Abstract
Due to phenomena such as urban heat islands, outdoor thermal comfort of the cities’ residents emerges as a growing concern. A major challenge for mega-cities in changing climate is the design of urban spaces that ensure and promote pedestrian thermal comfort. Understanding pedestrian behavioural adaptation to urban thermal environments is critically important to attain this goal. Current research in pedestrian behaviour lacks controlled experimentation, which limits the quantitative modelling of such complex behaviour. Combining well-controlled experiments with human participants and computational methods inspired by behavioural ecology and decision theory, we examine the effect of sun exposure on route choice in a tropical city. We find that the distance walked in the shade is discounted by a factor of 0.86 compared to the distance walked in the sun, and that shadows cast by buildings have a stronger effect than trees. The discounting effect is mathematically formalised and thus allows quantification of the behaviour that can be used in understanding pedestrian behaviour in changing urban climates. The results highlight the importance of assessment of climate through human responses to it and point the way forward to explore scenarios to mitigate pedestrian heat stress.
Highlights
Due to phenomena such as urban heat islands, outdoor thermal comfort of the cities’ residents emerges as a growing concern
Attendance of urban areas and occupation of sun and shade[26,27], duration and intensity of activities in urban parks[28] and preference for a sun-lit side of a street[29] have all been found to have an association with climate. While these rather qualitative observations confirm the presence of a pronounced human behavioural response to thermal environments, they do not provide insights into mechanisms underlying such behaviour, which are crucial for development of the quantitative model of pedestrian behavioural response to urban thermal environments
In this study we formulated the model of pedestrian path choice behaviour driven by the length and sun exposure parameters of the path options
Summary
Due to phenomena such as urban heat islands, outdoor thermal comfort of the cities’ residents emerges as a growing concern. Thermal perception and acceptance studies conducted through surveys throughout the w orld[14,15,16,17] connect the microclimate and comfort of the people in it These developments allow to evaluate and introduce the design and planning measures to improve pedestrian thermal environments through g reen[18,19,20] and b uilt[21,22] shading infrastructure, orientation of b uildings[23] as well as smart path p lanning[24,25]. Research on crowd d ynamics[30,31] and human navigation in urban e nvironments[32] provides mechanistic models of pedestrian motion, which are able to reproduce the aggregate dynamics or distribution of pedestrian flows in the environment These proposed mechanisms, remain hypothetical, requiring formal testing of them through controlled experimentation and quantitative characterisation of pedestrian choices in natural
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