> People need to be scared and frightened. Or they won't change.

People who are scared and frightened don't tend to change. They horde, they embrace authoritarians, they try to go back to the good old times, they fight - mostly with each other. The one thing they do not do is fix the problem.

People who are hopeful and optimistic tend to embrace change. They work with others for a better future instead of fighting over what ever is left.

I love trains and bikes and walking and most forms of public transport and I agree with almost everything //notjustbikes says. Cars don't belong in our cities, not as personal transport, but they do have their uses. In some mostly rural areas and for some types of journey cars do make sense.

Also, if planned correctly autonomous cars may even increase train use. Having a cheap and convenient way to get from your doorstep to the train station in somewhere like American suburban sprawl will make train travel more attractive.

I'm roughly the same age and that's just simply not true. Before 2005 self driving was pure science fiction. The most optimistic estimates from anyone in the industry put self driving cars at least 40 years away, in the 2040 to 2050 time frame. There was no path forward. Even if hardware continued to advance to the point it was possible nobody had any idea how to do the software side or what it would look like.

The 2005 Grand Challenge changed everything. There had been major breakthroughs in both image recognition and LIDAR and now there was a path forward. Self driving cars were suddenly not just possible, but it looked like they were only 10 to 20 years away.

No it wont. Kessler Syndrome at it's hypothetical worst will make some orbits unusable because the risk of a collision over the lifetime of a satellite will be too high. But even at it's worst the risk of a collision for the few minutes it would take a rocket to fly through the 'danger zone' to a higher orbit is still practically zero.