It’s getting increasingly unbearable, even downright dangerous, to walk in cities. That’s because of the urban heat island effect: Buildings, sidewalks, and roads absorb the sun’s energy and radiate it back at pedestrians, raising temperatures far above that you’d find in the surrounding countryside. If a city like Phoenix doesn’t have enough shade, people can’t move safely by foot, when really we need to help folks do more of that, because ambling improves public health and reduces vehicle traffic.
If you boot up a maps app on your phone, it provides the most efficient way of getting from point A to point B in a metropolis, but it tells you nothing about the blast furnace you’ll endure along the way. A new research project from Arizona State University hopes to fix that with Cool Routes, an online tool that calculates the heat that you might feel along active mobility paths. In addition to finding the shortest path, it determines the coolest and shadiest — and therefore safest, thermally speaking — one. Though it’s limited at the moment to the ASU Tempe campus, the r... Read more
