Pretty much. Pipe dream.

Those LEDs are what would allow this to be used as an advertising medium, which is probably a bigger selling point than the actual solar collecting potential (to the sources of funding, at any rate).


Asphalt won't be cheaper than this for that much longer.

That said, probably not going to work BUT it's a good idea tat could turn in to something that DOES work.

Um, simple furnace energy is a huge component of LED and glass manufacturing costs. As asphalt (or natural gas, or coal) becomes scarcer, the costs of these panels will rise accordingly.

Oh, also there's 7 gallons of crude (and not pixie dust) in every tire.

Quite a few experts on efficient transport agree that the future is electric rail. The paved road network may very well have peaked (gravel is cheaper for rural counties to maintain), and to the extent these novelty panels aren't a tax-writeoff, they'll be used for advertising novelties around public transport terminals and shopping malls.

I just want lines on the road that light up so when it rains at night on asphalt less than ten years old, you can flipping see how to not die.

That and who here voluntarily rides the bus instead of drive a car they could easily afford? Who will give up their car for public transport when the bus becomes an electric train full of the same people you avoid the bus over? I guess when car taxes are ,000 a year.

To memedumpster: I suspect the aversion to public transport will disappear fairly quickly when gas lines take hours. Which happened in '73, in '79, and through much of the southeast in Sept 2008. It could happen tomorrow in the US if everyone simply filled their tanks - there's less working storage of gasoline in the distribution system than unused tank capacity in registered vehicles.

At the moment, I'm temporarily living in an unwalkable lily-white suburb 4 miles from the nearest bus line. This neighborhood is screwed.

memedumpster: I have a car that I can easily afford, but I take mass transit to work. It's a lot less stressful, despite taking about 4x as long for my commute.

I gave up cars after working in auto insurance after college. I had a car that essentially rotted in my driveway, so I sold it. Being close to trains is part of my life and I like it that way. I get to read or nap to and from work. If I really needed a car either for a road trip or to move shit, I rent one. The only problem with pub transit I have is the occasional piece of shit ghetto kid or redneck or fratboy causing me some aggravation, but that seems less of an issue than being one of the 34,000 dead and 1.5 million injured annually that our selfish obsession with driving creates.

They're engineers, so hopefully those are the sort of questions that they're interested in answering. Ideas by themselves are practically worthless. Not that I think his vision of a sprawling solar utopia is coming to pass... it's too bad that the video focused on the lights instead of the engineering challenges.

Why do we even give a shit about LED's embedded in the roadways? This guy is talking about solving serious problems, then he invests time, money, and effort into a solution to a non-existent problem, in the form of a pressure sensitive plate that tells drivers to slow down if people are crossing.