Bus Roof Garden

I wonder how much extra gas those buses will burn to carry around the extra weight. Enough to negate the purpose?

Yeah... nothing like putting a thousand pounds of weight high above the center of gravity on a vehicle.... NOT SMART....

Lug around extra weight to look green, ya thats about right

If you tried to grow a garden on top of every MTA bus, you would soon have a fleet of ruined buses.

Plants need water to grow, and send roots down into the soil. Flat roof + water + plant growth + extra weight = structural failure.

whilst lightweigh seedum roofing (with root bariers an isolation layers like on a building roof - jeffos)are pretty skinny and weigh around 20kg / m2 it's still half a ton that the bus needs to accelerate every time it starts.

plus it would probably screw with the bus cleaning regime

put them on the bus stops. or don't bother.

The wind resistance from all those plants isn't going to help the fuel efficiency much either.

It is interesting from an artist's point of view... gardens on buses in a place that lacks proper gardens. But maybe a painting or this photograph 9or a better and more creative photograph of this bus) would suffice.

I don't think artists have a real concept of the repercussions of actions. I thin the environment was just an afterthought with this and is more a way to make the city look 'greener'. However, from every comment above mine it seems obvious to everyone, but the artist and his funding, that this is a bad idea in most every way. Fuel consumption, structural fail, maintenance, excess pollution and not to mention possibility of injury; what if debris falls off the top and smacks into a biker or flies into a windshield.

Plus all the random items that might fall off the top of the bus when it goes around a corner. Not smart.

What about the plants them selves? Constant start and stop, 40+ mph wind, and diesel fumes. I can not think of any plant that would thrive in that kind of environment...
Meh, just an artist trying to be creative, and someone who wants to appear to be thinking green. Just hope there is an engineer who will tell them they are being stupid, painfully obviously stupid.

I say give the "artists" a very small grant to put a garden on one old bus that does not drive anywhere except for special events. My prediction is that after three months it will be declared a failure and everyone will move on. In the process quite few artists will get an education in real life.

horrible idea!
is this a joke? I followed the link and it doesn't look like it.. I posted the "doesn't this cause a Lot of pollution" question on their comments.

It's completely silly -- flower gardens are not public space, but ornamental. Rather, there should be grass and benches. A few buses should have swings and playground equipment. Human spaces, for humans.

following the logic of the commenters at large here, we shouldn't run busses at all.

chill. it's not going to make an ounce of difference in the long run.

the bus would burn just as much fuel if it had 5 or 6 more people on it (1,000lbs)

i mean seriously, lighten up people. hey think about this one: having a kid adds another carbon footprint. nobody with kids can legitimately claim to be greener than someone without kids. if you're all so concerned with saving the planet, maybe you should go out and kill some kids or something.

do you see why it's silly, then, to worry about 1,000lbs of extra weight on a vehicle that already weighs 24,000lbs?

@14 @15: I think that what is annoying people is no the extra carbon foot print that people might be deciding to leave. It is more along the lines that whom ever came up with the idea does not seam to understand that of all of the places that one could put a garden a buss roof is just about the worst idea. There is the roofs of building, you could cover the side walks with trundles and have vines grow over, you could go up the sides of buildings adding planters. Hell even hanging shit from a helium balloon is a less silly idea.
All that would be accomplished with adding gardens to buses is increased pollution, more accidents, ratty looking plants, wasted gas, structural damage to the bus, and wasted money from actually implementing the thing.

35 acres isn't very much. Why not just encourage rooftop gardens?

Who cares if it's a bad idea or not? People like to knock THIS kind of stuff, when there are so many EVIL bad ideas? This kind of stuff should always be funded, weather it succeeds or not. What if it turns out awesome?

@ Ted - because it is not artsy.