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Heat stress mitigation by trees and shelters at bus stops
- mykowebhn 2y agoThis is great for focusing on providing adequate public transportation. I would also love to see attempts at providing heat stress mitigation FOR trees.
- rightbyte 2y agoDesign #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 1y agoThe 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 2y agoheat 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
- cadamsdotcom 2y agoTrees 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.
- nuc1e0n 1y agoThat's without mentioning the fact that trees emit chemicals into the air that help make it rain. It was discussed here on Hacker News recently. That will help to lower temperatures across a wide area.
- fuzzy_biscuit 1y agoAnd they're natural filters. It's a win/win/win.
- mhotchen 2y agoI 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)
- infecto 1y agoWouldn’t the simpler explanation be that we are more aware of the risks to over exposure to the sun? We certainly can use more trees but most folks spend most of their time indoors for work.
- wodenokoto 1y agoIt is. Sunscreen recommendations usually also applies if you plan on staying in shade. UV (like visible light) reflects off of walls too.
- roflmaostc 1y agoactually the reflectance of UV is usually much lower than visible light. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-01315-1/figures/2 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-01315-1/figures/2
- ricw 1y agoIt’s actually much more that the ozone layer, which filters uv, is much thinner than it was even 60-70 years ago. The ozone layer might be growing again, but at a very slow pace. Simple fact is, we’re much more exposed to uv than prior generations.
- dgacmu 1y ago"much" more might be overstating it? We get about 6% more UV: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/03/100316142529.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/03/100316142529.h... Which corresponds with the ozone layer being about 5% thinner: https://www.clo.nl/en/indicators/en021819-ozone-layer-1980-2022 https://www.clo.nl/en/indicators/en021819-ozone-layer-1980-2... Not good (or good for us) but also not a huge huge change, since we stopped the thinning of the ozone layer mostly in time.
- lucidguppy 1y agoYou 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.
- thih9 1y agoSome fun related links: https://parkingreform.org/resources/parking-lot-map/ https://parkingreform.org/resources/parking-lot-map/ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pocket_forest https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pocket_forest
- foobahhhhh 1y ago[flagged]
- croissants 1y agoThe paper does more than that. It measures wet bulb temperatures at different stops with different combinations and varieties of trees and bus stops, provides decent evidence of variation among these combinations, and attempts to explain the variations. For example, the roles played by evaporation from leaves and shelter material weren't obvious to me before reading. More generally, this method of interacting with the most simplified interpretation of science and then criticizing its simplicity isn't useful to the criticizer or the criticized.
- micromacrofoot 1y agonotably cooler in tree shade, at least attempt to learn something
- rsynnott 1y agoI realise that it's most improper to read the article on this website, but they actually found that shade by trees was more effective than shade by shelters which are themselves unshaded in reducing heat. This kind of _makes sense_, as the shelter will ultimately act like an oven as it heats in the sun, but isn't all that intuitive. In some cases it was even more effective to stand outside the shelter in the shade cast by the shelter than it was to stand in the shelter!
- mschuster91 1y ago[flagged]
- stefs 1y agowrong thread
- 9dev 1y agoIs it, though? Curiously the post mentions "shadow", a word that also appears in other comments on the thread, and the FA. I wouldn't be surprised if the account is part of a Russian disinformation botnet that just searches for matching trigger words on Hacker News to post semi-related content.
- 0_____0 1y agoDef wrong thread. There's a blackberry article on the front page and this user is pretty established and has a pretty "HN" style from what I can tell :)
- mschuster91 1y agoIndeed wrong thread. I got about 200 tabs open, must have confused the tab with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43892786 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43892786. As for "shadow IT" - that's a phrase I have used a few times in the past [1] and that's also relatively frequent on HN [2]. Next time, please don't accuse someone of something without doing at least a cursory search. [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=mschuster91%20%22shadow%20it%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... [2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=%22shadow%20it%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
- amunozo 1y agoWe all know this. We need political will.
- aaron695 1y ago[dead]
- washmyelbows 1y agoTrees good, study finds
- vanschelven 1y agoSee also https://thegreencities.eu/ https://thegreencities.eu/
- padjo 1y agoPeople who want to chop down trees for any reason other than them being in danger of falling down really baffle me.
- sillystu04 1y agoI hate male trees because they make hay fever much worse. Cutting them down and replacing them with female trees would achieve all the good benefits of trees without affecting hay fever. The only downside of female trees is that they shed pods, fruits & seeds into urban environments. But even this might conceivably have some benefits to biodiversity. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/may/16/how-urban-planners-preference-for-male-trees-has-made-your-hay-fever-worse https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/may/16/how-urba...
- badmintonbaseba 1y agoWould the female trees do that if there weren't any male trees around?
- bluGill 1y agoNot many male trees are needed to breed so even if one is around you get the problem. Not all trees have separate male and female trees as well. If you only have one type of tree you have no biodiversity and that is almost as bad as no trees.
- CGamesPlay 1y agoThis comment sounded very strange to me, but as the linked article says about "male" trees: > Growers’ breeding of purely male diodar trees had created, said Ogren, “something that doesn’t even exist in nature”.
- lippihom 1y agoA note about hay fever - not sure how bad yours is but mine was debilitating (hated leave the house during spring). The last two years I've been doing immunotherapy shots in the winter and this year my allergies are almost completely gone. It's been an unbelievable quality of life change. Would highly recommend if you have insurance that covers it (tho looking back now, I'd also gladly pay out of pocket).
