ASU President Michael Crow is one step closer to achieving a New American University with the addition of a New American Parking Lot.
The parking lot, located in front of the ASU Art Museum on 10th Street and Mill Avenue, could be the future of parking because it reduces urban heat island impact.
Urban heat island refers to the fact that urban cities are generally hotter than surrounding rural areas because of the amount of pavement, which absorbs heat, said Jay Golden, director of the National Center of Excellence, an extension of the ASU Global Institute of Sustainability.
Pavement usually makes up about 40 percent of the materials used to construct an urban city, Golden said.
ASU is one of the first universities to try to reduce the amount of urban heat island impact by installing
pervious concrete, Golden said.
Pervious concrete, developed by the NCE, allows water to flow through and infiltrate the ground. It also reflects ultraviolet rays, Golden said.
"ASU is going to be showcased nationally for what we're trying to do with the parking lot," he said.
Crow and the ASU administration decided they would install the pavement to conduct research, he said.
The New American Parking Lot, which is wired up with sensors, serves as an experiment - if it does what researchers project it will, ASU could send guidebooks to various counties in Arizona showing the benefits of using the pervious material, Golden said.
Researchers also installed sensors in regular parking lots so they can compare data, he added.
The negative effects of urban heat island could be decreased if everything with the pervious pavement goes as expected.
Urban heat island can cause the energy demand to peak, increase air conditioning costs and air pollution and also cause more heat-related mortalities, according to epa.gov.
The pervious concrete could also affect the runoff of rainwater in an urban city.
Joby Carlson, a research lab manager for NCE, said when rain falls in an urban city with regular pavement, 55 percent of that water is runoff, and only 15 percent penetrates the ground - the rest is evaporated. The
water that penetrates can go either to the surrounding vegetation, like trees, or all the way down to groundwater.
But the runoff water can go to a variety of places, one of them being infiltration basins, which can sometimes affect public fields or streams, Carlson said.
"All of the nasty stuff that's out on the road is concentrated and then put into soccer fields or streams, and it's killing fish and increasing algae growth," Carlson said.
But with pervious pavement, 10 percent is runoff and 50 percent directly infiltrates the ground, Carlson said.
This ultimately causes vegetation to thrive, the energy demand to decrease and the air quality to increase, Golden said.
Toxins can be filtered and degraded by Earth's natural processes, so the researchers aren't worried about gasoline and other pollutants entering the soil, Carlson added.
The research would probably take up to three years in order to get complete results, Golden said.
Reach the reporter at: kyle.snow@asu.edu.
