Wait until you hear about public transit...
> Generally the problem with carpark solar is the mounting solutions are low volume niche products that cost way more than traditional ground mounts.
Not really. You don't need anything unusual, just regular flat panels. The main expense is building the canopy itself to conform to all the requirements for hurricane/seismic resistance.
Transit also destroys entire lifetimes worth of time every day by forcing people to wait or to suffer through inefficient routes.
That's why parking lots are the most beautiful structures in cities.
I made some calculations like a year ago using public data from Finland in the year 2023, the people lost collectively 55k years to driving cars. If we could take all that time back by doing minimum wage work in Finland, that'd add 4,841,511,500.55€ to the GDP and add approximately 164,006,202.08€ of taxable income to the state.
Of course that's just an approximation which presumes everyone could do their jobs while commuting and that you could get 100% efficiency. (But many of the values in the data were rounded down, so this is technically just a lower bound on the value ROI)
E: fixed mafs
Can I use the time in subway while commuting to work to get groceries or to get my child to a doctor's appointment?
> I made some calculations like a year ago using public data from Finland in the year 2023, the people lost collectively 55k years to driving cars.
Now do that with transit. Keep in mind, that transit is typically 2-3 times slower than cars in well-designed cities (i.e. not Manhattan-style hellscapes). It absolutely is true of Helsinki. Try dropping 100 random points on the city map and plot the routes between all of them, for both cars and transit. You'll find that cars are typically 3x faster.
Can you use the time in a car while commuting to work to do the same?
> Keep in mind, that transit is typically 2-3 times slower than cars in well-designed cities (i.e. not Manhattan-style hellscapes).
What makes a city "well-designed" in your eyes?
Yes. In a well-designed city, a car trip will give you more time to do that.
> What makes a city "well-designed" in your eyes?
Not large, at most 300000 population, and designed for the needs of people, not for bike-lanes. So wide roads, plenty of parking (including parking lots), low density, large houses providing plenty of space, etc.
Plus, parking is simultaneously way too cheap (~3 million free parking spaces on some of the most valuable real estate in the world) and way too expensive for most people (garages by me start at $350/mo). So in order to keep a car, I'd either need to waste thousands of dollars on a garage or hundreds of hours driving around trying to find free parking.
> And it's very often faster to get somewhere by subway than it is by car.
Well, yeah. NY is a hellscape of density.