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.

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

That'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.

Wouldn’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.

imo: people used to be outside a lot more. by summer they usually had a good tan, so they didn't suffer the sunlight that much. of course this did lead to _premature_ (from our modern point of view) skin aging.

heat and light are different factors, even though they mostly come hand in hand. outside, heat is definitely a bigger problem than it used to be, but also we don't spend as much time outside. if heat became a problem people used to take time off, rest during the hottest times of the day and work earlier/later.

Also the 20th century abandonment of the hat.

(remind me, what was the California "bus shelter" design that was basically an expensive stick and got widely ridiculed on here?)

Some fun related links:

https://parkingreform.org/resources/parking-lot-map/

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pocket_forest

The 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 is pretty useless.

notably cooler in tree shade, at least attempt to learn something

I 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-urba...

Non native trees can be a harmful invader to the native environment and should be chopped down. If you can get a large enough area to do it at once chopping down all of a type of tree can stop the spread of disease thus saving tree father away that get isolated (though you can argue these are trees in danger of falling anyway)

100% 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.

I 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.

That's the cost of more and more of the budget going to pensions, as more and more of the "workers" are 65+ retirees...