Cartoon Tuesday: What a Green Parking Garage Looks Like

Detail from Lalo Alcaraz's La Cucaracha's Green Parking Garage
Detail from Lalo Alcaraz's La Cucaracha's Green Parking Garage

City Observatory has an excellent recent article pointing out the hypocrisy of LEED-certified green buildings that provide excessive multi-story structures for free parking.

But can a parking garage be truly green? Some parking lots, including one at the L.A. Zoo, do their part to cleanse rainwater, removing pollution that drips from the cars that park there. West Hollywood’s $18 million high tech robo-garage boasts a smaller footprint and less driving to search for a space, but each of its 200 spaces cost about $90,000.

If the goal is for parking structures to save the planet, though, there has to be another way.

L.A.-based cartoonist Lalo Alcaraz has found the solution. Check out his full La Cucaracha strip this week, excerpted above.

  • D G Spencer Ludgate

    There is a compromise solution…

    Require all surface parking lots to have solar canopies. Offer free or reduced rate charging for electric vehicles. This will have three benefits.

    1) Generates clean energy.
    2) With the sun’s energy being used to generate electricity, it reduces the heat island effect.
    3) Encourages electric vehicle usage.

    The requirement can be modified for multi-story garages. Solar canopy on the roof and panels on the south facing side.

  • Vooch

    our challenges are not technical, therefore technology will not provide solutions

    our challenges are design and urban planning. Therefore; ReDesign streets to encourage walking and cycling. Eliminate Urban Planning flaws such as zoning restrictions and allow residential, commercial, and retail mixed uses everywhere.

    the solutions are rather simple

  • D G Spencer Ludgate

    Your reply, relevant from a 30,000 foot perspective, is not relevant to this article. The cartoon depicts the artist’s idea of a “Green Garage”. I commented with my vision of a green garage.

  • Vooch

    true

  • Taurussf

    And lipstick on a pig turns it into….

    Electric cars are not the answer. Say this over and over, “most of the pollution caused by an automobile does not come from the tailpipe”.

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