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Bus stops aren’t the only parts of cities that overheat. Sidewalks get hot too. And a slide in a sunny playground can easily exceed temperatures that burn skin in a matter of seconds.
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Shade helps provide some of that relief, but it’s often lacking in public spaces where people are spending time midday. Those tend to be bus stops, playgrounds, and sidewalks en route to public transit that have no shade from the sun.
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There are national guidelines for playground safety that dictate modern playgrounds should be constructed with certain materials, such as plastic and rubber. The surface of the playground needs to be soft to cushion any falls, so it is usually rubber or artificial turf, rather than grass. After accounting for all these concerns in playground design, Vanos explained that adding shade is often an afterthought.
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Since 2017, NOAA has run an annual Urban Heat Island mapping program that sends volunteers out with heat and humidity sensors to take temperatures all over the city by bike or car. Morgan Zabow, community heat and health information coordinator at NOAA, said the data is collected over a single day, but ends up forming a snapshot of the inequities around a city. By the end of this summer, 75 communities will have collected and mapped this data.