Tiz would be cool. A real market solution to fossil fuel reliance and pollution creating greenhouse gases.

I still say, the only real solution to that whole dilemma is for the market to provide something else.
No Government regulation is going to end our reliance on fossil fuels that we currently have within the next 50 years, but the market can end it.

One can quote me on that.

Adron said:
I still say, the only real solution to that whole dilemma is for the market to provide something else.

Are you aware of the history of GM's EV-1 electric car? They only ever brought it to market because the state of California mandated zero-emission vehichles. The EV-1 was immensely popular and successful, but GM threw more effort into electing their own representatives to California's government and scuttling the regulation than they ever did to advertising and promoting the car. Eventually, GM had to pry all of the existing electric cars out of their sobbing owners' hands so they could crush the entire fleet of them and declare electric cars a "market failure." You can wonder why GM hated their own product so much, of course, but it's clear that without government prodding them, they wouldn't move forward. At the very least, it seems clear that a "free market" for automobiles simply doesn't exist in the world of the Big Three.

Markets aren't as wise as economists say they are. Markets are blind to long-term costs and all those truths that can't be expressed in price. Government, at its best, can provide that leadership.

For some reason, this brings to mind this article in the NY Times about robotic parking garages.

I particularly like the Pez Dispenser for Carsharing Vehicles concept. I wonder if it could be made to work with electric vehicles that need to be plugged in, too? Seems like a pretty simple engineering challenge to me.

I'd like to see some of these automated parking garages become the preferred solution in, say, NW Portland, Hawthorne and downtown Portland, to accompany the streetcar line and the MAX line. Combined with some way of distributing information on how many spaces were available in each garage, it could be very effective for the park, ride & spend crowd...