Another way to use restraint (if you have a car) is not to just drive it whenever you feel like it.

• Plan your trips well in advance, combine trips, wait to go shopping until you need a lot of things.
• Plan your purchases so you run out of everything at the same time.
• Get friends and neighbors together in a car pool for shopping.
• Find stores on your commute route so you don't have to make extra trips.
• Make a commitment to do all short and spontaneous trips on your bike or on foot.

Raising the ocean levels would at least get rid of two of this country's biggest problems; Both the East and West Coasts. Imho.

Welcome back! It's hard to stay away, isn't it?

What are your thoughts on the topic under discussion?

There's a hypothetical possiblity the earth could have a methane burp of epoch-ending significance. I wonder what happened to all that end-Permian methane if that actually was a real event.

What is that topic?

With numerous Trails within 20-50 miles of home, I'll be keeping my 04 Silverado. With 3 bikes in the back and 2 more on the hitch rack we are off for a day of adventure.

The proper and restrained use of the automobile. And how to file taxes.

Do you think there need to be any voluntary or imposed limits on car use, for the common good?

Voluntary? that is up to the individual. Imposed? NO WAY.

"The Tree of Liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of Tyrants and Patriots. For that is it's natural manure."
Thomas Jefferson.

Oh, based on your and others' posts, I thought the topic being discussed was just another in a long list of thread hijacks for ranting about climate change, fossil fuels and other environmental issues. I must have been misinformed.

I think it far more likely that, if there is going to be any popular push and associated political push for "involuntary restraining" the use of a transportation mode for the "common good" (as seen by the voting public), it will be to limit, restrict or ban use of bicycles on various public streets.

Attempts at such bans do crop up from time to time. The one in Colorado was struck down last year. There is an attempt in Misery going on right now. I don't think there is as much citizen support for those as their supporters imagine, but we may get to see when one finally passes.

It does pose an interesting legal conflict. The right to use the public right of way to travel is a basic common law right that predates the Constitution. The privilege to drive on the public right of way is not a right. On the surface of it, a privilege does not seem to carry nearly as much weight as a right, but a bike is not the only way to exercise such a right to travel. Fun times.

I think that if we merely required motorists to follow the law or be banned from driving we wouldn't need to have any further discussion since it doesn't appear that very many people can drive lawfully. Of course there would be other impacts from that like underutilized emergency rooms and unemployed cardiologists, but I can live with that.

I don't know what happened to prehistoric methane, but modern methane turns into carbon dioxide within 10 years of being in the atmosphere. So my guess is that's what happened to the Permian stuff.

In today's world, methane exists in a form (called clathrate, IIRC) where it is frozen solid with water. This occurs in the tundra and on the floor of deep oceans. There is concern that it could melt as the climate warms and contribute even more to atmospheric warming.

That's a good point.

I'd be interested in hearing your opinion. Leaving aside what you think will happen, what do you think should happen as regards restrictions on car usage--whether voluntary or mandated?

I (the OP) don't see it as a hijack. Environmental problems are clearly a result of car usage, and a major reason for both voluntary and mandated restrictions on car usage.

Rowan is having the same glitch but he has figured out a workaround.

Or not.

Those are possible reasons to restrict automobile use, thus, very appropriate to this thread.

What about imposed restrictions and regulations already in place - speed limits, emission standards, traffic lights, no U-turn signs, safety belts, licensing of drivers and vehicles, etc. - should we remove some or all of them?

Sure ... why not?

I seem to recall reading somewhere that an experiment was done where most of those rules were removed ... and people managed traffic situations better than when they had all those rules. Self-preservation kicked in.

You see it in places like Taiwan where it looks like the traffic is utter chaos, but there's actually a method to the madness.

There is already a bit of an overload of rules and regulations in today's society ... the nanny state situation. We don't really want more rules and regulations!

Yes, there are experiments in removing controls at some intersections and having people "negotiate" their way through. I'm not sure it would work at high speed highway interchanges - perhaps there we should retain some combination of traffic lights and cloverleafs. As well, multi-lane roads probably will still need defined lane striping, so you can pass traffic in the slower lane without worrying they will drift into your path. Mind you, they manage to use "virtual lanes" on motor race tracks, passing "high" and "low" etc. with hardly any fatal collisions, so maybe lane markings can be dispensed with too.

Or not.

The bottom line is that pretty well everybody is going to agree on some level of regulation or restriction of car use.

kinda works in big parking lots when they aren't to busy......folks don't always follow the pavement markings

Even there, if I cut across marked spots, I would still be expected to yield to people in the defined driving lanes.

You would probably feel differently if you were blind or handicapped. Busy streets are already very hard to cross when your sensory skills and mobility are limited in any way. Removing crosswalks and signals would make a bad situation much worse.

No serious people actually advocate removal of traffic controls on busy streets or high speed roads. Maybe you were referring to the concept of shared space, which has been tried on smaller roads that have a lot of pedestrian traffic.

Shared space - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia