First mile of paved road-How about we have the first mile of this-Solar Road!

[ghettopalmetto]

You never bothered to watch the video have you? Can you stick to the topic of the solar road?

The "solar" road is no solution to anything. Build the roads out of chocolate, or sheets of LSD, or rock salt. I don't care. It doesn't fix a damned thing.

The problem of oil dependency isn't that cars run on gasoline, or that asphalt is made from petroleum, it's that we have to drive for every fucking thing.

[Richard]

Its kind of like the space program,not very cost affective to run but the technology that is passed on through the research and passed onto the consumer for everyday life ,well you cannot even began to put a price tag on.

Interesting that the Chinese now produce the cheapest solar on the market,but what is even more interesting is the technology was produced here first.

Not to deviate from the OP but this is interesting reading .
http://www.en.iwm.fraunhofer.de/pres...details/id/27/

[DetroitPlanner]

The "solar" road is no solution to anything. Build the roads out of chocolate, or sheets of LSD, or rock salt. I don't care. It doesn't fix a damned thing.

The problem of oil dependency isn't that cars run on gasoline, or that asphalt is made from petroleum, it's that we have to drive for every fucking thing.

You don't get it do you? Roads are needed for buses, bikes, walkers. We had roads before cars and we will need them after cars. We will need to pay for their maintenance. We will need to pay for any public transit or other improvements. The gas tax is a carbon tax where some of the dollars are used to fund public transportation. We have madated higher fuel economy cars which will allow people to sprawl out even further and have the effect of reducing the dollars going into the trust fund. Alternatives are needed to fund roadways and transit or the cost of transit will soon be $10 a trip and the roads will turn to crap. Niether of these options will get people to jobs or goods to market.

You continue to pontificate and question me without looking at the video or checking out any of the other sources I have posted. Here is another one for you not to read from the Wall Street Journal

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123611793346923071.html

You can continue to rip on me all you want but planners have to work within the confines of policy and economic reality. The reality is that without you or others contacting your representatives to support reasonable policy there is only so much we can do other than try to educate the voters.

[ghettopalmetto]

You don't get it do you? Roads are needed for buses, bikes, walkers. We had roads before cars and we will need them after cars. We will need to pay for their maintenance. We will need to pay for any public transit or other improvements. The gas tax is a carbon tax where some of the dollars are used to fund public transportation. We have madated higher fuel economy cars which will allow people to sprawl out even further and have the effect of reducing the dollars going into the trust fund. Alternatives are needed to fund roadways and transit or the cost of transit will soon be $10 a trip and the roads will turn to crap. Niether of these options will get people to jobs or goods to market.


You continue to pontificate and question me without looking at the video or checking out any of the other sources I have posted. Here is another one for you not to read from the Wall Street Journal

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123611793346923071.html

Nobody is proposing to obliterate roads. But you pretend we can continue to build 12-lane monstrosities into cornfields [[and then be surprised when they get clogged with traffic from new subdivisions and office parks). And somehow, these pixie-dust coated solar panels are supposed to fix everything. The problem isn't petroleum dependency, good sir. The problem is an AUTOMOBILE dependency. But you can't get that through your skull because you just know EVERYTHING about place-making. Everything, that is, in the plug-and-chug post-World War II era.

This solar road bullshit is a solution looking for a problem. Sure, it's cool to look at, but you're INSANE if you think we're going to install those panels over every existing paved lane-mile. No one here has even asked the big question, which is COST. For all you know, these panels cost $10,000/sf. [[and I wonder how robust they perform when subjected to freeze-thaw cycles).

Never mind that we're not even close to solving the problem of automobile-dependency, so factor in more magical solar panels for a few bazillion more beige plastic subdivisions and Soviet office parks. Then we can just all sell our homes and move into our cars permanently! YAY!

[DetroitPlanner]

GP if you don't like solar roads, what is your solution for generating energy and funding transportation?

[ghettopalmetto]

GP if you don't like solar roads, what is your solution for generating energy and funding transportation?

1. More trains, which can be powered by electricity. This includes streetcars in cities and towns.

2. Creating places where we can FUCKING WALK to things without getting plowed by a car travelling at 50 mph.

[DetroitPlanner]

1. More trains, which can be powered by electricity. This includes streetcars in cities and towns.

2. Creating places where we can FUCKING WALK to things without getting plowed by a car travelling at 50 mph.

How do you generate the energy to run the trains and how do you propose to pay for them without a gas tax?

[ghettopalmetto]

How do you generate the energy to run the trains and how do you propose to pay for them without a gas tax?

As I'm sure you're well aware, electricity can be generated through numerous means, including hydroelectric power, nuclear power, and coal. This technology already exists, and already powers trains worldwide, including some in the United States. No reinventing the wheel necessary. Even better, if we can retrofit our existing shitscape to become negotiable by pedestrians and bicycles, we wouldn't have to worry about producing energy for completing most of our day-to-day tasks.

