Unless you're tailgating or hoping for a fly ball, it feels like Dante invented the parking lot. Right now they're hellish: hot, crowded, endless concrete, full of blazing metal vehicles and emissions. Several brave souls are taking on these nasty necessities, creating tech that makes them greener, more useful and easier to navigate.
Part of the pain is all that driving around looking for an elusive public parking spot that's really free and not a fakeout half space left by a double-parker. All those emissions, all that endless circling, only to result in standoff -- over what might be the only space left on Earth -- opposite a Hummer.
In an attempt to help drivers avoid this mess, Google Labs introduced a new Android phone application called Open Spot. Say you're leaving a parking space, take a moment to help fellow drivers find it by identifying it on a map with a dot. At five minutes, the dot is red, and eventually at 20 minutes it fades to yellow. Drivers in about a mile radius can get an alert about the free spot. As Jennifer Latkiewicz at geekGLOSS points out, it's not foolproof, but it's an optimistic start.
Meanwhile, a group of researchers at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands has been testing out "air-purifying concrete paving stones" made by the manufacturer Struyk Verwo Infra. The pavers contain titanium dioxide, which the researchers found removes nitrogen oxide from the air and converts it into nitrate, which gets washed away by rain. Testing showed that nitrogen oxide was 25 to 45 percent lower in a 1,000-square-meter section of these pavers compared with the same size area containing standard concrete. Apparently this stuff can be mixed with asphalt to improve its air-cleaning capabilities. Parking lots need as much air cleaning as possible.
One of the most promising strategies for turning parking hell into a more heavenly space comes from San Diego-based company Envision Solar. They want to transform lots and garages into solar groves, sun-collecting canopies (photo above). The arrays do double duty by shading cars and serving as charging stations for electric vehicles.
The company has already installed substantial arrays at the University of California San Diego, Kyocera Corporation's North American headquarters in San Diego, Dell's headquarters in Round Rock, Texas, as well as at the Johnson and Johnson subsidiary Centacor in Horsham, Pennsylvania. Currently they're working with Coulomb Technologies and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory to test a prototype for a small solar canopy that covers two parking spaces. These guys are onto something: the Dell array generates 131,000 kilowatt hours yearly.
Of course, no matter how much we green parking lots, there are still problematic factors beyond technology's reach. I recently moved to Boulder, Colorado, and the big news when I arrived was one peculiar parking lot. The police were called to a local grocery store because some guy dressed like a leprechaun was apparently jumping out from behind cars, making "obscene gestures." Oddly, the police didn't catch him. Maybe he detests parking lots as much as we all do.
Photo: A "solar grove" parking lot at Kyocera's North American headquarters in San Diego, California. Credit: Envision Solar.
Tags: Buildings and Structures, Cars, Electric Cars, Green Tech, Renewable Energy
comments ( )