- ThinkBeat 1y agoFrom life in Oslo, Norway. In so far as improving the comfort of passengers using mass transit the best way to attract more travelers and retain travelers is to run enough busses, trains, subway trains, during rush hour so that the passangers are not packed like sardines ass to dick for 30 mins or more twice a day. Then cooling inside the inside the passaenger area is also key Sweating like a pig while playing a sardine makes the experience even worse. Starting work drenched in sweat and the smell of other poeples perfume and cologn is not a good start.
- naming_the_user 1y ago100% this - make it more comfortable and handle the rush. I live in London, we have tons of public transport. In the middle of the day, outside of rush hour, I use it a lot and it can be really pleasant, particularly suburban rail, you can stretch out a bit, there is often air conditioning, a nice view from the window, etc. When it's busy I will drive even if it takes longer because my car is guaranteed to have personal space and is clean.
- bluGill 1y agoI agree, but that costs a lot money. It costs $100/hour (this is likely low since I haven't checked in several years what inflation has done) to run a bus. That is one bus, even a tiny city will need more than 100 buses to just provide bad service, and would need 5-10 times as many just to give good service. If running buses were free everyone would have a bus every 5 minutes, with many different routes to choose from. Providing good places to wait for your bus is cheap by contrast, the cost of a single bus will upgrade many bus stops and the investment will last longer than the bus (though you need to maintain it) You are wrong about rush hour. You need to provide good service all day, not just during rust hour. People who have good rush hour service and then a "family emergency" pops up mid day when they discover service is bad will go back to driving just in case that happens again. Plus running all day service at the same rates ends up breaking even - between staff willing to take less per hour, and good service enticing people to ride you can generally break even on your costs.
- seszett 1y ago
- elric 1y ago> Municipalities are attempting to create safe and comfortable transit systems in the face of climate change. Citation needed. Over here, municipalities are trying to find further ways of reducing the cost of public transport. Spending money on comfort is simply not going to happen. Belgium's 2nd largest city's transit system has famously malfunctioning escalators (some of which have been broken for half a decade). The offering is reduced year after year, while prices go up. I wish things were different.
- onlyrealcuzzo 1y agoThat's the cost of more and more of the budget going to pensions, as more and more of the "workers" are 65+ retirees...
- elric 1y agoEverything is a tradeoff. I'm sure pensions will become more affordable if we keep killing people by means of air pollution and car crashes. /s But I'm sure we'll keep subsidising company cars.
- tppiotrowski 1y agoPlanting trees is hard. Phoenix AZ has a tree planting program called the Shade Phoenix Plan and they publish public reports. Watering and maintenance are a big cost. Iirc it's about $1000 to plant a tree. $100 for the tree and $900 for the irrigation and labor to plant it. In the first 10 years of the program 2/3 of the 106,000 planted trees were removed due to accidents, storms, not enough water/aging. [1] [1] https://www.phoenix.gov/content/dam/phoenix/heatsite/documents/BP_ShadePhoenixPlan_Report_031025_EN.pdf https://www.phoenix.gov/content/dam/phoenix/heatsite/documen...
- potato3732842 1y agoIt being difficult to grow trees that provide good in phoenix is literally the nick cake "you don't say" meme. Expecting something like that work without questionable degree of investment to make some tree work survive of its element is contradictory to all the adaptations that make plant life suitable for arid climates (i.e not providing a ton of area to the sun relative to their mass).
- tppiotrowski 1y agoFair. I used Phoenix because it's the only published city shading plan I've come across. It could just be that arid/hot climates are the places trees are needed. The study linked was in Houston, Texas. The Phoenix report is valuable because it provides lessons that should be avoided going forward: change the laws so property owners are not liable if a tree outside their business hurts someone, don't plant a tree if you can't irrigate it, work with local residents to plant and water trees to save on labor and increase success, etc. If there's other municipal shade reports I'd love to read them. Helping people find shade is what I do for a living. [1] [1] shademap.app
- viburnum 1y agoMilwaukee started its shade program in the 1980s.
- jodrellblank 1y ago
- JohnMakin 1y agoAt least in CA, we're going the opposite direction - complete removal of shelter, even the benches have dividers on them so people can't sleep. This is meant to deter homeless, but the city also doesn't really provide them anywhere else to go, so things that provide additional shelter at bus stops are essentially a non-starter for the city.
- nickdothutton 1y agoGiven the cost of maintaining trees, I’m surprised councils in the UK haven’t just removed street trees and “planted” metal ones.
- newer_vienna 1y ago"Here's a scientific study that shows that trees and shelters are nice because they provide shade" thanks, I guess. I didn't need a study telling me something I already know and agree with
- Ylpertnodi 1y agoSomeone got paid: it all keeps the money flowing. Always check if the fence serves a purpose.
- MattSayar 1y agoReminds me of a Technology Connections video describing how helpful awnings are in reducing temperatures inside your house [0]. Are there any modern-looking awnings that wouldn't look out of place in my neighborhood? [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhbDfi7Ee7k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhbDfi7Ee7k
- profsummergig 1y agoDo we need reasons to plant cities in urban areas now? Look at photos of Tel Aviv. Lush green trees everywhere. Compare it with any other city in the desert. Completely changes the quality of life.
- MeteorMarc 1y agoTrees as shelter works as long there is water for the trees(evaporation cools, like in sweating). With increasing heat stress there is not enough water and the trees will simply die. Or burn.