Tuesday, February 8, 2011

What's Your Big Green Idea?

At the Sustainable Engineers Association Conference on Jan 15th, I challenged students to provide their big green ideas. What can the Provincial government be doing to be greener?Below are the responses. I've since put them on dotmocracy sheets and asked some of my colleagues if they agree. View the results of voting HERE.

  • Light rail in the median – should be more widespread (already beingplanned on Hwy 407); we should catch up; in between densely populated urban areas it would be a huge energy saver and also immune to congestion
  • Driver education interms of awareness of cyclists and how to treat them on the roads
  • Promotion of warm mix asphalt
  • Smaller buses onthe road, especially on lesspopulated routes and off-peak hours; smaller buses are more than enough for these applications and are more efficient
  • DVP bicycle tram (light rail) with major pick-up points (Salma Saad)
  • Major bike arteries, with private and tax deductible funding (Salma Saad)
  • Wider bicycle lanes on all major roads, like in Beijing, China
  • Single fare system between cities/regions. It is too expensive to commute downtown when you need to buy multiple passes (Radhika Sagar)
  • Piezoelectric type panels for electricity generation
  • Eliminate HOV lanes; they are not a way of saving the environment and a wasted lane when cars sit and idle
  • Increase cost of driving by charging road tolls; Implement a car tax a la Denmark
  • Solar cells on top of cars to power them or contribute to some of its power. In parking lots it can be plugged in to a system and the owner can get a cut of the electricity made off the parked car. Rest goes to owner of land. (Armin Hamta)
  • Wind generation along sides of busy highways; storing energy (heat) from busy highways that surrounding communities can tap in to.

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