Accessible and available public transportation is seen today as an essential element in ensuring the quality of urban life and as one of the central goals in any urban sustainability vision. However, accessibility to public transportation is often presented as depending mainly on the habitual distance between the users' starting points (places of residence or work) and the shuttle stations and the physical infrastructure for walking, such as the availability of wide sidewalks, without taking into account the climatic comfort of the pedestrian access routes to the shuttle stations.

In Israel, it is known that conditions of a lack of shading may have an acute effect on the heat loads to which pedestrians are exposed, as well as non-planar topographic conditions that force the body to invest excess physical effort when moving uphill.

The purpose of this research is to develop an index of climatic accessibility of shuttle stations, to locate on the basis of this index the climatic weak points in the network of shuttle stations in urban environments in Israel and to prioritize actions to improve these conditions based on it. The development of the method will be based on the use of huge data of various types (geographic, functional) and advanced computational techniques with the aim of examining not only the potential damage to the thermal comfort of public transport users due to poor planning of the urban environment, but also to what extent this damage can be linked to the frequency of public transport use .

The research will focus on three major cities in Israel: Tel Aviv-Jaffa, Haifa and Be'er Sheva, which are centers of public transportation that differ from each other in terms of geography, climate and transportation. The focus on these cities is expected to present a broad and varied picture of the distribution of bus stops in the urban space and of physical urban conditions, primarily exposure to solar radiation, topography and building density and street network.