You might also be flabbergasted to know that gasoline taxes aren't required to fund trains. You could use whatever mechanism you like. Nothing requires trains to be funded by gas taxes [[Amtrak sure as hell isn't!).

But of course, you'll continue to insist that you don't exist in a 1950s idealized automobile-dependent world.... What a joke. All you know is roads, cars, and oil.

[DetroitPlanner]

As I'm sure you're well aware, electricity can be generated through numerous means, including hydroelectric power, nuclear power, and coal. This technology already exists, and already powers trains worldwide, including some in the United States. No reinventing the wheel necessary. Even better, if we can retrofit our existing shitscape to become negotiable by pedestrians and bicycles, we wouldn't have to worry about producing energy for completing most of our day-to-day tasks.

You might also be flabbergasted to know that gasoline taxes aren't required to fund trains. You could use whatever mechanism you like. Nothing requires trains to be funded by gas taxes [[Amtrak sure as hell isn't!).

But of course, you'll continue to insist that you don't exist in a 1950s idealized automobile-dependent world.... What a joke. All you know is roads, cars, and oil.

Yep I'm the idiot living in the past, you showed me good! [[God help us all)

I guess I need to start fighting public transit agencies, the biking community, and stop being for quality of life issues! Lets burn coal, gas and nukes instead of using clean sustainable power to fund transportation needs. You have made me see the light, I guess being for the economy makes me a socialist!

[Detroitnerd]

Land uses in most places, I'm sure you know, presume two goals:

1. That everyone will be transported by personal automobile, and
2. The primary objective is to move as many cars as quickly as possible.

This is the antithesis of the city. I cannot believe there are so-called "city planners" who advocate this as the solution to our problems. More cars, more movement, more travel, more hours spent in traffic, enable by more technology.

It amply illustrates why our city center is failing: People have forgotten why we have cities in the first place. They obviate the need for all this frantic travel. They allow a person to walk to work, to walk to the pub, to walk to the store, to walk home, to walk for pleasure. No high-tech fix is going to undo this essential truth.

[ghettopalmetto]

This is the antithesis of the city. I cannot believe there are so-called "city planners" who advocate this as the solution to our problems. More cars, more movement, more travel, more hours spent in traffic, enable by more technology.

It amply illustrates why our city center is failing: People have forgotten why we have cities in the first place. They obviate the need for all this frantic travel. They allow a person to walk to work, to walk to the pub, to walk to the store, to walk home, to walk for pleasure. No high-tech fix is going to undo this essential truth.

And that is the next crisis to which we're steering our society. Look at all of this "sustainability" crap that we're funding through research: hybrid vehicles, electric vehicles, fuel cells, solar roads.... They all operate under the base assumption that we must continue driving for every task.

My solution is infinitely cheaper. Build sidewalks. Ban six-lane divided highway collector roads. Introduce transportation redundancy, instead of focusing on peak-hour throughput. Ban cul-de-sacs. Legalize mixed-use town/village/neighborhood centers [[vis-a-vis the plastic chain-store shopping malls designed to MIMIC town centers). Designate bicycle lanes. Rehabilitate rail lines. Putting these low-cost solutions into effect can not only accommodate greater numbers of people, but will also cost less than expanding and maintaining our roadway network and parkingplexes.

We already have this technology, and in the other 90% of the civilized world, it works. Our projected population growth isn't going to allow us to have an automotive appendage affixed to our bodies, because if current traffic congestion is any indication, we're already running out of physical space to do so. "Sustainability" doesn't mean jack shit if you have to schedule your bread-and-milk run for 6:00 on a Sunday morning.

[Detroitnerd]

Free the car to do what it's best at: Point-to-point travel for shared vehicles [[taxis), emergency vehicles [[police, fire, EMS), and delivery and work vehicles [[smaller, smarter). Offer so many options in the city that the private vehicle owner will use his car for what Ford originally intended: Driving out into nature.

[Fnemecek]

Wow! I never thought something as simple as solar panels in a roadway could prompt such a flame war. Okay - as someone who was looking into this long before this thread got started - I feel a need to beg folks to pause and take a breather.

Here are a few points.

#1. The Solar Roadway has been around since 2008, when it grew out of a US DOT project.

#2. Prototypes have been built and tested. It's also been done on a small scale in parking lots. The technology that this is based on has been done to death for almost half a century. This is simply a matter of taking that technology and using it in a different manner.

#3. The major barrier to a Solar Roadway is its upfront cost. However, with the electricity that is generated, it will pay for itself over the course of its lifespan.

#4. Conventional asphalt or concrete roads, however, do not pay for themselves.

