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Comment by tiborsaas | Hacker News Reader

I never owned a car, but going anywhere, anytime, at will is a very real thing and cars are the obvious solution. Humans are terrible at safe driving and self driving will eventually solve this. I don't see how this is not the future of transportation.

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The obvious solution often isn't the right solution.

We can go anywhere, anytime, at will after the roads have been built and the pedestrians cleared away, no? The occasional neighborhood also cleared away for a freeway.

All that money and energy could have gone somewhere else.

anywhere there's a road, and not forest, park, building, garden, trains, or people...

> Humans are terrible at safe driving

I'd dispute this. I'd say humans are excellent at many aspects of it. The high mortality is simply because driving is inherently dangerous and we do a lot of it.

I imagine the solution is basically what has happened over the last 60 years: gradual changes to improve safe driving.

"Nearly 1.25 million people die in road crashes each year, on average 3,287 deaths a day.

An additional 20-50 million are injured or disabled."

https://www.asirt.org/safe-travel/road-safety-facts/

"Over 90% of all road fatalities occur in low and middle-income countries, which have less than half of the world’s vehicles." Not really relevant statistical baseline here. Self driving cars aren't going to help in areas where people can't afford them.

Not in the near future. Think 100+ years. I can totally imagine owning a human driven car to be the luxury choice.

Seems like we're proportionally better at the seemingly more complex task of driving, than we are at maintaining our health. Heart disease in the U.S alone apparently kills about as much as half the number of worldwide car related fatalities each year.

We're going to lose the global warming battle if we don't reduce personal cars in transportation. (And no, EVs don't solve it, they still have way too big CO2 footprints)

> personal cars in transportation.

the EPA[1] says 4.6 metric tons of co2 from an average car. There were[2] 1bn cars in service globally, as of 2010.

“It has been estimated that just one of these container ships, the length of around six football pitches, can produce the same amount of pollution as 50 million cars."[3]

1bn/50m = 20 cargo ships equal the estimated world carbon footprint of automobiles.

There are 50,000 cargo ships globally. There's your problem, go nuclear or go home.

[1] https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/greenhouse-gas-emissions-t... [2] https://www.worldometers.info/cars/ [3] https://inews.co.uk/news/long-reads/cargo-container-shipping...

Cargo ships looks like a diversion from lobbies. It should be relatively easy to solve (upgrading 50k motors is much easier than redesign transport on land to trains, subway and bus). The trick is to conflate nitrogen oxide emission with air pollution.

When I look at data I find that transport is "20% of CO2 emission" (https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-other-greenhouse-gas-emis...) but shipping is "2.2% of the global human-made emissions in 2012" (form wikipedia http://www.imo.org/en/OurWork/Environment/PollutionPreventio...)

What does it means ? Well, shipping uses dirty fuel and is very polluting but that's also a scapegoat for individual consumerist culpability.

Have a look at figure 8.1 here:

https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5...

Road transport is growinv catastrophically in addition to dominating other transport in absolute terms

I have difficulty understanding how you can present a figure like 4.6 tons per car and argue that it's not a lot, especially as developign countries are headed dangerously toward widespread car ownership.

The "50000x" number about cargo ships isn't CO2 emissions, it's about other pollution due to cargo ships using bunker fuel.

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