By Ann Hoevel and Wes McRae | July 9, 2026
“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.
Cool Routes on Campus
“I tell my landscapers all day to step into the shade,” Patterson said, “Our environmental health and safety colleague is always telling our guys to drink water. I don’t want my guys to get hurt.”
Landscapers could benefit immediately from the Cool Routes app, Patterson said.
“If we’re seeing hot spots on campus, and that map can help us figure out where these hot spots are in relation to the landscape, we could run irrigation schedules based on which is the hottest area,” he said. “For us, it serves multiple purposes.”
“Our supervisors could use the app to create daily task schedules for their crews that work around shade areas instead of full light areas,” he said. “Also, why not use it in reverse in the winter, when you want to stay warmer?”
Patterson is impressed by the home-grown app. “For us to be part of it, the thoughtfulness that goes into taking care of our team, it really does bring in a family-type atmosphere. And it gives me a deeper appreciation for the students and what they do.”
When heat exhaustion progresses to heat stroke, treatment is critical, he said. “Heat stroke, if left untreated, will kill you, and it kills you pretty fast, actually,” Dowdy said.
World Cup fans visiting Atlanta may already be unintentionally compromised by lack of sleep or dehydration, he said. Dowdy pointed out that the only option for people to cool down in that situation may be buying a $15 slushy from one of the game-related vendors.
Not everyone can afford the overpriced food that’s part of a major sporting event. “What they need is data, information, so that they can plan around the heat risk and avoid the worst of it. To identify where the canopy and greenery are, so we can take routes through there to reduce the cumulative load of heat stress on our bodies.”
Dowdy sees high heat as part of the climate crisis, which he points to as modern humanity’s primary threat.
“I’m excited to see that this is being worked on at Georgia Tech. We can bring some of Tech’s immense resources to bear on the fundamental problem of keeping human beings alive and safe outdoors.”