Marco Castro Cosio, a graduate of NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program, designed this green roof for a bus as part of his thesis project named "Bus Roots." Coslo wanted to " Reclaim forgotten space, increase quality of life and grow the amount of green spaces in the city," which would not only add aesthetic values to the city but also help reduce carbon dioxide.
As Coslo explains on his website:
-A public transit bus has a surface of 340 square feet. The MTA fleet has around 4,500 buses.
-If we grew a garden on the roof of every one of the 4,500 buses in the MTA bus fleet, we would have 35 acres of new rolling green space in the city, the equivalent to the space of four Bryant Parks.
The photos on this page of MTA buses outfitted with green roofs are digital renderings of what buses could look like, though Coslo has already installed a green roof on a bus for a real-life tryout:
His first prototype bus garden was grown on the roof of the Bio Bus, which is a science lab inside a re-purposed San Francsico transit bus that visits public schools in New York and in the Midweset to provide hands-on science education for schools that lack high-tech science labs for their students. As the site explains, "the BioBus is carbon neutral; its daily energy needs are provided by solar panels, a wind turbine, and an engine that runs on waste vegetable oil."
