I try not to write about the social media outrage of the day, but the one from yesterday was about bus stops in LA. Two things dear to my heart. I love buses and I love LA, and recently spent two weeks without a car in south LA.
If you haven’t followed it, yesterday LA city officials proudly announced the unveiling of a new “shade and lighting” thingamajig, named La Sombrita, to address rider complaints. You can see the tweet here:
Not surprisingly, Twitter did its thing and roundly mocked La Sombrita, pointing out that it’s a sad provider of both light and shade. I mean, just look at it.
At best it provides shade for one person, maybe, and as many people pointed out, imagine the fights over who gets to use the sometimes single sliver of shade.
As for the light, I’m not sure how this is better, or any different, than your standard street lamp?
Then there was the issue of cost, and the whole wrapping it in the issue of gender equity. The latter was because it was found from a poll that women riders want more shade and more safety, which given that women are people isn’t surprising. All bus riders, no matter their gender, race, religion, and age want more shade and safety.
As for the cost, it was claimed that each La Sombrita is $10,000, although the research that went into designing it is said to have cost well over $300,000
. The research included junkets to foreign cities to see what works including Quito, Ecuador, a city I’ve spent a fair amount of time in walking and bussing. I can tell you, Quito doesn’t have these sad things.
I’m really glad LA is trying to address its bus stop problem, because while LA has a surprisingly extensive system, with clean and comfortable buses, the stops themselves are all over the place. The larger ones are great, like in the picture below.
However, the smaller stops are hit-and-miss. Some like in the cover photo are literally a pole along the side of a busy road (at least this one is under an interstate which provides shade, but reeks of urine), while others are a simple bench in the sun.
That, however, they’ve come up with La Sombrita as the solution is so depressing and a revealing example of a much bigger problem in the US: we can’t build nice things. Especially not when compared to the rest of the world, which is all poorer than us. Often much poorer.
After I spent two weeks walking (and bussing) LA, I went to Taipei, then Germany, where I walked both the Ruhr Valley and Rhine Valley.
The contrast is shocking, from the obvious larger public works (which I don’t want to focus on)
, to the less obvious smaller things, like the lesser bus stops, which while sometimes chaotic looking, work.
Part of the issue LA is dealing with, relative to Taipei or Quito, is that it’s rather spread out and is a less dense cityscape, a result of being a car-centered city, where buses are secondary fill-ins.
Quito
, which has a wonderful newer trolleybus network as well as a more extensive regular bus system, is an older, denser city. There are few long stretches of road with no buildings against the sidewalk to provide shade and light.
It’s also a less regulated city, where the natural ebb and flow of people, the fruit vendors’ umbrellas, or the upstairs porch of the building right next to the road, provide the shade. LA doesn’t have as much of that. It has long, straight streets lined with shopping plazas, set off from the road by extensive parking lots. Or streets of homes with large yards.
The other big issue LA is dealing with, which they won’t admit, is homelessness. They built La Sombrita, rather than a full shelter, for the same reason NYC is taking benches out of Penn Station and Port Authority — they don’t want them to be used as shelters.
The bus stop in the cover photo has dozens of homeless camping immediately around it. Including a guy sleeping on a mattress just across the street.
It’s something you see more and more in US cities. A locking down of public spaces in an attempt to deal with the growth of the homeless population and drug use.
A removal of resources for the majority, because of concerns over “misuse” of less than one percent of residents.
That isn’t to say those concerns aren’t well founded. Shelters become unusable if someone is sleeping or pissing in them, but it’s a cowardly way to cope with a problem they are otherwise not wanting to, or able to, address.
When you start comparing LA’s bus stop problem, or any other US cities, with the rest of the world you see the framework of a larger problem we are dealing with.
To get big-brained about it, something like La Sombrita could only happen in a high-regulation/low-trust society like the US. In every other variation (low regulation/high trust, high regulation/high trust, low regulation/low trust) you get either larger public works without fear of vandalism or misuse (a proper bus shelter), or like in Quito (a lower regulation society) you get natural ad hoc bottom-up solutions.
It’s only in the high-regulation low-trust society (ours), that you end up building the least to protect against the worst — the constraints of both regulations and behavior results in things the majority doesn’t want, or doesn’t find useful.
This is why there are so few new functional things in US cities and why what is built feels “cold.” Regulati
