Cool Pavement Programme
This overview was generated with AI from the public sources listed below and checked against them before publication. It has not had a complete human fact-check — treat it as a starting point and follow the sources.
How this atlas is made · What “last verified” means · What “source-checked” means · The full record behind this page
StreetsLA (Bureau of Street Services) coats residential streets with a light-grey reflective 'CoolSeal' sealant to fight the urban heat-island effect. Piloted from 2017, the programme had coated roughly 175 lane-miles across about 600 street segments by 2023, prioritising the hottest, most heat-vulnerable neighbourhoods such as Pacoima, Sun Valley and South LA. Application costs about $40,000 per lane-mile and lasts several years.
what does this mean?
The strongest source behind this entry is an independent peer-reviewed or academic study. It grades who did the looking — not how well the project went. All four grades →📊 Impact
Field measurements report coated road surfaces up to ~10°F cooler than conventional asphalt, and, in the Pacoima deployment, ambient air temperatures up to 3.5°F cooler during extreme-heat events. A peer-reviewed study (Ko et al. 2022) confirmed real daytime cooling but flagged increased reflected sunlight on pedestrians at street level.
🎓 Lesson
Reflective pavement measurably lowers air and surface temperature, but bounces more sunlight onto people at street level — a real daytime-comfort tradeoff cities must weigh.
Sources
Show your work What this page rests on and what it can’t tell you · all 1 claims with their sources · the forensic record
Evidence Passport · public beta 1 addressable claim, 3 source dossiers, one permanent baseline. The passport is unreviewed — an AI-assisted structural migration, not a human or expert endorsement. Every revision keeps a permanent copy under revision history.
Inspect the claims, one by one — verbatim text, sources and caveats for all 1
The text below is copied verbatim from the published record. Each claim names the source dossiers that carry it; caveats stay attached to the claim they qualify.
clm-249719a9cb596719
quantitative
A peer-reviewed study (Ko et al. 2022) confirmed real daytime cooling but flagged increased reflected sunlight on pedestrians at street level.
Sources carrying this claim
Forensic record — source dossiers, gaps, hashes and the exact revision this page renders
This layer records what is known about each source, what is still missing, and the exact snapshot this page is rendering. A missing date, archive or hash stays visible as missing.
Awaiting operator and domain-expert review; publication of this revision implies neither.
sha256:2d635b6e985af94ebd4c4aa0178e97e87f42270c594a5bbd973e860b8b19f582
- 1
- of 1 claims mapped
- 3
- source dossiers
- 2
- publication dates recorded
- 1
- archives linked
- 0
- exact locators
- 0
- content captures hashed
Governance facts carried by the record
- Operator
- StreetsLA (Bureau of Street Services)
- Actor types
- city-government
- Funding model
- public
- Funding description
- Not recorded
- Cost
- ~$40,000 per lane-mile (StreetsLA); FY2023 ~$4M from the Street Damage Restoration Fee
- Ownership
- Not recorded
- Decision rights
- Not recorded
- Exit conditions
- Not recorded
3 source dossiers
StreetsLA / Bureau of Street Services — What We Do (authority)
- Stable source ID
src-626064c869fe3928- Publisher
- Name not classified · lastreets.lacity.org
- Type / language
- web-page · language not classified
- Published
- Not recorded
- Updated
- Not recorded
- Source last checked
- No source-level check date
- Record last verified
- 2026-07-17
- Dossier created
- 2026-08-20
- Retrieved copy
- No local capture recorded
- Archive
- No archived copy linked
- Content hash
- No captured content hash
- Locator
- Descriptive only — not page/paragraph exact
Open the recorded source note
Official StreetsLA description of the Cool Pavement programme and heat strategy.
- Claims linked
- Background source; no baseline claim points here
Smart Cities Dive — Results of the LA cool pavement experiment (press)
- Stable source ID
src-224850f5dfc85d56- Publisher
- Name not classified · smartcitiesdive.com
- Type / language
- web-page · language not classified
- Published
- 2024-04-26
- Updated
- Not recorded
- Source last checked
- No source-level check date
- Record last verified
- 2026-07-17
- Dossier created
- 2026-08-20
- Retrieved copy
- No local capture recorded
- Archive
- No archived copy linked
- Content hash
- No captured content hash
- Locator
- Descriptive only — not page/paragraph exact
Open the recorded source note
Pacoima study: up to 3.5°F cooler air in extreme heat; 175 lane-miles / 600 segments by 2023.
- Claims linked
- Background source; no baseline claim points here
Ko et al. 2022, Environmental Research Letters (peer-reviewed)
- Stable source ID
src-1c03ba15a6804665- Publisher
- Name not classified · iopscience.iop.org
- Type / language
- web-page · language not classified
- Published
- 2022-03-18
- Updated
- Not recorded
- Source last checked
- No source-level check date
- Record last verified
- 2026-07-17
- Dossier created
- 2026-08-20
- Retrieved copy
- No local capture recorded
- Archive
- Open archived copy ↗ · 2026-07-31
- Content hash
- No captured content hash
- Locator
- Descriptive only — not page/paragraph exact
Open the recorded source note
Neighbourhood-scale albedo/temperature measurement; documents daytime cooling and pedestrian-radiation tradeoff.
- Claims linked
Known limits of this passport
- Publisher names and source languages have not yet been classified; domains are recorded without guessing.
- Existing source notes are descriptive locators, not page- or paragraph-exact citations.
- A missing archive, publication date or content hash is shown as null rather than inferred.
- The project-level evidence grade ranks the strongest source in the entry; it is not a truth score for every claim.
Continue exploring
Compare this project
A city notices the heat — what is it actually able to do?
Four responses to the same hazard, ordered by how far the city's own hand reaches: from a post created by philanthropy to a plan that changes what hospitals and water carriers do on a forecast day.
| Project | Since | Status | Outcome | Evidence | Run by | Cost | What the city can actually act on |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Heat Action PlanAhmedabad, 🇮🇳 | 2013 | Live | Ongoing | Peer-reviewed | City government, National government, Research institution | not public | A forecast triggers an alert the municipal corporation acts on, and the peer-reviewed literature calls it South Asia's first heat-health action plan. |
| Cool Pavement ProgrammeLos Angeles, 🇺🇸 | 2017 | Live | Succeeded | Peer-reviewed | City government | ~$40,000 per lane-mile (StreetsLA); FY2023 ~$4M from the Street Damage Restoration Fee | Physical change the city controls outright: reflective coating on residential streets, prioritised in the hottest neighbourhoods. |
| Extrema Global Heat Risk ApplicationAthens, 🇬🇷 | 2018 | Live | Ongoing | Independent | Research institution, City government | not public | Information rather than infrastructure: personalised heat-risk scores and directions to the nearest cool space. |
| Miami-Dade's Chief Heat Officer and Extreme Heat Action PlanMiami, 🇺🇸 | 2021 | Completed | Scaled back | Media | Regional government | not public | A post rather than a power — created with philanthropic seed money, and abolished when the budget and state law closed in. |
Explore the wider context
📎 Cite this project
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “Cool Pavement Programme” — Los Angeles, United States. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/la-cool-pavement/ (last verified 2026-07-17). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.