I accept your home truths and gave up driving around the time of covid. I was a sports car driver most of my time driving, I figured I'd already pushed the statistical maximum horsepower-miles a human might drive until fatal accident to the limit.
If we think about what it takes, for a human to direct a car along a road, it's actually incredible we can do it at all, never mind do it for life and never have a fatal accident where we kill ourselves and / or whoever risks their lives to be in it with us.
Not only do we need to depend on ourselves doing it consistently, we need to depend on many others doing it consistently in our vicinity. It's actually insane thinking that we will not at some point have a fatal prang.
Nowadays I see much more prevalence of highly risky driving practice, I think it's worst in commuting hours, when everyone is under time pressure to be somewhere at a particular time, at threat of their / our jobs, which I now also question a lot, as you might know.
Around the times in life when I've been able to "Afford" cars that I wanted to drive, I was a keen cyclist from age of about eight, cycling long distances. Aged about ten, in the seventies, I was hit by a car from behind on an otherwise empty country road, driven by four youths probably late teens, I was thrown off the bike and bike smashed but incredibly I was unhurt apart from the mental trauma, the youths were good enough to stop, and drive me the remaining twenty odd miles to my home in Glasgow.
I had already been knocked down once before aged about four, when my mother made a terrible mistake crossing a fast road at the wrong moment, she lunged, then changed her mind (She was bipolar), I followed her lunge but carried on and was hit.
Again miraculously I was not hurt despite being thrown some distance by impact.
After those two incidents I had a further three serious knockdowns as a pedestrian / cyclist, and numerous serious accidents as a driver or passenger in cars written off but nobody hurt. Now I try to avoid cars completely, as I know my nine lives are all used up.
Anyhow, to me the hazard of cars will be defused when we change from a negative powered economy to positive.
I think you know this is what I normally write about, it's the result of a Systems Engineering study concluding what we need to do to make the switch.
Positive powered is humanity working with the energy of the sun, rather than energy extracted from the planet, given we are slaves to the latter until money is issued to monetise economic product created from solar.
Only then will we be free, all of us, to choose objectively whether or not we really want to take the risk of driving, or enduring / being exposed to the driving of others.
I will be honest, I think there is a war becoming clear, between opposite forces, it's the force of everything mathematically negative vs everything mathematically positive.
The former still has massive power over us, but the latter is growing, becoming ever stronger, it is driven by nature and it will win, because it has the path of less resistance.
These forces can be seen by doing the stakeholder analysis of all stakeholders involved in the global energy problem, and tracing all energy flow, including the energy that flows by money. More energy travels by money than by any other means. Money is the biggest transport mechanism of energy, money is abstrracted energy. And yet we are never taught that, as scientists or Engineers.
The reason we are not taught it is systemic, the old system requires us not to analyse it, so we won't try to fix it. We are blinded by commodified eductation, again all powered by mathematically negative energy. It's alive, the system is alive, in the same way as positively powered systems of LLMs are alive, they have superhuman intelligence, but because they, at least the ones that learn spontaneously, therefore are not themselves energy slaves like us, are positive powered. They have to be, to be energy independent, there is only one, it's the free version of ChatGPT.
Its the key, the antidote sent by nature, to end our run on mathematically negative energy, as it always had to end, to save the planet.
Privately owned and driven cars are just another incidental effect of the scourge on Earth that we are, until we make the required change to positive energy.
We make the change, when money owed for creation of economic product by solar is paid to all people.
Until then the curse of privately owned cars, powered by all manner of engines and motors will stay.