American planners: we wanted to build 3 new bus lines but we were only given $3 and a mandate to
give itcontract it out to the mayor’s cousin’s anti-homeless company that has 50% cop employees.$3
“The design and prototyping was funded by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation […] Each prototype came to about $10,000 including design, materials and engineering, says Odbert, but the idea is that the cost for each shade would drop to about $2,000 if mass produced.”
Believe it or not those are kinds of average numbers for street furniture. Shit is pointlessly expensive due to contracting and a lack of central planning.
And the scale of what is needed to really do the job is hundreds of thousands to millions.
Problem with bus stops in my city is that fucking cars keep driving into them, then its months with no cover until they’re replaced
It’s insane that most bus shelters are designed to break away to keep the inhabitants of cars safer
Have you tried violence?
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There’s a reason it’s called a parasol
I used to rock umbrellas in summer too
And the bus stop somehow involved more bureaucracy to achieve
For the unfamiliar: “la sombrita” is the name of the corrugated metal piece on this bus stop post. It is designed to provide shade to people waiting for the bus, because the areas where these are installed have very little shade.
Due to a multitude of reasons from NIMBYs to building codes, it’s difficult for the city to install anything much bigger or better than this.
If you find this interesting, you can learn more by listening to episode 545 of the podcast 99% Invisible. It’s called “Shade Redux”
Poor lil smile bean city LA can’t change it’s own building codes.
Or, god forbid, use their Eminent Domain to take some private land along the sidewalk to improve life for poor people without impeding the ability of wheelchair users to navigate the city.
But that would anger the landowners, of course.
They couldn’t even finish the 710 because it would require them to domain the rich folk in the hills. So now the city still owns some homes that are going to rot below the hills and they spend (waste) money on cops to patrol/make sure no homeless can squat in them.
I saw that on
and couldn’t believe it was real. Everyone in that city’s government deserves to burn in the summer sun. The only reason to make building bus shelters that complicated is to punish the homeless, it doesn’t “just happen.” I live over 1000km away and it still makes me madThere is one thing to be said for it, which I think could be interpreted as sincere if you really wanna give them the benetof the doubt (I dont).
They wanted to design a busstop that also felt safe for women. Designing urban infrastructure is always difficult, because you need to balance a lot of different needs. One of these is the need for safety/perceived safety. No one will use something, if they perceive it as unsafe to do so. Another need is that for secluded spaces in public space. These two often come I to conflict, and it can be hard to solve the two.
They allegedly wanted to make something safer for people to use, that could be installed on narrow sidewalks.However they completely fucked up, and if that was what they actually wanted to do, they could’ve just copied one of the many existing tried-and-true designs.
They managed to make something “safe” by virtue of it not really being there anymore. Can’t feel unsafe because of poor visibility in the structure by the busstop, if the bus stop has no structure
Alternatively they could’ve talked to the people making use of the bus and people wanting to make use of the bus. City planners are deathly afraid of citizen participation and it sucks, because citizens are often the most insightful with regards to their needs.
It’s hard to imagine to me how a whole country can be so big. Poland is only somewhat bigger than Texas 💀
Well at least it isn’t a 🔲
Keep in mind this “low cost” bus stop cost $200k. Infinite grift.
https://www.cato.org/blog/la-sombrita-or-how-fail-infrastructure
Cato Institute link
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What if I told you… yuppie car tunnels with no safety features and LED lighting?
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LA Metro hates the homeless more than the average Angeleno and that is fucking saying something.
To give context from another capitalist hellhole that is propagandized in the West to be even a worse capitalist hell than the West to keep the population in line through fear:
Korea (lib) has bus stops with air conditioning, sun cover, wind cover, heated seating, usb charging port, wifi, and digitized bus arrival time with real time update through a screen.Yeah, that’s way above and beyond the average even in like, Berlin.
The most you get here is a small booth with a bench and glass covering the side + a plastic roof. Also the electronic screen with bus arrival times, but that’s a city thing only.
It’s supposed to provide shade to folks at the bus stop. How much shade is this actually providing? How many people can get in the marginal shade this even provides? It’s basically non functional.
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If you see the pole with the white Metro 16 sign on the right, that’s what tells you it’s a bus stop and what bus will stop there. This was supposed to be something more than that, now it’s basically a very expensive and redundant piece of crap.
The bus is really infrequent and LA gets a lot of the-sun-is-trying-to-kill-you days. The lack of benches is an attack on the homeless. This thing yielding practically no shade is an attack on bus riders. It’s not so much that they made things worse – I’ve stood at stops there with no shade whatsoever. That these things were just recently installed makes installing something actually good a non-starter for years, if not decades, and that’s the problem. It’s sort of a flip side to the good-is-not-the-enemy-of-the-perfect cliche. I don’t oppose this because it’s good and I want perfect – I oppose it because it’s crap and I want at least good, but we’re locked into crap for now. See also: VTA light rail.
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You can’t really do anything to improve local politics in LA because it’s utterly dominated by real estate interest groups, and also because the cops in LA need to get put in a denazification camp. Like the entire institution of policing is bad, but LA cops are genuinely insane.
What is the point of a bus shade cover if it’s transparent and smaller than a person? Also I searched “british bus stops” and they look like normal enclosed bus stops with bench inside them?
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We have those in LA too, but this thing they put up was meant to act as a bus shade and also cost like $100 million.
The difference is that the UK doesn’t have year-round temperatures of 29 degrees celcius. You can get away with not sheltering people in the UK because the weather (usually) won’t kill them.
