Landscaping - Root removal without damaging tree

I recently bought a house with two large, coniferous trees in the backyard. One of them has a root that protrudes above the ground right at the edge of the driveway. We have only lived there a week and it has already damaged the car tires. It looks like we will need to remove the root, but I would hate to cut down the tree so I was hoping for some advice on how to remove the root while minimizing damage to the tree. I would also appreciate any advice on preventing infection at the wounded site.

The protruding portion is about a foot in length and I believe the height is about 3 inches.

The tree is far enough from the house that I am not too concerned about damage to the foundation. We have also considered raising the driveway so the root no longer protrudes but a portion of our driveway is “shared” with the neighbour (we each have a right of way).

I will be grateful for any advice!

I am not sure you can cut a root that large and presumably close to the tree without causing it harm. Could you possibly build some kind of a ramp around/over it instead that would look okay but still allow you move your cars around that part of the drive?

Thanks for the reply. Any suggestions of how I could do that? I tried to come up with something like that and gave up, I can't think of anything that would work. If we could we would just park more to the left but with the right of way we are required to park at least 2.5 feet from the property line, putting our tires against the roots.

Tomorrow I will take a picture and try to figure out how to post it on here.

Thanks again!

Rather than post it directly to the website you can use a hosting site such as imageshack. You upload to them and they have easy cut&paste links you can use after uploading. Its far easier and less frustrating.

I wish I had some good ideas for you, but I only had the idea but no real idea on how to execute it. The problem would be making it look good. A picture of what to work with will be a big help.

Do you know what the species is? Some evergreens can handle root reduction better than others.