When I revealed that 1 was planning to travel around Britain by public transport, everyone I saw said, 'Gosh, you're brave!' but it never occurred to me to go any other way. Driving in     Britain is such a dull experience these days. There are far too many cars on the road, nearly double what there were when I first came here, and in those days people didn't actually drive their cars. They just parked them in the driveway and cleaned them once every week or so.     About twice a year they would “get the car out” for a pleasant drive to visit relatives or take a trip.

Now everyone drives everywhere for everything, which I don't understand because there isn*t a single feature of driving in Britain that has even the tiniest measure of enjoyment in it. Just consider the average multi-storey（多层的）car park. You drive around for ages, and eventually find a space that is exactly two inches wider than average car. Then, because you are parked next to a pillar（柱子）,you have to climb over the seats and end up squeezing out of the passenger door, in the process transferring all the dirt from the side of your car to the back of your smart new jacket. Then you go hunting for some distant pay-and-display machine, which doesn't give change.

And that's just one tiny part of the driving experience. There are all the other annoyances of motoring, like traffic lights on busy roundabouts（环形交通枢纽）that never let you advance more than 20 feet at a time, and motorway service areas where food is much more expensive. Motorized vehicles are ugly and dirty. They occupy every pavement, turn ancient market squares into disorderly and untidy groups of metal, and cause petrol stations and other discouraging places to appear in great number. They are horrible and awful and 1 wanted nothing to do with them on this trip.

Twenty-four trains, nine countries, 13,500 miles. They are the numbers behind the train journey one man took from Southampton in the UK to eastern China.

Roger Tyers, 37, spent a month on board trains and over $2,500 — almost three times of the cost of a return flight — to travel to the Chinese port city Ningbo for academic （学术的） research in May. It was the climate crisis, not a love of trains, that drove the sociologist to choose this hard route over a return flight. Tyers told CNN that he felt it necessary to stop flying when UN climate experts warned last year that the world has less than 11 years to avoid destructive levels of global warming.

Tyers is not the only person to avoid air travel in response to climate change. Thousands of people worldwide have publicly promised to stop flying, including teenage activist Greta Thunberg, who has encouraged youth climate protests around the world.

Activist Maja Rosen launched the "Flight Free" activity in Sweden in 2018 with the aim of encouraging 100, 000 people not to fly for one year. Although only around 14, 000 people signed the online "flightfree2019" promise, Rosen told CNN that the campaign had made more people realize the urgency of the climate crisis and motivated them to travel by train more often. Rosen, who stopped flying 12 years ago, says the collective promise helps deal with the sense of hopelessness many people feel when it comes to fighting with climate change. "One of the problems is that people feel there's no point in what you do singly. The activity is about making people realize that if we do this together, we can actually make a huge difference,” she said.

Tyers calculated （计算）that his train journey to China produced almost 90% less emissions（气体排放）than a return flight.

This year, new technologies will enable more drivers to take their hands off the steering wheel (方向盘) while on the road. But that doesn’t mean their cars will be fully self-driving — that day still remains far in the future.

Automakers like General Motors (GM), Ford and Stellantis are introducing, or upgrading existing technologies. But in the words of Kay Stepper, an automated driving expert, these systems are “feet off” and “hands off”, but they will not be “eyes off” or “mind off”.

For the time being, these systems will only be used on limited-access highways, where there are no pedestrians or bicyclists. Vehicles with this technology will be able to drive at relatively high speeds, but only in simple traffic situations.

Bryan Reimer, a researcher with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Age Lab, said it will be -decades before people can buy. truly-self-driving cars in-which humans ride as passengers，

Still, the technology that will be rolled out by the major automakers this year will do more than most so-called Advanced Driver Assistance Systems, or AD AS, do now.

GM’s Super Cruise system allows drivers to completely let go of the steering wheel while driving on selected highways. It was introduced in 2017 on the Cadillac CT6 sedan, which was ds continued last year. An improved version is coming this year on the Cadillac Escalade SUV and the Cadillac CT 4 and CT5 sedans.

Super Cruise only works on highways that have been previously laser-mapped in three dimensions. GPS positioning and the vehicles, radar sensors(传感器) and cameras are used to enable drivers to unh and — and un foot — all the controls.

Drivers still need to pay attention, however. A camera in the car makes sure the driver is looking at the road at all times. If the driver looks away from the road for more than a few seconds, the system will stop working.