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Comment by local_crmdgeon | Hacker News Reader

That's not a great example - surface parking lots and their runoff are fucking horrible for the environment

So, it's probably a good example then, since we currently accept the building of parking lots.

The point is, people are always writing letters to the editor and what-not when some green tech has some environmental impact, far more than they do over their city making another parking lot or any of a million other things. I assume it's because it triggers some notion of hypocrisy. c.f. wind turbines and dead birds.

How about we put our energy into fighting cars and parking lots first, before we worry about solar-powered desalination that could potentially save the Western states from the over-extraction of water that's turning them into dust bowls?

It's a good example then. Given that a Walmart parking lot is societally acceptable, fresh clean drinking water probably will be too.

Carbon-based energy is socially acceptable, as are completely unsecured computing devices and mass corporate surveillance, but that isn't the standard of a good idea. If it was, we wouldn't want a forum like HN.

I'm not going to lose any sleep over that. Permeable concrete exists, but it's just not worth the maintenance cost in most places

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pervious_concrete

That's pretty cool. Personally, I'd prefer small roads and outdoor parking lots to be au naturel unpaved. Zero construction cost, and I imagine the maintenance cost is just trimming grass.

Only works if the natural soil is remarkably solid or the traffic negligible. Unpaved roads with more than very modest traffic generally need routine grading (repairing corrugations by scraping it over with a levelling blade) and re-graveling

Accurate. And, if there is significant rain and/or snowmelt, roads can quickly become impassable (see: "mud season" in New England, and surely many other places)

Won't they become unusable when it rains?

"Fucking horrible" is unquantifiable. Policy decisions need to be based on figures.

Unfortunately, in reality many policy decisions are based on enough many people thinking X is "fucking horrible".

On a tangential note, I don't why paved outdoor parking lots are built[1]. It seems to be an entirely pointless exercise in aesthetics to me. I've parked on unpaved spots (in large parks near hiking trails, etc), and never had an issue.

We really should have more unpaved outdoor that is simply trimmed semi-regularly if or when the plant growth gets too big.

[1] Unless you're in a sandy or snowy area, where shoveling the sand or snow is difficult on an unpaved surface.

Unpaved parking lots tend to lose their plant growth when frequently used, after which the parking lot turns to mud in wet weather, which then results in stuck cars and dirt getting into stores with the customers that walked through that mud.

Pure soil wouldn't be a good option. Anything that's subject to high traffic, whether foot or vehicular, will also be subject to soil compaction which implies water pooling. That's a long way of saying those parking lots will turn into mud lots. At a minimum you could grade and gravel them, going the extra mile to crush the gravel so it stays in place longer. I do this with the driveway at my house because it rains a lot where I live. Paving would arguably last a lot longer and probably be more bang for my buck, but not having a place for water to go and having a basement is not a good combination.

On my driveway we only tend to get clovers and really resilient weeds. So, either really shallow rooted plants or weeds with absurdly strong roots. You're not likely to get native plans to grow unless you section off parts of the area for maintaining living soil.

To give a visceral example- There's an episode of Clarkson's Farm where the customers that parked in the grass at his farm shop need to get their cars pulled out of the mud by a tractor.

What's the problem with parking lots?

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