Urban Climates
thebritishgeographer.weebly.com
thebritishgeographer.weebly.com
Not only do you have thousands of vehicles burning thousands of gallons of petroleum, you also have low-albedo asphalt parking lots everywhere.
Do car-friendly cities have a bigger heat-island effect than transit-friendly cities?
Obviously asphalt roads and (especially) parking lots are an indirect contributor to low-albedo and low-permeability landscape.
Taken together, how much of the heat island effect is due to the automobile? Would a pedestrian + transit city, with aggressive tree canopy, still be a heat island?
Replacing parking lots seems like the most obvious win all around to me.
Planting trees is great in many ways (quality of life and air quality in addition to heat mitigation) but is pricier. It can also take several years to "bear fruit" (even for non fruit-bearing trees ;-) because generally you plant saplings, which can take decades to grow to a size where they provide significant shade. NYC hust completed an initiative to plant a million new trees, and it's barely made a dent in the amount of treeless sidewalks, let alone unshaded space in the city.
It would have been nice if the article had made more concrete recommendations, tho, I agree.