“[Higgins] said that if there were a child who’d learned in school that you should shut your car off, those children would be sitting in the back seat telling their parents: You should shut the car off!”

That’s an enormous “if”, Marcia. Aside from school dropoffs, I’d venture that the percentage of overall passenger vehicle trips that include a child of school age is in the single digits. Also, what’s the deal with the propensity of adults to shift responsibility for their behavior to children?

“[Heiftje] described education as a wiser course than talking about enforcement.”

Maybe Lumm, Higgins, and Heiftje should run for school board if they’re more interested in education than the necessary and appropriate role of government to regulate behaviors that impact the commons. And way to try to limit the scope prior to a public hearing, folks!

Granted, education is also a necessary and useful approach. However, as Naud’s and Teall’s examples demonstrate, education alone–especially in a world of information bombardment–tends to fall short.

The question arises, are the reluctant council members sincerely open to an enforceable ordinance or are they hoping either that a funded education program would put an end to consideration of it, or that a failure to get funding could be used as a rationale for dropping it altogether?

In Donella Meadows’ book, Thinking in Systems: A Primer, which I mentioned in another thread, she describes a third approach to addressing the so-called tragedy of the commons: privatization of the commons (p. 119.) In this case, that would entail directing the tailpipe exhaust into the cab of the vehicle. Gotta say that there’s a certain sense of poetic justice to that image.

I’ll have more to say on the likely effectiveness of the proposed ordinance later.

I think the intended meaning is “everyone.”