Walking enhances health and supports urban sustainability. Outdoor thermal comfort significantly influences people’s enthusiasm for walking and the quality of their outdoor activities. When walking in urban streets, pedestrians encounter a series of unstable microclimate environments. However, current models for assessing outdoor thermal comfort typically focus on specific locations and times, failing to fully account for the varied conditions along the entire path. To meet pedestrians’ actual walking needs, this study investigates pedestrian thermal comfort through a whole-trip perspective, conducted within a controlled laboratory setting. A series of experiments were carried out in a climate chamber, creating varied dynamic thermal radiation exposure scenarios to analyze their effects on pedestrians’ perceptions throughout the trip segments they have completed. Findings indicate that for pedestrians experiencing dynamic environmental changes, whole-trip thermal sensation is neither equivalent to instantaneous thermal sensation nor to the weighted average of past thermal sensations at different time periods. Current instantaneous thermal sensation, mean skin temperature, and the surplus Joules received by the human body compared to the neutral thermal state can better characterize the whole-trip thermal sensation of pedestrians. The results of this study will help to deepen the understanding of human thermal perception patterns in dynamic environments and provide a theoretical basis for outdoor microclimate design and pedestrian thermal comfort evaluation.

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Source: Zhao, H., Zhao, L., Zhai, Y., Jin, L., Meng, Q., Yan, J., Wu, R., & Brown, R. D. (2024). The impact of dynamic thermal experiences on pedestrian thermal comfort: A whole-trip perspective from laboratory studies. Building and Environment, 258, 111599. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.buildenv.2024.111599