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Comment by watersb | Hacker News Reader

In Phoenix, Arizona, there are solar panels over the parking lots at since of the grocery stores. Makes a huge difference in survivability when you get back to the car.

(Without huge infrastructure dedicated to car welfare, Phoenix is uninhabitable.)

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Phoenix is uninhabitable precisely because it's entirely optimized for car life from what I heard? (i.e. massively spread out, no walkability, etc)

I suspect they were mostly referring to it being uninhabitable due to the extreme heat and duration of 100ºF+ days.

A dry 100F is fine weather. I’ll take that over a midwestern winter any day.

100F days are fine, cakewalks, even, especially with misters + shade. We had 70+ days of 110°F two years ago, and over 20 days 115°F+. They are not the same. Those days are unbearable nightmare fuel, and worse, they turn into insanely miserable nights where the low temperature rarely dips below 95°. It is absolutely awful, dry or not.

It's car optimized because the 110F weather makes it un-walkable in the first place. When I lived in a walkable city, I would prefer to walk 30 minutes than drive. When I lived in Phoenix, I did not want to spend more than 30 seconds outside in the summer.

how's the tree situation though? 110F + lots of huge trees = a lot more tolerable. trees cool shit down big time.

It's a desert so trees can't survive without irrigation. Since water is scarce as well, there aren't enough trees to cover the vast low density area.

You can always start small and over decades grow the area. After all that is how cities like Copenhagen and Amsterdam became bike friendly, not just a few years, but decades of work.

What about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dracaena_cinnabari or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilopsis?

As a fellow European: we're prone to underestimating how uninhabitable bits of America are that nonetheless have people living in them. Those are port cities and therefore stable and temperate. You cannot green Arizona.

Just FYI there's a lot of ways to re-green a desert without actually being wasteful with water. There's some really impressive case studies out there. Shaping the land with berms and swales, building walls of trees to prevent water from being leached away by the wind, etc.

Phoenix as well as other similar places (such as Las Vegas where I live part of the year) have an outsized benefit from installing solar compared to normal places. We basically never have to deal with rain or clouds. Installing solar here is a total no-brainer.

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