68
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 30 Nov 2023
68 points (90.5% liked)
Technology
59366 readers
1277 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Projects that attempt to put things in the road tend to fail to be economical or practical. It's almost always better putting the same (or less) investment into something equivalent that sits next to the road rather than inside it.
The key features of roads that make them so economically successful are:
Installing anything in the road surface completely voids these two points.
Detailed problems:
The fundamental, core problem of all of these "put solar panels in roads" or "put chargers in roads" projects is that they are romantically and narratively attractive. Roads are ugly wasted space, but if we could put them to better use then wouldn't it be magic? Sadly this never works. Roads are ugly and wastes of space because nothing else works as well for transport infrastructure (other than railways).
Same reason “SOLAR FREAKIN ROADWAYS” never went anywhere.
I still see that one crop up every now and then and I’m amazed it’s still kicking.
I never got why people even had the idea for solar bike paths etc. We have literally millions of roofs that are still empty, where noone tramples on, that are angled so any snow and water will slide of easily...
Lets fill out those first and if will still have demand for more surfaces to install solar panels on, then we can think about putting them on the road... (it would still be stupid)
The best try I've seen was a bike path and iirc even that was a miserable failure. Making roads out of glass is stupid and doesn't work, who woulda thunk.
Probably a better approach is to use pantographs for trucks like on that stretch of road in Germany. And yeah, wireless charging would be cool, but it's probably better suited for parking spots/garages instead of moving targets.