Bus stops as neighborhood focal points and opportunities for placemaking

1.  Boston is promoting digital library access at 20 bus stops ("Borrowing books on the bus? It’s happening in Boston," Boston Globe).

It's not particularly pathbreaking.  Libraries in places like Orange County, California and Calgary have put in book lending stations at transit stations in their communities for more than a decade.

2.  But once again, it raises the issue of how to make bus stops more than perfunctory places within a neighborhood and community.  See past blog entries:

-- "Pathetic not revelatory: Quality of bus stop study in San Francisco," 2021
-- "Bus shelters as social spaces, as potential vectors for virus: Seoul's new anti-covid bus shelter," 2020

Project for Public Spaces has a report on the topic, Destination Station: Transforming Bus Stops through Community Outreach.

3.  Utah has invested in bus stops, but given the heat and sun in the summer months, the fact that a majority of stops have zero provision for shade is a problem.  And not providing a shelter doesn't work out so great in the winter either.

There are three bus stops--no shelters--alongside Sugar House Park for which I am on the board, and I hope that we can work with the Utah Transit Authority to put shelters in, and at at least two of the locations, to incorporate greenery.

Transit shelter next to a fence/golf course, E. Spring Street, Long Beach, California, 

with bougainvillea growing on top of the shelter

A few years ago, there was a public art project with one bus shelter in Everett, Massachusetts that did something similar ("Everett tried to make a bus stop pretty," Boston Globe).  But only for three days.

Rendering of “Felipe Baeza: Unruly Forms,” which will be presented by Public Art Fund next month on more than 400 JCDecaux bus shelters and street furniture throughout New York, Chicago, Boston in the United States, and Mexico City, León, Querétaro in Mexico.  Image: Public Art Fund, NY

4.  The New York Times has an article on a bus shelter public art project, "Watching for the Bus Stop Gallery."  From the article:

Starting Aug. 9, the artist, whose home base is Brooklyn, will be giving people something to think about during their own public transportation journey, or purgatory as the case may be. As part of a Public Art Fund program designed to reach people where they live or commute, Baeza will have eight of his mixed-media, collagelike paintings reproduced on some 400 JCDecaux bus shelters in New York, Boston and Chicago as well as Querétaro and Léon in Mexico. They will also appear on digital kiosks and newsstands in Mexico City.... 

And his paintings for the project — fantastic, ritualistic images of human bodies in different stages of transformation or regeneration — touch on the power of mobility. Speaking from a small office-like studio at the Getty, where he had a nine-month residency ending in June, Baeza called his subjects “unruly forms” or “fugitive bodies” who don’t conform to norms or abide by laws. Some seem to be morphing into sea creatures or mythic birds; others are on the cusp of flight.

I especially like the leveraging of digital ad networks across cities.  

I proposed something like that, although within communities, as point #10, "Create a digital community and transit information network for Silver Spring, employing kiosks and mobile applications" in "PL #5: Creating a Silver Spring "Sustainable Mobility District" | Part 3: Program items 10-18" (2018).