Prioritising Street Shade Intensification to Support Pedestrian Accessibility to Public Transport: A Data-driven Approach

Abstract

This article presents a new methodology for urban-scale prioritisation of shade-inducing operations by quantifying the gap between the use intensity of public transport stops and the solar exposure of the streets leading to them. By cross-referencing a high-resolution dataset of travel ticket validation with shade maps quantifying the average street shade provision, we were able to calculate a new metric, the Shading Priority Index, which quantifies the relative importance of adding street shading in each statistical zone. The method was applied to Tel Aviv-Yafo, a major city in Israel. The calculation of the Shading Priority Index at the scale of a statistical zone in the city made it possible to expose significant differences between each zone, both in passenger quantities and outdoor shading conditions in the routes leading to transportation stops, and to identify key weak points in the climate-related accessibility of pedestrians to public transport.