If you wait for the bus in Los Angeles on a hot day, there’s a good chance that you’ll be standing in the sun: The majority of the city’s 8,000 bus stops don’t have shelters or even shade from a tree. As the planet heats up and extreme heat becomes more common, the problem is getting worse.
At a press conference last week, city officials unveiled what they called a “shade and lighting pilot” in an attempt to offer a solution. When photos circulated online of the design, called La Sombrita, the response was disbelief. A skinny sheet of perforated metal, slightly curved and attached to a pole, looked like it might possibly offer a little shade for one person if the sun hits at just the right angle. A solar panel and battery also power a light in the structure at night, though photos of the prototype seem to show that it doesn’t actually illuminate the sidewalk. The four prototypes each cost $7,500 (initially reported as “under $10,000”), though mass produced devices would cost less. The funding came from a foundation, not taxpayers.
On Twitter and Reddit, Angelenos asked the obvious question: Why not plant a tree, or build an actual bus shelter? KDI, the nonprofit design firm that worked on the project for the city, outlined the constraints. One challenge is the fact that at many bus stops, the sidewalk is so narrow that the city says there isn’t room for a tree to grow or to build a full shelter.
There are also financial considerations, which one transportation advocate laid out: The current model for bus shelters—which can cost upwards of $50,000 to build and maintain—relies on advertising on side panels, which requires a bigger size. (This model also makes it harder to build shelters in low-income neighborhoods where there’s less demand from advertisers.) And because of the way the bureaucracy is set up, adding a new shelter involves eight city departments, approval from an elected official, and 16 different steps. Even attaching a shade structure to an existing bus bench isn’t easy, because it involves another agency.
“We are committed to making it easier and safer for people to get to where they need to go in LA—and testing all possible solutions that help us get there,” Colin Sweeney, a spokesperson for LADOT, said in a statement. “This pilot, entirely grant funded, is not a replacement for bus shelters and street lights, which are critical investments we need more of, and was designed to test ways of creating small amounts of shade and light where other solutions are not immediately possible.” As a pilot, there aren’t any plans yet (and there isn’t any funding allocated) to build more of the shade devices.
The design is a hack to move faster. It’s lightweight and tiny enough that it can be attached to an existing sign pole, something each bus stop has, so no new permits are needed to install it. It can be put in place in half an hour. The final cost will likely be around 4% of a standard shelter. (It’s also similar to another design in development, though that version can rotate to better block the sun throughout the day.) But while even a sliver of shade can be helpful—as anyone who’s waited for a bus in the shadow of a telephone pole or walk sign can tell you—the inadequacy of the design points to bigger issues.
“What I see is a shade structure that has been basically whittled down by all the regulations and policies that make it really difficult—and you can call it illegal—to produce shade where needed,” says V. Kelly Turner, an associate professor of urban planning and geography at UCLA who studies how design can protect people from extreme heat. (She also previously worked with KDI on more standard-looking bus shelters for farmworkers in Riverside County).
“The big-picture issue that you’re finding here, whether it’s ‘La Sombrita’ or it’s street trees, is that most of our cities don’t think about shade as an infrastructure system,” she says. “We’re doing these little patchwork, piecemeal interventions, but not thinking through all the places where people might use shade and how it might be appropriate to provide that.”
Planning what happens at a bus stop isn’t just about the bus stop; if the sidewalk needs to be wider to accommodate trees or full shelters (or more pedestrians, or outdoor dining, or badly-needed public restrooms), it should be part of a larger strategy. “We need a vision: What do we want from our sidewalks or streets in 10 years? What are our priorities?” says Jessica Meaney, executive director for Transportation in Place, a nonprofit that advocates for better transportation and public infrastructure.
L.A. is unusual in that it doesn’t have a capital infrastructure plan, a multi-year budget and strategy for managing public space. “There is no public works and transportation budget for the city of Los Angeles, and it’s really hard to do budget advocacy without a budget,” says Meaney, adding that it’s hard to track where the billion-plus dollars in funding for public works and transportation actually go each year (her group has spent years digging through spreadsheets). Planning happens one year at a time, she says, and projects may not include future needs, so trees might be planted without enough funding to maintain them so they can stay healthy and grow large enough to actually provide shade.
Investing in Place recently did an inventory of L.A.’s public right of way, including sidewalks and bus stops, since the city didn’t have a comprehensive list. The group learned that the city has around 200,000 empty tree wells; city arborists told them that they couldn’t be planted because of narrow sidewalks. They also learned that the city has a staggering 9,000 miles of sidewalks.
An LADOT official told me on background that there’s a general push to improve coordination between agencies; for example, in the last couple of years, the city has started coordinating work to add bike lanes at the same time that a street needs repaving. Meaney also said that there’s support for putting a capital infrastructure plan in place. Arguably, LADOT should also build more internal capacity to work on sidewalk and street furniture design itself—and to study what riders need, though it should be obvious that shade during the day and light at night are important. But it’s difficult to shift the way that a massive city government works.
Although some of the challenges are especially pronounced in L.A., other cities need to similarly rethink shade as heat waves grow. “Most cities probably need to step back and think more holistically about shade,” says Turner. That also means planning beyond bus stops, so pedestrians can walk comfortably. (It doesn’t always mean trees, since mid-rise buildings can also offer shade.)
“Heat exposure is a cumulative thing that happens throughout the day,” she says. “If you’re an individual who lives in a hot neighborhood that lacks shade, and then you maybe work outside or in conditions where it’s hot and there’s no air conditioning, and then you’re taking buses and there’s no shade, or your kids are then going to a school that has just a giant parking lot where they have to play, that’s the big issue. . . . Overall, our cities are not designed to think about people being comfortable and healthy in their climate.”
Correction/update: KDI clarified that the prototypes were 15% of the cost of a standard bus shelter, but the cost could drop to 4% in the future (or around $2,000). The concept came out of an earlier report on gender equity in transportation that cost $200,000 to produce; the organization couldn’t share the size of the grant for the current project, a roadmap for equity in transit, which will eventually include suggestions for around 40 different actions.
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