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.
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.
