Bus Roots is a living garden planted on the roofs of city buses. It’s an effort that rose out of New York City designer Marco Antonio Castro Cosio’s graduate thesis at the NYU. The project aims to reclaim the forgotten space on the tops of city buses, while enhancing the quality of urban life by proliferating green spaces on these unused bus roofs. A prototype of the rolling gardens has been installed on the roof of the BioBus, a mobile science laboratory and the first bus with an extensive green roof system. It has been growing for five months while travelling around New York City and as far as Ohio.
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Bus Roots joins the ranks of mobile gardens planted on trucks, trains, and other roving sites. Cosio explains his project as an exercise in “nomadic urban agriculture.”
Benefits
According to the bustop gardener, benefits include:
• Aesthetic Value
• Mitigation of Urban Heat Island Effect
• Acoustical and Thermal Insulation
• Storm Water Reduction and Management
• CO2 absorbtion
• Habitat Restoration
• Public Education and Recreation
• Reclaiming Forgotten Real Estate
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Raising the Roots
Cosio estimates Bus Roots can add greatly to the city’s green space. Each public transit bus has a surface of 340 ft2., and The Metropolitan Transit Authority has a fleet of around 4,500 buses. Do the math.
“If a garden were planted on the roof of every one of the 4,500 buses in the city’s bus fleet,” calculates Cosio, his busses could add 35 acres of new rolling green space in the city.
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