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Solar Roads Will Solve All Our Problems … Maybe

It’s Infrastructure Week, here, and to me that usually means bad news. I was planning on telling you all the horrible things going on with our infrastructure.

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American


It's Infrastructure Week, here, and to me that usually means bad news. I was planning on telling you all the horrible things going on with our infrastructure. Like, the Highway Trust fund is running out of money because we refuse to raise taxes. Or like that lack of investment is causing things like our usual D grade in roads from the American Society of Civil Engineers, and the usual murmurings about possibly finding better ways to fund our transportation.

But you know what? That's all just too depressing. So here's one dude's idea for solving road problems, infrastructure problems, energy problems -- hell, just about all our problems -- in one go.

Welcome to Solar Roadways -- roads that not only hold up your cars but generate electricity and communicate with drivers and recharge electric cars and, I suppose, play quarterback for the Cleveland Browns all at once.


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There's a lot of cool stuff here, and the Federal Highway Agency has funded this pie-in-the-sky-sounding thingy to a degree. So we can hope. I kinda stick with this guy, who is somewhat skeptical until we see how glass roadways hold up under about two skillion overloaded semis pounding over them for a few years. But like everyone else, I'm anxious to be proved wrong.

Anyhow, it's fun to think about. And it's nice to have something to take our mind off the fact that we no long pay enough taxes to keep up our roads and we don't look likely to do anything about that.

Happy Infrastructure Week!

 

 

Scott Huler was born in 1959 in Cleveland and raised in that city's eastern suburbs. He graduated from Washington University in 1981; he was made a member of Phi Beta Kappa because of the breadth of his studies, and that breadth has been a signature of his writing work. He has written on everything from the death penalty to bikini waxing, from NASCAR racing to the stealth bomber, for such newspapers as the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Los Angeles Times and such magazines as ESPN, Backpacker, and Fortune. His award-winning radio work has been heard on "All Things Considered" and "Day to Day" on National Public Radio and on "Marketplace" and "Splendid Table" on American Public Media. He has been a staff writer for the Philadelphia Daily News and the Raleigh News & Observer and a staff reporter and producer for Nashville Public Radio. He was the founding and managing editor of the Nashville City Paper. He has taught at such colleges as Berry College and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

His books include Defining the Wind, about the Beaufort Scale of wind force, and No-Man's Lands, about retracing the journey of Odysseus.

His most recent book, On the Grid, was his sixth. His work has been included in such compilations as Appalachian Adventure and in such anthologies as Literary Trails of the North Carolina Piedmont, The Appalachian Trail Reader and Speed: Stories of Survival from Behind the Wheel.

For 2014-2015 Scott is a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT, which is funding his work on the Lawson Trek, an effort to retrace the journey of explorer John Lawson through the Carolinas in 1700-1701.

He lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, with his wife, the writer June Spence, and their two sons.

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