LA secures funding for bus shelters. Community calls it 'long overdue'

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass this week announced that she has secured funding to address some of the effects of the climate crisis, mostly by building more shade structures.

Roughly $93.5 million dollars will be allocated toward addressing extreme heat, with the majority of the funding for building bus shelters. Other money will go toward planting more trees and installing cooling pavement.

Work on installing the shelters will begin early next year.

The funding, said Councilmember Imelda Padilla at a news conference, will help the city add 3,000 more bus shelters and 450 shade structures over 10 years. In Padilla's district, which encompasses the San Fernando Valley, she said they'll focus on building shelters along routes like the 152, 154 and 94.

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Temperatures in the San Fernando Valley can rise up to 115 degrees, and “for somebody to be sitting on a bench like this and not have shade is literally dangerous,” Congressman Tony Cardenas told reporters at a news conference.

Funding is coming from:

• $30 million Public Works Trust Fund loan that will go toward Los Angeles’ Sidewalk and Transit Amenities Program (STAP) to install bus shelters and shade structures
• $8 million in Los Angeles City funding also toward STAP 
• $53 million in funding from Metro to construct bus shelters as part of Metro’s North San Fernando Valley Transit Corridor project
• $2.5 million in Federal Community Project Funding that will be used toward shade structures, cooling pavements and other projects designed to bring down the heat on sidewalks

Effects of heat

Madeline Brozen welcomes the funding. As deputy director for the UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies, her work focuses on the transport needs of vulnerable populations. Through her research, she’s found that only about 23% of bus stops in Los Angeles have shade.

“Extreme heat kills more people than any other natural disaster,” Brozen said. “There's a really important avenue (building bus shelters) by which to address public health and make sure that people feel less of the impacts of climate change.”

Extreme heat, she said, was one of equity as those who are more likely to ride the bus are people of color.

People at risk for the negative effects of extreme heat, she said, live in neighborhoods that have less tree cover and access to air conditioning because of “the way in which kind of the neighborhoods are constructed.”

Barriers to bus shelters

Funding was just one of the barriers to installing bus shelters in the city, Brozen said. There were also “bureaucratic hurdles in terms of the approval process by which new shelters are being added to the system,” as well as how the city’s previous contract was set up to provide bus shelters. The contract, she said, was focused on “producing ad revenue and the city wasn't actually seeing any of that revenue.”

The city’s current contract with Tranzito-Vector, LLC is exciting, she added.

“The city is actually paying the capital costs and that they're getting revenue sharing with the new contractor,” Brozen said. “This is just allowing for the city to have more control of where the bus shelters will go as they're putting in the capital costs.”

Community welcomes the funding 

Jessica Meaney, executive director of Investing in Place, a nonprofit focused on transportation and public works advocacy in Los Angeles, said the funding was long overdue. In 2022, the organization published a report titled, The Bus Stops Here. In it, bus riders across the city, said things that were lacking included “shade, a place to sit, trash picked up, feelings of safety, lighting, kind of the basic things that have been far too long neglected in the city of LA and our public right of way.”

Investing in bus shelters, Meaney said, would also mean bringing them up “to accessible standards so that people with wheelchairs, with strollers and things like that have a safe and easy path to wait for the bus.”