#5. Did I mention that Solar Roadways pay for themselves but conventional road don't?

#6. Because a Solar Roadway pays for itself, and a conventional road doesn't, the roadway vs. mass transit debate is a moot issue, in my opinion. A significant portion of our infrastructure budget goes toward maintaining conventional roads. If we replace them with roads that pay for themselves, we eventually free up cash for other things - like improved mass transit.

[Detroitnerd]

I see what's going on.

You can take time-honored design principles, that cities should be densely settled, encourage people to walk, have excellent services and appealing human scale. And nobody will do anything about it because "we like our cars."

You can take any old technology that has worked for more than 100 years moving thousands of persons per hour through dense urban environments -- trains, light rail, trams, trolleys, cable cars, subways -- and it's a boondoggle. Too costly, unproven, people won't ride them.

But as soon as you link some brand-new, unproven, just-thunk-it-up idea and link it to CARS, why, everybody will LOVE this new thing, tinker with it, imagine it as a vital and necessary way to solve the problems of maintaining all this roadway [[which is not needed if we honored cities and built dense) and allow us to drive all these CARS [[which destroy cities and density.)

How about this: Not one thin dime of my tax money for this idea. Until we have light rail on all main thoroughfares, we shouldn't even consider building one friggin' INCH of "solar roadway." Jesus-fuck, no.

[ghettopalmetto]

Wintertime. Frost-heave beneath the road thrusts the concrete slab roadbed upward. Solar panel driving surface moves upward with it. How many tires get blown out driving over the edge of the panel at 75 mph? How many rims get bent to shit? How *does* one fix a pothole in a solar roadway, anyway? And how does the coefficient of thermal expansion compare to that of concrete, which will certainly need to be constructed as a structural sub-base?

If the solar roadway pays for itself by producing electricity, how much money do we spend on wasted electrical production capacity? How much do we spend bulldozing our existing power infrastructure? How much do we spend to pave a mile of road with these solar panels, and how long before we recoup our investment?

Again--this is a solution looking for a problem. This solar roadway business is a complete and utter gamble that doesn't fix anything that isn't already addressed by making better, smarter, more affordable choices. What's next? Prescribing cocaine for chronically depressed people?

[Fnemecek]

Wow! I actually need a moment to regroup from the collective stupidity of you two.

[ghettopalmetto]

Wow! I actually need a moment to regroup from the collective stupidity of you two.

Show me where anything I've written is factually incorrect.

And since you're the expert on all things solar roadway, including your claim that "they pay for themselves", sure you have numbers that demonstrate this.

How is sitting in 12 lanes of gridlock in this mess any improvement over asphalt? Oh wait--it's SOLAR-POWERED!!! That's why!

Any asinine excuse to not have the four-wheeled appendage surgically-removed from your ass.... How WILL we ever function if we have to use our own two feet? The irony is, Frank, YOU OF ALL PEOPLE KNOW HOW MUCH MONEY AND LAND DETROIT SPENDS ON PARKING LOTS AND GARAGES. Yet you see no need to reduce or eliminate such a ridiculous expense. You'd rather run childishly to an unproven, impractical technology that solves no practical problem.

How many Madison-Lenoxes get demolished for solar-powered [[and landscaped and lighted!) parking lots, Frank? How many Book-Cadillacs are restored because they don't have to come up with an extra $20 million for solar-powered parking garages, Frank? How many buildings will be demolished for widening the solar-powered main road to 10 lanes, Frank?

[Fnemecek]

I see what's going on.

You can take time-honored design principles, that cities should be densely settled, encourage people to walk, have excellent services and appealing human scale. And nobody will do anything about it because "we like our cars."

You can take any old technology that has worked for more than 100 years moving thousands of persons per hour through dense urban environments -- trains, light rail, trams, trolleys, cable cars, subways -- and it's a boondoggle. Too costly, unproven, people won't ride them.

But as soon as you link some brand-new, unproven, just-thunk-it-up idea and link it to CARS, why, everybody will LOVE this new thing, tinker with it, imagine it as a vital and necessary way to solve the problems of maintaining all this roadway [[which is not needed if we honored cities and built dense) and allow us to drive all these CARS [[which destroy cities and density.)

How about this: Not one thin dime of my tax money for this idea. Until we have light rail on all main thoroughfares, we shouldn't even consider building one friggin' INCH of "solar roadway." Jesus-fuck, no.

#1. I think your general frustration over a lack of progress in mass transit in Detroit is effecting you. Seriously. Log off. Take a walk. Do whatever to clear your head and come back.

#2. Even in the densest of cities, there have always been a need for roads. Those roads have always required maintainance. We either continue to pay those costs or we can employ technologies that solve the problem.

[Detroitnerd]

Wow! I actually need a moment to regroup from the collective stupidity of you two.

