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 madFor 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.
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.
And the bus stop somehow involved more bureaucracy to achieve
this would’ve been better
What if I told you… yuppie car tunnels with no safety features and LED lighting?
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?
I’ve seen women in Spain using umbrellas in the past (a very, very long time ago).
I used to rock umbrellas in summer too
Looks like a project where the actual purpose was to funnel money to any consultants involved in the design
Thats how most bus stops are here in the UK. We’ve had them like that since buses were a thing. Is it an attack on the homeless or just a bus stop? I feel like more context is needed.
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.
LA Metro hates the homeless more than the average Angeleno and that is fucking saying something.
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“The train” get the fuck out of here you fake ass mf. Nobody in LA talks like that.
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Nobody calls it that. Everybody calls it the green line. Fuck off. Go back to reddit where you can post anti-homeless BS on discussions about communities you don’t live in. Your BS isn’t tolerated here.
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.
Its function is surely to say “here is a bus stop, you can get a but here at X time”. I’m not arguing that its uncomfortable for passengers. I’m certainly not arguing that homelessness is a problem, but come on - fix the homeless issues, dont create a society where they sleep in bus shelters. Give them a society where they get jobs that pay, medical and mental health treatment, affordable homes, etc. I find it kind of sad that this is people’s first thought of reasoning when talking homelessness.
And if its passengers that want the shade, dont use the homeless as a wedge issue. It muddies the water. Dont get to the bus stop too early, ask the company, or go with another firm for transport/ride a bike… There are options even in shit countries.
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.
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?
Thats just some inner city ones. Many rural ones are just flag poles.
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.
Then you have a corrupt local authority that funnels your taxes out. Vote for better people, stand for election, be citizen journalist…
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.
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.
Maybe the real issue isnt the bus stop, its the lack of regard and help in general for homeless people? I mean, how many of those objecting donate to homeless charity (I do twice a year if I can afford it), or help at shelters? Vote for politicians with a proven record of helping addiction, mental illness issues and poverty issues? I mean its all good to say “there are no seats” but people shouldnt be having to fcuking sleep on a bus shelter in the first place - they need proper bloody help.
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.
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
