Hot Enough For Ya? Georgia Tech Has an App for That, and It’s More Useful Than You Might Think

"They say Atlanta is the city in a forest," Clayton Patterson, Georgia Tech's operations manager for horticulture, said, "but there's a lot of asphalt here, a lot of concrete, and it gets really hot around it. This place turns into an oven, real quick."

School of City and Regional Planning Assistant Professor Rounaq Basu knows it, too. So he and his students (supported by the Center for Urban Resilience and Analytics) created the Cool Routes app to help people in Atlanta find the most shaded - and most importantly, the coolest - paths if they have to walk or bike outside.

Describing Atlanta's latest heatwave, "This is great for research, but not so great for residents," Basu said. "I like to walk and bike everywhere, and it's too hot. I need to know where the shaded paths are!"

The Cool Routes app currently covers 10 cities in the U.S., including Atlanta. Users choose a city from a dropdown menu, provide a trip start and destination, tell the app whether they're walking or biking, and select route preferences. The app then generates up to three routes to the user's destination, allowing them to compare how much cooler one route is from another. Further refinement of routes is offered after that.

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