That only depends on the grass you use.
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At first I was amazed at how quiet this drone is. You can hear birds and the workers without any hint of drone noise. Amazing! What noise-canceling space-age rotor design magic is this?!
And then I realized that the audio was coming from the pilot on the ground.
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Grass uses A LOT of water.
Good point. Water is a finite resource, it doesn’t exactly fall from the sky!!
Once we use up all of the water, it will be gone forever.
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Often it doesn’t fall where and when you would like it to fall.
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I wonder if keeping the temperature lower will also increase the lifetime of the pavement because high temperatures tend to soften asphalt?
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I doesn’t fall from the sky in Los Angeles between July and December. And over the past 7 or so years, it hasn’t been falling from the sky much at all. Grass lawns in LA are pretty irresponsible.
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If only there was a source of water nearby? I guess being landlocked is kind of a bummer
You know the ocean has lots of salt in it, right?
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You know there are salt-tolerant turfgrasses right?
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As the article says:
The substitution of more ■■■■■ and permeable environments for drier and less permeable environments causes dense urban regions to become much warmer than the surrounding areas.
Grass is darker, so it absorbs more light than the native desert.
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Maybe only use it on North/South streets?
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Why not make the roads out of concrete? Lighter colour than tarmac, expensive, as is the sealant, but concrete roads last for decades… since this is LA, you don’t even need to consider winter conditions (heaving, salt-free deicing) as a cost factor.
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And I wonder how much the reflection might add to light pollution at night. I wonder if they’ll discover a need to dim the street lights, maybe, and provide nearby residents with light-blocking drapery for their bedroom windows?
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Some of the freeways are of a medium grey concrete, but I hate them because they have small little lines in the surface that makes the car vibrate with a distracting frequency (as in sound).
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The only thing I’ve ever mocked Al Gore for was not debating Ralph Nader.
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It’ll help eliminate jaywalking, too!
(by cooking the jaywalkers)
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White tires to the rescue. However, I agree. It’ll look unsightly PDQ and its efficiency will drop right off after day one. But it should be good for the paint manufacturer.
Here come those Santa Anna winds again…
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Not if you use the right grass.
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The White Roof Project is still around.
http://www.whiteroofproject.org/
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It’s not just the colour that matters. Vegetation provides additional cooling by transpiration of water through the leaf surface - a garden or green roof is basically a giant swamp cooler.
Also, a green roof provides numerous other benefits beyond cooling, from adding habitat for urban wildlife, to reducing the amount of runoff that the storm drain system needs to handle, to insulating the roof in cold weather.
But in desert regions like LA, even if you planted it with desert plants, you’d still need to water a green roof at least a little, so the cost benefit calculation is different there than in wetter climates.
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