Heating Up the Kensington Expressway Project
Several years ago, a friend of mine who has lived on Humboldt Parkway his entire life, told me about a proposal being talked about that would fill-in and restore the Kensington Expressway to the old Humboldt Parkway we knew as children. I thought he was crazy and believed it to be a pipe dream, and would never happen. I couldn’t understand why and what would be the social and economic value behind the project.
Yet, ten years later the Federal Environmental Agency greenlit the final steps to beginning the billion-dollar Kensington Expressway Cap and Tunnel project.
I must say up front, I don’t object to the project itself. I object to the high cost of the project. A billion dollars is a lot of taxpayer’s money that will largely go to white construction companies and their white union employees.
From my simpleminded perspective, the project is a relatively straightforward and simple deconstruction task to backfill and cover, and cap – forming a tunnel. Does that really need to cost a billion dollars to do?
I recently read up on the undertaking and examined the blueprints of the project, and it occurred to me that there was an opportunity to make the project unique and special by utilizing modern tech means to Buffalo’s biggest problem – snow removal.
Why not remake the entire Kensington Expressway and the surrounding neighborhoods “winterproof” by laying heated roads and sidewalks from downtown to the airport?
Did you know there’s a city in Michigan (Holland, Michigan) that has had heated streets and sidewalks in its downtown district since 1998, and it has worked perfectly, according to reports. Businesses and residences in the area don’t have to deal with snow shoveling and other winter-related issues because their sidewalks stay snow and ice free.
It’s done with 168 miles of tubing coiled beneath the concrete. It’s the largest publicly owned snowmelt system in the country. Also, there are several cities in Europe that have heated streets and sidewalks. Montreal, Canada is talking about it. Of course, Buffalo will be 25 years behind the rest of the world. Why can’t Buffalo be a model of modern cold weather cities that is proactive against snow removal?
My question is can solar energy be stored and used to heat roads in the winter?
Most don’t know Buffalo has one of the largest solar panel factories in the country, owned by world premiere innovator billionaire Elon Musk, whose sending people to space. Couldn’t his engineers come up with a method to economically and efficiently use solar energy to heat the roadway and sidewalks of Buffalo? Maybe someone would build a factory to produce the things needed to winterize the entire city.
But this is Buffalo – where we build stadiums with no dome, twice – because we elect dumb politicians!!!