New Bus stops, which turn into water retention collectors are being looked at as a way to mitigate the drought situations and help conserve water. With some many Western States at a complete drought crisis, we should be looking at ways to further conserve our water supplies. One concept being which came out of the World Think Tank was to have bus stops collect water on the roofs and within the frames of the booths.
The water will be collected in the roof, which would slightly expand on top to create more surface area for collection of rainwater. The roof will be a box shape with an “X” shaped box as the top of the bus stop and incorporated into the roof with holes in the center where the “X” comes together with a membrane in it to keep it clean from the bird droppings on the roof. The posts of the bus stop will also be part of the containers with a garden hose fixture on them, this will be used to water nearby plants and water shrubbery. The collected water will also used to power wash or steam clean the bus stops to keep them free of disease and clean for patrons to make people feel comfortable so they want to ride the bus and thus save natural resources.
We know that street-sweepers cleaning up paper, trash or debris, which can fill up near drains and cause flooding during rains require consistent street sweeping services. Street sweepers must fill up water to adequately do this effectively, this is a huge usage of water. Cities, which own these bus stops can use the free-water supplies collected during rains by the bus stop concept collection system to fill up street sweepers, thus meaning they do not need to hook up to fire hydrants along the route to fill them up, which promotes spillage and waste due to the cumbersome nature of that operation.
A very interesting concept along this line of thinking is a company promoting green roofs on buildings, upon contacting this company on another project we now see they have been thinking transportation issues, the more of us using buses the less emissions of hydrocarbons and thus cleaner environments. Here is the company’s information on the Green roof bus stop roof with shrubbery;
http://www.lid-stormwater.net/design_img/4…0bus%20stop.jpg
We believe that conservation is important to water supplies through out the world and by conserving water we can make it thru the drought until additional infrastructure can be built like desalination plants, pipelines, strategic canals, dams and other tools to keep up with our needs and thirst for water as our population and the populations of the world increase.
If you have innovative ideas on water conservation, dual use transportation ideas, bus stop designs or things of this nature please spread the word, we must conserve our fresh water supplies.
Lance Winslow – Online Think Tank forum board. If you have innovative thoughts and unique perspectives, come think with Lance; www.WorldThinkTank.net/wttbbs/