It's already the biggest-grossing campaign in Indiegogo's history. With more than a week to go before its run on the crowdfunding site ends, the Solar Roadways campaign has more than doubled its $1 million goal.

Solar Roadways is the brainchild of husband-and-wife team Scott and Julie Brusaw from Sagle, Idaho, who want to bring the humble road surface into the electronic age. Solar Roadways are comprised of rugged hexagonal glass plates in which are embedded solar cells, electronics, and LEDs. Where asphalt roads must be continuously patched and repaved, the panel making up a Solar Roadway simply would be swapped out if they fail. And where today's highways and parking lots just sit there soaking up the sun, Solar Roadways would produce energy. "Unlike the asphalt system, a Solar Roadway pays for itself through the generation of electricity," Scott Brusaw tells PM.

The road could be embedded with heating elements that would eliminate ice. Solar-powered sensors would detect oncoming traffic or debris and light up pavement markings in response. "To make an asphalt road comparable to a Solar Road," Scott Brusaw says, "you have to add a power generation plant (and the coal or radioactive material to run it), a power distribution network, snow removal, line repainting, pothole repair, etc. And then, you've only made them equal in costs."

And the Brusaws aren't the only people who think America's cruddy roads need a revolution. Tech giant Qualcomm, for example, has acquired a spinoff from the University of Aukland in New Zealand called Halo. Its product can be embedded in pavement to recharge electric vehicles wirelessly through induction, the same technology commonly used to charge electric toothbrushes. Qualcomm has already begun licensing Halo to automakers for prototype vehicles. A California Energy Commission study released this year recommends building a piezoelectric road demonstrator to gather more data on the feasibility of harvesting the vibrational energy of traffic passing over the road's suface. And the Intelligent Transportation Systems office of the US Department of Transportation is developing technologies to enable cars to communicate with each other as well as with traffic lights, sensors, and other elements of an envisioned smart road infrastructure.

As the runaway success of Solar Roadways' crowdfunding shows, there's strong popular appeal for these kinds of new high-tech road technologies, and many of them already exist in prototype form. But given the sorry state of American infrastructure—and the fact that money to repair even ordinary dumb roads is drying up—will we ever walk and drive over these futuristic systems?

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Jonathan Levine, professor of urban planning at the University of Michigan, puts the delay on the fragmented network of local, state, and federal governments that all have their say in how and where new road technologies will be implemented. To overhaul how America builds its roads would require a feat of bureaucratic jujitsu, aligning all of those separate governing bodies.

"In some cases the technologies are not yet there," Levine says. "[But] in other cases the technologies are there, but our American way of organizing government, society, and the planning function in particular, just has its way of slowing things down."

Yet Solar Roadways might have an advantage over other high-tech road advancement that have been proposed, Levine says. Try to convince a state to redo an entire highway with solar panels rather than asphalt and you might get laughed out of the statehouse, especially before the technology has been proven. But a single town could deploy something like a Solar Roadway in a parking lot, which would not require connecting roads from multiple jurisdictions and all the legal wrangling that comes with that.

"Assuming the technological promise is as it appears, I think it might have a shot," Levine says of Solar Roadways. "And here's why: it's readily deployable at a small scale. Unlike...inductive charging in roadways, it's actually not dependent on what other people do, or what other agencies do, or what other municipalities do.

Prototype Parking Lot Panels

"So let's say I'm a municipality, I've got a big parking lot, and I want to say, 'Hey, you know what, let's give this a try, in this big parking lot. We're not going to go over to the roadways quite yet, we're going to do the parking lot.' And if I can demonstrate that it does what they say it does and it quickly pays for itself and then starts generating a surplus, then wow—the logic becomes pretty impeccable."

The Brusaws used a $750,000 Federal Highway Administration grant to construct a demonstration parking lot that is about 20 feet wide by 70 feet long. Presumably, production parking lots and other surfaces would cost less per square foot than prototypes.

Has the time finally come for roads to get a tech upgrade? More than 45,000 funders on Indiegogo are placing a $2 million bet that it has. The Brusaws plan to use the money they raise to staff up with additional engineering talent. "With this team in place," says Scott Brusaw, "we hope to finalize the product for market by the end of this year."

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