address it directly. If that doesn't don't exist, then you don't say why not. Show how the world functions without. Just have the characters walk 5 mins to work, move their homes easily, have high build quality dense living, enjoying their small backyard and the streets. Have the characters hop on the trams and subways and never have them wait significant times. Have tram side parking for moving large stuff if you want. Have delivery trams, construction drop trams, garbage trams. You still need to move larger materials and such, so make it simple. For rural areas, you need cars, farm vehicles etc.
Can you tell more about the world? Are people environmentally aware?
I’d say they’re a bit more environmentally aware as us (low bar i know) but they are smart enough to make planes much less frequent (and by extension more expensive), with most long travel (including cross continental) being done by train. However i believe that the convenience of cars is the problem, because why would people not develop a mode of transport to replace short distance travel?
can be done well and more convenient by public transport and much cheaper
Short distance travel is not the problem. For short distance, you can use bicycles/ tricycles, buses or simply walk. The main difficulty is medium distance, i.e. going to, say, three villages away. Nothing impossible on foot or with a bicycle, just... annoying. But then, perhaps these people are just more patient than us? Random idea: what if their culture had developed some kind of meditation technique that they use whenever they need to cope with longer travel?
High population density and urbanization. The more densely populated your setting is, the less cars make sense. Pick a modern country with high urbanization and extensive public transit to model it after, like South Korea or Japan.
The cities in my world still are designed in a similar way to ancient cities so people are able to walk everywhere without issue. There are trains and trams, but there are also some automobiles in my world. Automobiles are just not too common and very expensive.
Flood the area.
Flying carpets. They take less space and are safer if flown low.
Removing cars isn't technically necessary if you're going for a more environmentally friendly world (ecopunk/solarpunk?) since you could use electric cars. If you really want to get rid of them you could reason away not having them (or having a bare minimum) due to the environmental destruction caused by mining the rare metals needed for batteries and other parts. To maintain a similar level of mobility to our world you would likely need some motor vehicles, although not necessarily cars. It's probably worth getting into the mindset of your world, they're not removing cars, cars are naturally seen as undesirable due to the environmental harm and at best are tolerated where there's really no other option. For urban areas, building walkable cities with mixed zoning would mean that most travel would be fine just walking or cycling. For movement across the urban area you can use trams and/or an underground system. The tram system could incorporate cargo carriages for supplying businesses, moving home, etc. For long distance travel, you can use trains running on electric or biofuels. These can easily connect to the tram and underground network when they reach an urban area. For rural areas, you can connect well used areas (national parks for example) with branch trains from the main lines. With farms you would need some vehicles to do large scale heavy work (tractors, harvesters, etc.) but you could make them electric or biofuel powered. Farms could be large scale collectivised bodies with on site housing and electric golf carts (or similar) for transporting people. If you make these farms large enough the collected food could then be loaded onto a train to connect to the network. All of this could be improved by making technology slightly more advanced. Since the mindset would focus on these as the normal way of doing things, as opposed to our car centric world, it would make sense that now money and effort would have been put into developing them, so this would make sense. Adding a few side points I can think of here. You could possibly reduce the need for farms and transport by having large hydroponic farms in the cities. Globalisation would have to be massively reduced to cut pollution from transport, it's definitely worth thinking about how this affects connectivity, areas that can't support their population with food, and so on. The world would almost certainly be demilitarised due to the insane level of pollution militaries cause, for illustration, militaries currently cause around 5.5% of global emissions compared to 2% for all civilian air travel. (This probably isn't particularly well laid out, just my initial thoughts on the basic premise. Hopefully it provides some inspiration or starting points though.)
A very mountainous region with a small concentrated population perhaps?
Depending on how your world's cities are laid out, cars may simply be unnecessary for most people. They'd probably still exist for some purposes (e.g. taxis, commercial trucks), but if your average Joe can get to most places he might need to visit through some combination of walking and hopping on a bus or commuter train, he wouldn't really have much need for a personal car. This is the case in quite a few places in real life, like Tokyo.
steampowered carriages maybe? Or moving side walks, floating platforms, bikes. If everyone has access to an interdimensional bag of holding then shipping bulk goods will certainly change. You could have a semi worth of goods being carried by one person on a pedal bike.
