A little commentary on a Los Angeles bus stop
Chris Arnade calls it the sort of thing that happens in an overregulated + low-trust society like the US.
I have been impressed by just how many lessons have been drawn from a tiny little LA bus stop fiasco. And as someone who cares about:
Good urban design.
How overregulation makes life worse.
And, the moneymaking graft of “equity”.
I thought I’d write a few words, and link to a nice piece by Chris Arnade.
If you aren’t on Twitter / missed the story, apparently the women of LA were saying they want more shade and lighting at bus stops… one can’t blame them for that. So as part of their Gender Equity Action Plan, the city commissioned the design of a new bus stop to provide exactly that, and came up with… LA SOMBRITA.
So friends… that’s a small piece of porous metal and a light. In other words, it’s a low-quality bus stop fixture, something just marginally better than a sign on a pole. You wouldn’t even notice it if you were just walking by. But look at all those cameras for the celebration, look at the pride. It’s a low quality bus stop fixture GENDER EQUITY PRODUCT. (Someone on Twitter told me “I love that it becomes a gender equity product if you’re thinking about women when you look at it.”)
Oh, and because of course, the light it provides at night is also pitiful.
How much did this silly thing cost the city? Well, according to Arnade’s post, $300,000 for the design, and $10,000 per installation. And that is what I meant by “equity graft”. We are in the wrong profession friends. We should be bending pieces of metal, calling them gender equity pieces of metal and selling them to progressive governments for huge sums of money.
It reminded me of some of the HR-trainings I was required to take when I worked at LCC. It was super shallow stuff that I could have designed while half-asleep, just make some slides that say the faddish equity things HR wants you to say. But I bet the firms that provided them were paid gobs of money for them.
Why the US is so messed up on stuff like this
I found it interesting… Arnade is a world traveler who gets around by walking and public transit, and he regularly makes the point that US transit infrastructure is particularly bad - worse than other rich countries and also worse than many poor countries. Why? He connects it to overregulation, and low-trust.
Overregulation
Overregulation means that if you want some new transit infrastructure built, why you have to go through the appropriate channels, there have to be studies, committees must meet, public comments must be heard, design must be maximized for “safety” and environmental benefit or whatever, and then ten years later funds must be spent.
By contrast, in Quito, Ecuador, he said, if there was a need for shade at a bus stop, riders would have tied an umbrella to a pole. Or tossed some old chairs under a tree (see his post for photos). Or streetside vendors would have been attracted to the location and they would have umbrellas. The problem would be solved in an effective, cheap, ad-hoc manner within a week. But despite the benefit to the public, those solutions would all be illegal in the US and would be quickly dismantled.
(Incidentally, it is a regular theme of the Strong Towns crowd that the amount of money we have in the US has allowed us to be stupid about infrastructure design. That stupidity would simply be too expensive to implement in much of the world. Quito isn’t going to pay anyone $10,000 to attach a bent piece of metal to a pole.)
And speaking personally, when we were in Delhi, India, the streetside vendors everywhere was one of the things that was charming about the place. In the US it’s often a fight to get food trucks allowed along one block. We make life a lot worse by overregulating it to make it “safer” and “better”. (Sample photo from Delhi trip below.)
Low-trust
His other big theme is that the US is a low-trust society. If you want a bus stop that provides shade and maybe lighting… uh, how about a traditional bus shelter design that has been in use for a century now? (Below, have a year-old photo of Kriti here as illustration of a Lansing bus shelter!) Well the unstated issue in LA is that homeless people would sleep / set up camp in them. Or people would use drugs in them. Or urinate in them. So instead you get this silly, celebrated piece of porous metal.
And indeed, locally to me, the bus shelters were recently removed at a shopping center near our home. The shopping center said employees of the businesses were being harassed by people hanging out at the bus shelters. The bus stops are now just a sign along the road.
THAT IS ALL. Give Arnade’s photo-filled post a read.
By coincidence, there's been some bus shelter drama in my neighbourhood. It was being used by junkies and mentally ill people, some of both being quite aggressive. The city took it down as nuisance abatement. The well-to-do activist bien pensant threw tantrums, 24/7 sanctimonious hysterics. The city restored it. A week or so later, a concerned citizen abated it very thoroughly with his pickup truck. I laughed, but it's not a great solution. The people abusing it belong in some form of custody or close supervision, under real threat of extended incarceration. That would be truly helpful. The money for that, however, is being diverted to minor league oligarchs and their stooges.
Arnade's stuff is excellent, I've been fan for a while.
"This is why we can't have nice things" is a the spirit of the age. The photography of urban landscapes from 100 years ago shows the extent to which we're all living downstream of 1001 tragedies of the commons.