I am rich beyond Google’s wildest driverless-car dreams; I own a fleet of swift and reliable driverless cars that take me where I’m going while I read or stare out the window or watch beautifully limber kids turf dancing in the aisles for my entertainment. I have been riding these liberating transportation marvels for many decades; I have seen the future; it is all of us in these driverless cars we already own together.

OK, by driverless cars I mean vehicles that get me there while I am not driving them, brilliantly efficient vehicles that get by with maybe one human driver per 50 or 500 people. You own them too. We call them buses, streetcars, trains, ferries. I own a car, I take taxis, but I make extensive use of my feet, my bike, and public transit, and the mix works very nicely for this city dweller.

Here in the shadow of Silicon Valley, it is dismal to see the obsession with privatization when the shifts we need to respond to climate change should include enhanced public transit, both in what fuels those fleets and how well they serve us. Enhanced public transit and reduced private transit. The Tesla cars are the best of big tech’s vision of the future; it is now possible to put solar panels on your roof and run your electric car for free in a nearly carbon-neutral way (once the panels and cars are built). Which is literally cool.

But existing technologies already allow us to keep our climate impact comparatively dainty. These technologies, when it comes to trains, have existed since long before the private automobile. The first passenger railroad ran in 1830 (and yeah, it ran on coal, but we can run passenger trains on clean electricity). We can go forward in part by going back. And around. And look out the window while we do it, while trained professionals navigate.

Grist recently reported: “Americans drive a lot – about 8.9m miles each day during the summer driving season last year, an increase of about 3.7% over the year before. Total miles driven last year were about 4% higher than in 2007. By 2017, we’re expected to be driving 7% more miles than we did in 2007.”

Self-driving cars, like regular cars, are a way to keep doing this when runaway climate change demands that we run away from cars. Twenty-seven per cent of US greenhouse gas emissions are from transportation, about two thirds of that – or about 18% of the total – from cars. So we don’t need new ways to use cars; we need new ways to not use them. Because here’s the thing people keep forgetting to mention about driverless cars: they’re cars.

Self-driving cars are, like so much technology, a solution in search of a problem.

The Washington Post reports that Americans collectively spent 3.4m years commuting last year; a thinktank called CityLab notes that 76.4% of commuters drive to work alone. The rise of the private automobile accompanied the white flight of the postwar era. It was subsidized by a massive governmental program to build highways and freeways and by a withdrawal from public life and public space, which suburbanizing modernist designers saw as useless, chaotic and menacing, when they saw it at all. They tried to design it out, with much success. Their designs pushed people into what sprawl gives rise to: the rise of private transit, the decline of public transit, socially and economically segregated landscapes, and unpleasant commutes.

The affluent have collectively changed their minds about cities to a great extent, leading to the opposite of white flight. That has had the corollary effect of pushing the formerly urban poor to the outskirts, where they face horrendous commutes and little institutional interest in improving their transit options.

This white convergence has put wealthy people who get to choose from many options back in the density in which public transit works best. Shall we call this “white return”? “White implosion”?

Sadly, many of the urban returnees want to live in cities without understanding what cities are: places of coexistence, of public luxury, of shared space. Places where your car is not a bright solution to how to get from here to there.

This year, Mother Jones ran a long article about how great self-driving cars are because they won’t have to park. If we use them like taxis or a car-sharing program rather than own vehicles individually, it’s true that less parking will be required. But even these private one-person or one-party vehicles must stop at some point and park. And they don’t solve the problems of emissions or gridlock, because no matter how magical your navigational software, too many cars is too many cars, and many places are overwhelmed with vehicles even today. When it comes to carbon dioxide emissions, for that matter, the Earth as a whole already has too many cars.

In dense places and even not-so-dense ones, private transit can lead to traffic jams, road rage and squandered time, along with a supremely wasteful use of fossil fuel, whose emissions first go into the lungs of anyone stuck in traffic or in its vicinity. An hour spent reading a novel on a train is very different from an hour in stop-and-go traffic cursing and flinching. And if you want to read a novel (or, OK, twiddle with your phone) on your commute, you should be demanding better public transit, not self-driving cars. The fewer of us in private vehicles, the less gridlock.

The privatized shuttle buses thundering up and down San Francisco streets (and sometimes getting stuck on the steep ones) have been another sign that big tech takes little interest in enhancing public transit. The corporations could have done what corporations in earlier eras have: used their power to push for improved public transit. Instead, massive tech industry buses have joined the traffic jams, usurped the public bus stops, and encouraged tech workers to stay inside a bubble of tinted-window privilege, while making it possible for them to live far from their workplaces in San Francisco. (In a survey a few years ago, a significant percentage said they wouldn’t live in San Francisco without the tech shuttles, which accommodate Silicon Valley’s destructive policy of pursuing job growth without meaningful housing growth.)

Apple, Tesla, Uber, Google and various auto manufacturers’ pursuit of driverless cars is an attempt to preserve and maybe extend private automobile usage. The rise of new ways of hailing taxis and the problematic companies Lyft and Uber has given a younger generation more ways to stay in private one-party-per-vehicle transit and added fleets of new vehicles to already congested cities. Uber alone added an estimated 11,000 drivers to San Francisco’s streets. That’s not the future. That’s dressing up the past. We need people to engage with bicycles, buses, streetcars, trains, and their own feet, to look at ways they can get places without fossil fuel, or instead using technologies that minimize the impact of our fossil fuel usage – or consider living where they don’t need to go awkward distances often. There are good new technologies, like real-time bus arrival apps, that help, more than new ways to order that obsolete thing: a car to get you where you don’t need a car to go.

There is talk of how self-driving cars could reduce accidents on the road, but us just driving less could do that too (and the way that self-driving cars can be hacked or just have their software go south should concern us; when a computer goes haywire, it really goes); and the fender benders to date of Google’s self-driving cars suggest that machines may never quite comprehend human nature. Self-driving cars are, like so much technology, a solution in search of a problem. We already have beautiful solutions, well-deployed, to moving people around, better solutions in terms of safety, emissions, efficiency, and the rest.

All we need is the political will and cultural imagination to get on the bus. Or train. Or ferry. Or bike.