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Great point! Would keep the cars cooler, too. Hopefully the world follows France's example and makes it mandatory to have solar panels covering parking lots that have space for at least 80 cars!

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Notably their example is in Taiwan where available land is limited.

Large open car parks in urban areas present a substantial opportunity for literally anything other than a car park. Solar farms should be quite far down the list in most cases.

There's also the point that we have too much parking, and this might help get rid of some of it.

Densify, densify, densify.

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ideally we wouldn't have large surface car parks in cities... but I guess if they're going to exist using them for solar makes it slightly better?

Where exactly are you going to park? Public transit won't get you there.

Did you miss the word "ideally"?

Countries where available land is limited don't have large open car parks that aren't multi-storey in the first place.

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This is old news where I live (Phoenix, USA). Not far from me are shopping centers and schools with solar shades. There is a Tesla supercharger with solar at the nearest major shopping center. A place where I worked studied adding solar shade but the nearest connection point to the grid was too far away to make it work. It would have required expensive transmission lines and it is hard to get new power lines approved.

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Solar power and wind power are ecological disasters, let’s try nuclear.

Improving the temperature of Cities and reducing the carbon footprint of cities is a twofold process of removing excess and unused pavement and replacing it with green space, while also moving towards solar panels to provide shade and energy absorption where we still need parking.

Better public transportation would also help immensely

parking garages are way better use of space for the most part.

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Solar pro here. If you want to pay more, build solar carports. To pay less, put arrays on open ground or on rooftops.

How vulnerable are solar panels to vibration? Like if you installed them on a canopy over a freeway would they last or would the vibrations from the road damage them?

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It would be a more substantial opportunity if those solar panels were on top of moderately priced housing where parking lots used to be.

Is it because carparks are sources of oily particulates, and are expensive to service when in use and difficult to close?

Also, roads kick up oil, asphalt, salt, tire dust, exhaust particulates... And skylines are useful locational references.

I think car infrastructure can't be made multipurpose. Cars are just too awful to pair with anything else.

No, it's because public carports require more materials, more complicated installation, more safeguards to keep DC wiring away from prying fingers, heavy posts to survive vehicle strikes, etc..