Hot Stops: How Houston Bus Stops Get Dangerously Hot Houston Public Media

In this bonus episode, officials, local advocates and bus riders react to our investigation into the impact of extreme heat on METRO riders in Houston. We hear how one county precinct may use our findings to inform their tree planting strategy and bus shelter redesign in Southwest Houston.RQorINeCN3g7wumm3vP3

Tree shade was twice as effective at cooling riders as bus shelters. That’s what Sara and Katie observed while spending three weeks at Houston bus stops this summer and authoring a pilot study. The two reporters now dig into the pathway -- and the obstacles it's dotted with -- to planting those trees near bus stops and what to do when that simply isn’t an option.

Sara and Katie visit two dozen bus stops across Houston with their high-tech equipment, garnering lots of strange looks and questions from METRO riders, passing cars and bus drivers. They let riders know the question on their minds: just how hot do bus stops get during the never-ending heatwave in Houston this summer? What they found were some extremely hot stops and a budding friendship between two coworkers. 
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Taking the bus should be simple. With over nine thousand bus stops in Houston, you should be able to find one, hop on and get there. But in Houston, heat can turn a simple trip into an odyssey. In this first episode of Hot Stops, we uncover 911 heat-related calls from bus stops and learn how time in the heat can add up, causing some to suffer from heat illness and pass.

"It's like a sweat box," "an easy bake oven," "it's like a desert." This is how METRO riders described Houston bus stops to Sara Willa Ernst and Katie Watkins at the beginning of the summer. This left them wondering just how hot these bus stops can get. No data on the subject exists, so they armed themselves with sunscreen, baseball hats, and a high-tech thermometer and headed to the bus stop to get answers for themselves. What they found lined up with the stories they had heard: dangerously hot temperatures that experts found alarming. Their reporting led them to learn about riders getting sick from the heat and a public transit system ill-prepared to protect its riders from rising temperatures brought by climate change.
Hot Stops: How Houston Bus Stops Get Dangerously Hot premieres on Thursday, September 7th.