LA's "La Sombrita" Represents Everything Wrong with American Transportation

We need to focus on outcomes, not process

You may have seen images showing the groundbreaking of a new bus shelter known as “La Sombrita” go viral on Twitter over the past few days. If you’ve been out of the loop, this is what it looks like:

Now obviously, La Sombrita fails to accomplish the goals of a bus shelter: it provides no seating, almost no shade, and no protection from the elements. While politicians and planners celebrating this silly structure are obviously deserving of criticism, the story behind this joke of a bus shelter is actually quite revealing of the broader failures of American transportation infrastructure. The rot goes far deeper than La Sombrita.

After being thoroughly mocked on the internet, Kounkuey, the design firm that came up with La Sombrita defended itself by explaining that “Typical bus shelters often cost $50k or more and require coordination among 8 departments. La Sombrita (in its most expensive, prototype form) costs approximately 15% of the price of a typical bus shelter and can be installed in 30 minutes or less”. This half-baked justification actually is a valuable insight into LA’s failure to provide transportation infrastructure. Specifically:

1. Unnecessary permitting requirements and lack of interagency cooperation: Kounkuey said that the “shelter” had to be small to avoid going through a permitting process requiring coordination across 8 different agencies. On it’s face, this is absurd, a standard-sized bus shelter is a well-known piece of infrastructure with obvious impacts. The permitting for a shelter should be instantaneous and there should be a dedicated point of contact who can coordinate across agencies to quickly get sign-off for this simple piece of infrastructure Further, the fact that there are eight separate agencies that need to review something as simple as a bus shelter shows how excessive permitting requirements create unnecessary chokepoints that slow down much-needed infrastructure. While installing a full bus shelter only takes two hours, the time required to get eight separate agencies to sign off on the shelter is typically much greater.

2. Diffusion of responsibility across municipal levels: While LA Metro serves the entirety of Los Angeles County, bus shelter installation is delegated to the specific municipality where a bus stop is located since each municipality owns the sidewalk. This reflects yet another layer of complexity, as LA County has 88 separate municipalities, each of which has its entirely unique permitting requirements. This gap prevents economies of scale, with every city devising its own bus shelter requirements, making it harder to incorporate learnings and best practices across the county.

3. Disproportionate focus on community feedback: Kounkuey likes to highlight the fact that they performed community outreach, with pictures of them speaking to small groups of residents. I have run focus groups before. You can get people in focus groups to say anything (I Think You Should Leave and The Simpsons both have fantastic parodies of focus groups highlighting this exact point). This is not to say that getting community feedback is a waste of time. But rather, the focus should be on finding specific pain points (in this case, a lack of shade and seating), and directly solving them at scale, rather than focus-grouping a solution to the point of parody.

4. Lack of modular, off-the-shelf designs: There are hundreds of thousands, if not millions of bus shelters across the world. This is not a unique project requiring a bespoke solution. As with many American transit failures, an excessive desire to innovate, rather than replicate, is partially to blame. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel and there is no need to reinvent the bus shelter. Just use what already works across the world: it’s almost always going to be more scalable and less expensive than creating a new solution from scratch.

5. Overreliance on external non-profits due to diminished state capacity: There’s no reason a non-profit design firm like Kounkuey should be designing something as simple as a bus shelter in the first place. We have withered our state capacity due to the exact causes detailed above (excessive permitting, too many layers, refusal to procure off-the-shelf designs), and now are trying to rely on a hodge-podge of non-profits to fill in the gaps. The same issue can be seen with housing, where the government should be building social housing at scale for low-income residents rather than outsourcing it to non-profits with a complex system of tax credits. (Noah Smith wrote more about this angle of La Sombrita, it’s worth checking out)

6. Excessive costs: Part of the justification for La Sombrita’s existence is that it “only” costs “less than $10,000” compared to $50,000 for a full bus shelter in LA. But guess what: a bus shelter should not cost $50,000! In London, a city that typically has high wages and construction costs, it still only costs $10,000-$15,000 to construct a bus shelter. At that price point, the justification for a half-measure like La Sombrita completely disappears. However, again, due to the causes listed above, LA has created a regulatory environment where bus shelters cost five times as much as they should. And the city is trying to navigate around the unnecessary roadblocks it set up for itself rather than just simply removing the roadblocks.

7. Not solving the root issue: Narrow sidewalks and too much space for cars. Part of the “appeal” of La Sombrita is that it takes up little sidewalk space, leaving a sufficiently wide sidewalk space for ADA compliance. However, the solution here isn’t to build a bunch of crappy Sombritas. It’s to make the sidewalks wider. Unlike, say, Boston, where many streets are legitimately cramped and it can be difficult to expand sidewalks, Los Angeles is full of massive 6-8 lane roads that could benefit from a road diet with dedicated bus lanes, wider sidewalks, and yes, real bus shelters.

None of this is meant to absolve Kounkuey or the politicians touting this joke of a bus shelter. The fact that not a single person, at any point in the process said “hey, this feels like a bit of a joke with very little utility” shows just how pathetic the state of transportation infrastructure is in this country: tangibly improving service is too difficult, so the only thing left to celebrate is increasingly absurd ribbon cuttings. Kounkuey and these politicians should have highlighted the issues I illustrated above and proposed systemic changes to address them rather than trying to celebrate a laughably inadequate half-measure.

Thankfully, I have a positive example that can serve as an antidote to LA’s failures: Emeryville. Emeryville is a small, dense city across the Bay from San Francisco. There, Mayor John Bauters noticed that an elderly passenger with a cane had no place to sit while waiting for the bus. Rather than wasting time focus-grouping a solution and creating a complex permitting system, he sprung into action: He found an off-the-shelf bus stop design that was affordable, replicable, and easy-to-install, and instructed the city to get to work. In just seven months, dozens of these were installed at every bus stop across the city that lacked seating, and now passengers in Emeryville can comfortably sit while waiting for the bus. We’re lucky to live in a country as rich as America, and we can make people’s lives better when we stop shooting ourselves in the foot by making it nearly impossible to build good things.