Last week, the Los Angeles Department of Transportation held a press conference and ribbon-cutting ceremony to launch its latest facility: a bus shade and lamp roughly the size of a streetside parking sign called “La Sombrita.” Pictures displaying the device showed an internet eager for Sombrita content and its limited ambitions (see the viral chatter on Twitter and TikTok), as it provides little or no shade at certain times of day and the lamp is pointed so it doesn’t even illuminate its surroundings:
The Los Angeles Department of Transportation (LADOT) and Kounkuey Design Initiative (KDI), the nonprofit behind La Sombrita’s design, explicitly acknowledge that the structure was specifically designed for situations where permitting delays, agency conflicts, or narrow sidewalks prevent the installation of street trees or traditional bus shelters with a roof and seating. Indeed, highlighting these constraints may have been the most valuable contribution that La Sombrita makes to the Los Angeles bus system, because these limitations are self-imposed, or at the very least, stem from a narrow political vision that must be widened for cities to govern effectively through coming challenges.
Despite the humorous tone of the discussion — and La Sombrita certainly deserves the jokes at its expense — the issues of shade, nighttime lighting, and general infrastructure needs for pedestrians and bus users are all quite serious business. Bus riders — often low-income workers using current American bus systems as a mode of last resort — are forced to wait for infrequent service under the scorching sun with nowhere to sit, and without coverage from street trees like those common in richer neighborhoods. The structure’s lamp was included to meet an identified need for better lighting to help provide security for women against the risk of gendered violence. Narrow sidewalks and poor maintenance hurt all users, but they make any further obstruction especially difficult for people with mobility disabilities to pass by. And for the public and planet at large, infrastructure that improves low-emissions transportation methods like buses and walking will be increasingly important to us all as climate change continues to raise temperatures and reduce cloud cover in a brutal feedback cycle.
Just as the clean energy transition requires updating old federal environmental regulations holding back the deployment of renewables, transmission, and mass transit, cities working to mitigate and adapt to climate change while growing and maintaining their vibrancy through the social and workplaces transitions that follow the COVID pandemic must reform these local regulatory thickets holding back city governments like LADOT from building out effective networks of infrastructure for neglected modes of low-carbon transportation. The problem is not limited to Los Angeles either, as the decade-long slog to build bus lanes in San Francisco and a million-dollar bus stop in Arlington, Virginia, demonstrate.
Cities around the world have shown that climate-friendly urban infrastructure projects can be delivered quickly and at low cost. Consider the COVID pop-up bike lanes of Paris, which increased ridership by 60% in just two years, or the world-class bus rapid transit network that Mexico City built in the time it took San Francisco to build just one lane, or Vienna’s Cool Streets program that provide shade and water features at places for city residents to cool off in the fresh air on select streets during hotter and hotter summers.
Adopting programs like these in the U.S. will never succeed if every program is launched as an expensive pilot project forced to jump through the hoops of countless agencies’ rules and forced through tortuous process requirements. U.S. cities aiming for ambitious progress on climate, mobility, and equity should be applauded for the results they achieve rather than the ideals they profess in service of overpriced half-measures. A comprehensive and forward-looking mode of urban governance does not require spending lavish sums on vanity projects but should instead focus on:
If America’s cities get out of their own way with unnecessary requirements and limitations to embrace a vision of livable and vibrant cities, the next $200,000 spent on urban infrastructure will go much further than La Sombrita.
