Friday Five: Chocolate-Covered Highways, Mural-Adorned Garages, and Parking Spots for Sale

Who says a parking garage can’t be a work of art? Cave drawings were the inspiration for this 9,600-foot mural in a Colorado parking garage (via Huffington Post)

A parking garage in Vail, Colorado acted as a canvas this past week after artist Randy Milhoan painted large murals on each floor of the multi-level underground parking complex. Inspired by rock art and picture writing, each level of the garage is filled with cave-like outlines of horses and buffalo. The artwork was either directly traced or copied from several hundred pictures of prehistoric carvings for heightened authenticity. The mural extends about 9,600 feet in total.

Han Yue has just set the Guinness World Record for the tightest parallel parking,  perfectly parking his Mini Cooper with less than 15 cm to spare.  Luckily for the rest of us mere mortals, Ford recently expanded its Park Assist technology, which uses rear sensors to guide the vehicle safely into a spot. Meanwhile, the automobile giant’s Traffic Jam Assist technology allows cars to automatically follow traffic ahead while staying within a singular lane.

Signs like these may soon adorn driveways on busy streets with the development of Parking Panda, a new parking app (via MyParkingSign.com)

Parking spaces may now be permanently reserved for the highest bidder, and lots may be reserved for grocery stores. A Baltimore startup app called Parking Panda will allow homeowners the opportunity to rent out their driveways on popular thoroughfares and lets drivers bid for spots in advance at certain events and on certain roads. Meanwhile, students at Ohio State University are interested in developing ways to grow food in them. Apples, peaches, green beans, blueberries, raspberries, and tomatoes are all growing in a parking lot behind an unused dormitory on the university’s campus.

A custom sign for a custom experience.  In chocolate (via RoadTrafficSigns.com)

In Stockholm, New York  on Thursday, June 28, a large tractor-trailer filled to the brim with roughly 20 tons of Hershey’s chocolate rolled over, leaving a delicious mess of over 41,000 pounds of chocolate chips on the busy highway. The road was subsequently closed for over three hours, and was originally intended to travel to Utah.  While the overturn was a tasty inconvenience, nobody was injured in the accident.

New Jersey may punish texting while driving with jail time (via Smartsign.com)

In New Jersey, a rsher cell phone law is off to the desk of Governor Chris Christie after a 37-0 government vote in favor of the bill. The law states that if a motorist kills or injures somebody while using a cell phone, he/she could be convicted of vehicular homicide or assault. The law places cell-phone usage under the classification of driving recklessly, after it became apparent that the state’s laws regarding cell phone usage were uncharacteristically lenient. This legislation is a victory for campaigns such as No Texting and Driving, which urges drivers to put down the phone while behind the wheel.

– S. Walsh