Heat stress mitigation by trees and shelters at bus stops
9 comments
·May 5, 2025cadamsdotcom
Trees are relaxing to look at when your bus is late :) and 3.2C cooler than shelters!
Though most know such things intuitively, hard numbers help transit designers make their case.
lucidguppy
You can have a pretty good simulacrum of a forest using only two tennis courts worth of land (a pittance in most US cities that have 30% reserved for parking).
Look up Miyawaki method.
mykowebhn
This is great for focusing on providing adequate public transportation.
I would also love to see attempts at providing heat stress mitigation FOR trees.
rightbyte
Design #12 looks nice. The same performance as trees.
It has annoyed me alot that buss shelters seem to be built like sun ovens only protecting versus rain and wind.
nottorp
The protection from wind is the problem when it's hot - no air movement and thus less cooling inside the shelter than outside it.
On the other hand, most trees won't protect you from rain.
Maybe it's best to have a shelter under trees.
metalman
heat stress mitigation for trees, could actualy be exploited for our, and there benifit. treat a tree as a bunch of fancy pumps, which it is, and choose trees that have best shape and canopy for cover, that are also water hogs, as they do pump a lot of water from the ground to stay cool, so give them extra via burried waterers that drip feed them water to there roots, and they will cool the surrounding area a bit more, set enough of them up, and paint all availible roofs with the new super reflective paints, and it might be possible to create niehborhood islands of cool
foobahhhhh
It is cooler in the shade. Now... PhD, please.
I think about this often. I hear people talking about why we need sunscreen these days and in my mind it's simply due to the lack of foliage and natural shade in both modern urban and rural areas (which are largely farm land these days)