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I'm thinking about light colored roads that seem to be made of concrete. See them here and there. Seemed to be more of them when I was a kid. Wonder if that wo
by wishfish 1y ago
I'm thinking about light colored roads that seem to be made of concrete. See them here and there. Seemed to be more of them when I was a kid.
Wonder if that would make a substantial difference? Much brighter than asphalt but not bright enough to bother drivers.
- Llamamoe 1y agoI was thinking you could potentially engineer them to reflect IR light, but I feel like dust and dirt would probably quickly eat into the effectiveness. The question is whether it'd really make a difference on a global scale at all.
- thfuran 1y agoThere are materials that do what you're looking for surprisingly effectively, staying many degrees sub-ambient even in direct sunlight. (See https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/eom2.12284 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/eom2.12284 for example). But a roadway is a really difficult use case for a surface coating. With something like 50% of the surface area of many American cities being road or parking, there's a lot of potential room for effectively mitigating the urban heat island effect, but I think roofs are a better target. They don't have cars sitting on top of them blocking sightlines nearly as often.