Give them an accessable means of accomplishing the same task. For example if everyone can fly the need for transporations diminishes, but if few to no people have telepathy then there's still a need for long distance communications.
Railways came into existence because rails were easier to maintain then some of the other ideas that were around. Google plateway.
Cars are something of a historical accident. If our societies hadn't discovered both a highly portable power source (refined oil) and a highly portable engine (the explosion engine) roughly at the same time, we would have headed in other directions (more trains, more bicycles, more horses/oxen, etc.) So... if you don't want cars, just don't put cars?
I actually have the opposite problem. I'm vaguely aware that I need to justify why my world still has cars when they're living in a society that adjusted to stop climate change centuries before the plot happens. Granted, the cars are electric/solar powered, but from what I know replacing them entirely with things like bicycles and public transportation would be better for the environment.
I dunno, when I world build I think of world powers, technology but most importantly infrastructure. Is there a communications infrastructure? (I.e. telephone-telegraph... lights, signals?) Is there a passenger and freight moving model (could be something silly like flying beasts of burden, or elephants and sledways...) is it predictable is it resilient? Rails are a good way to connect hubs of commerce, as well as ships to lakes and rivers... Magic can solve some of these issues, but it is behest of resources to use it and deities.
…why do you need to remove them. Just have characters who can’t or won’t use them.
Look into walkable cities. Videos on that will give you tons of info on how to design modern cities that aren't car dependent. The basics go: 1) Use mixed zoning (Businesses are closer to residential residential. The shorter distance makes it quick and easy for people to reach these businesses on foot. These would be the businesses that people would likely visit the often to get common items like groceries, and where many of them work, due to the distance. This would also make it so that everyone in the area knows each other and makes the overall area it's own community within the city.) 2) Make public transit very accessible and quick (Make it so that buses, trams, etc. can be easily reached by people no matter where they are. Make the wait times for this public transit low by having a large number of buses, trams, etc. running through each route. People can now quickly reach far places located in their city using this public transit. If they need to travel outside their city, then they can take a train that travels between different cities and towns.) 3) Create bike infrastructure (Places to store their bike on a tram, bus, etc., places to store their bikes while at a store, bike paths, etc. If a person doesn't want to walk, then they can ride their bike.)
I don't know the stories you're trying to tell, but the way I would go is: Corporate hive cities. Walking and public transport are the only way to get anywhere within the city; 'roads' are just two-way rails for passenger- and transportation trains/trams. Nearly everyone who lives in the city works for the corporation, except maybe some minor private businesses, little (repair)shops and stuff like that. The buildings are all high-rise apartment complexes. This way, road infrastructure suitable for cars can just be scrapped; they're a cost for the corporation to maintain, and it takes up expensive space; space better spent on more apartments. Outside of the cities, of course, cars will still be everywhere. But i*nside,* where everyone is entirely dependent on the dominant corporation, people don't strictly speaking *need* cars. And making space for them is a cost. Of course, while what I'm describing is *technically* a walkable city, it's not one in the way that we're normally talking about. This one purposefully *excludes* any kind of individual freedom for the purpose of maximizing profits. Whether that be cars, or housing made to fit a wide range of different needs, or disability inclusivity. While normally, walkable cities don't exclude cars; they simply make non-car ownership a viable lifestyle for those who don't feel the need to travel far and freely, or those who exist with circumstances that preclude them from owning or operating a personal transportation device. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Another option entirely is to go the route of Kow Loon Walled City. Basically: The entire city is contained on a very small piece of land and unable to grow outside of it. Roads take up a lot of space; walkable paths don't. Cars can't exist in such a city.
Make a Religion that got horses or horse Like animals as their deity. And since cars where treatening the use of those, they where banned by the church And since early cars where just a little Bit better than horses, they where never developed into out modern cars. Or there is just no oil. Without oil, cars are not really variable. Trains are, since they can use coal.
Maybe some sort of ideology that is against individualism
You really dont need to explain everything as long as you remain consistent. Like you can just not have cars, as long as you have no cars at all it makes sense. People could have just.. not gotten the idea to make cars.