Thermal comfort performance of bus stops at IIUM Gombak campus

Abstract

In an effort to ensure a sustainable campus environment, IIUM embarked on the Green campus mission by encouraging an increase in the use of bicycles and public buses as a means to reduce pollution and ensure a friendlier and safer campus and its environs. In line with this noble cause that the university is championing, this study seeks to augment this effort by conducting research on the thermal comfort of the university concentrating on the bus stops encircling the IIUM Gombak campus. These bus stops host public buses and passengers (staffs, students and visitors) who wait for the bus to get to their destinations. For this purpose, the thermal comfort condition of bus stop encircling IIUM Gombak campus was evaluated. The research is divided into two segments; firstly, field measurements of thermal environments to calculate the human thermal comfort indices from the environmental data obtained from the bus stops, and secondly the subjective method namely field survey questionnaire, to assess the relationships between the thermal environment and the evolved subjective human reactions. The measurements were done at selected bus stops within IIUM Gombak. Then, by cross-tabulating the data using SPSS, these values were summed up in a table to indicate minimum and maximum measures. They were then compared with the current users’ perceptions of environmental values from questionnaire survey. The findings revealed that some bus stops are thermally more comfortable than the other