Oh, yeah. I'm sure all these solar roads will produce electricity that's "too cheap to meter."

Let me just add:

If photovoltaic surfaces need sunlight to produce power, why do we want to build them on the bottom of everything? I can understand building panels on top of buildings. I can even understand building panels on the south side of a building that's exposed to light. But, um, aren't roads kind of on the bottom of everything? Sunken down into depressed freeways? Along dense thoroughfares where no light falls for hours a day? Sometimes covered with traffic, sometimes with snow?

In other words, if you wanted to install photovoltaics, would you want them up in the air with plenty of light, where you can have access to them when they need maintenance or upgrades?

Or, put it another way, is there a stupider place to put solar cells than in the middle of the fucking road?

[ghettopalmetto]

#2. Even in the densest of cities, there have always been a need for roads. Those roads have always required maintainance. We either continue to pay those costs or we can employ technologies that solve the problem.

We'd have money to maintain STREETS if we weren't busy spending it all constructing bypasses, connectors, beltways, flyovers, "express" lanes and all manner of automotive sewer out to every half-assed cardboard-and-plastic subdivision and Soviet office park.

[ghettopalmetto]

Or, put it another way, is there a stupider place to put solar cells than in the middle of the fucking road?

"Gee, these solar panels were a great idea until the snow plow done gone and busted 'em all up!"

Of course, all the brilliant materials scientists are forgetting the principle of DUCTILITY that these solar panels just do not have. Without ductility, you have stresses induced by horizontal movement of the concrete structure below, caused by natural temperature fluctuations. You can't make a spot repair to a solar panel if it gets busted--you have to replace the whole damned thing. And of course, any old $10/hr employee can do that work, yes?

[Fnemecek]

Wintertime. Frost-heave beneath the road thrusts the concrete slab roadbed upward. Solar panel driving surface moves upward with it. How many tires get blown out driving over the edge of the panel at 75 mph? How many rims get bent to shit? How *does* one fix a pothole in a solar roadway, anyway? And how does the coefficient of thermal expansion compare to that of concrete, which will certainly need to be constructed as a structural sub-base.

#1. Nothing "rises upward" in a Solar Roadway, regardless of the season.

#2. The edge of a Solar Roadway isn't any sharper or more severe than the seams that are already present in a concrete road.

#3. Potholes don't form in a Solar Roadway.

If the solar roadway pays for itself by producing electricity, how much money do we spend on wasted electrical production capacity? How much do we spend bulldozing our existing power infrastructure? How much do we spend to pave a mile of road with these solar panels, and how long before we recoup our investment?

Our current electrical production capacity has to be replaced periodically, just like our roads do. If we phase in Solar Roadways, we can phase out the current capacity as part of its natural attrition.

[Detroitnerd]

#1. I think your general frustration over a lack of progress in mass transit in Detroit is effecting you. Seriously. Log off. Take a walk. Do whatever to clear your head and come back.

An emotional reaction to something stupid may be a sign of fatigue. But when you have a problem and, year after year, week after week, day after day, people float unsuitable, untested, unworkable plans that allow us to KEEP DOING STUPID STUFF, an emotional reaction may be suitable. Why don't you clear your head, look into why other cities in the world are LIGHT YEARS ahead of Detroit, and stop giving this twaddle any serious credence. We don't even have bike paths yet, let alone light rail.

#2. Even in the densest of cities, there have always been a need for roads. Those roads have always required maintainance. We either continue to pay those costs or we can employ technologies that solve the problem.

So, we're going to solve the problem of road maintenance by putting maintenance-heavy panels right down the middle of the road where 100,000-pound trucks drive over them every day, crushing them under snow and salt and gravel?

Um ... who needs to go clear his head here?

[Hypestyles]

I support having solar panels on the light rail cars and at the rail stops and maintenance stations.. whatever power it would generate, should be welcomed; off-set costs at least somewhat..

[Fnemecek]

Oh, yeah. I'm sure all these solar roads will produce electricity that's "too cheap to meter."

Umm... Did I say that? Did I say anything even remotely like that?

If photovoltaic surfaces need sunlight to produce power, why do we want to build them on the bottom of everything? I can understand building panels on top of buildings. I can even understand building panels on the south side of a building that's exposed to light. But, um, aren't roads kind of on the bottom of everything? Sunken down into depressed freeways? Along dense thoroughfares where no light falls for hours a day? Sometimes covered with traffic, sometimes with snow?

Snow is dealt with by a heating element that is embedded into the Solar Roadway. Snow gets melted away and is drained just like rain does.

As for the other variables that you mentioned, not every road and/or parking is a good candidate for conversion to a Solar Roadway. However, there are lots of them were it does work.

For every place where it works, it means more green energy and less resources needed for road maintainance.