Photos: Matthew Roth

The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) announced today that it has installed the 100th new transit shelter, representing a new aesthetic for one of the more iconic pieces of street furniture in the city.

The shelters began on a trial basis in May 2009 when Mayor Gavin Newsom showcased a solar-powered shelter on Geary and Arguello Boulevards in the Richmond. The shelters feature a new wave pattern on the roof meant to reflect both the hills of the city and the Golden Gate Bridge, according to designer Olle Lundberg of Lundberg Design.

The installations follow a two-year process to develop, design and fabricate the new shelters, which were created with the SFMTA’s transit shelter advertising and maintenance contractor, Clear Channel Outdoor.

The contract with Clear Channel requires the company to provide the new shelters and replace the existing 1,100 shelters no later than the end of 2013, in exchange for the majority of advertising rights. The SFMTA will get some of the revenue, which the agency expects to top $300 million over the 20-year term of the contract.

“San Francisco has a strong history of environmental sustainability and we pride ourselves on being a city of inclusion,” Mayor Gavin Newsom said in a statement. “The new Muni shelters reflect those values and will make getting around this beautiful city easier and greener.”

The roof of the solar-enabled shelter at Arguello and Geary

The original shelter pioneered a polycarbonate roof structure designed by 3form Materials Solutions, with photovoltaic laminates by Konarka Power Plastic.  According to the SFMTA, the new shelters feature steel with high-recycled content as well as energy-efficient light-emitting diodes. For comparison, the florescent lights in the current shelters use 336 watts, while the new LED panels use only 74.4 watts. Though none of the other 99 shelters has been outfitted with the solar laminate, SFMTA spokesperson Paul Rose said the agency was working with Pacific Gas and Electric to install solar capability on shelters where appropriate.

Rose said the installation has been prioritized in areas of where Muni has heavy passenger traffic, particularly downtown. The shelters also provide better information for the riding public, with two maps and a large space for transit information. As NextMuni signs become available, each shelter that has a usable power source will have both the NextMuni display as well as the accompanying Push-to-Talk system to read the NextMuni information for those who are visually impaired.

“Over the past several months, it’s been exciting to see more and more of these smart new shelters in place,” said SFMTA CEO Nat Ford. “These are shelters that provide more information for our customers and better accessibility. The use of environmentally sustainable features such as photovoltaics and LEDs, where feasible, ensure that their contribution goes beyond assisting our customers to benefiting the entire City.”

One of the central criticisms of Muni's objective to consolidate bus stops is that it hasn't conducted thorough demographic analysis of the people who use each stop, particularly seniors and the disabled. Rather than rely solely on the distance between stops and the incline of the streets, say critics, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) should make nuanced decisions about each stop based on the amenities near the stops and the people who use them.

But one community group isn't waiting on the SFMTA to do the legwork.

Staff at the Chinatown Community Development Center (CCDC) and approximately twenty students with clipboards and measuring tape analyzed 34 bus stops in Chinatown, an initiative the group hopes will be a model adopted by other neighborhood groups and the SFMTA itself. The students who conducted the surveys are part of CCDC's Youth for SROs Leadership Empowerment program, most of them children of recent immigrants to the United States.

"We're trying to offer a community perspective of how people use a bus stop," said CCDC's Deland Chan, who coordinated the surveys with Judy Kuang. "We're trying to capture exactly the value of a bus stop, not in terms of the spacing, but in terms of its importance to community uses, in terms of who uses a bus stop and what the people think they would like to improve with the transit system they encounter on a daily basis."

As part of the rationale for the survey, CCDC said bus stop spacing should be part of the larger goal of facilitating transit as an attractive alternative to driving, integrating design features that improve public health and safety, and ensuring that existing transit services complement and encourage travel by foot.

"Because the MTA do not include the demographic and the land use data, we are collecting all the data," said Bill Yu, a high school senior. Yu said that without looking at neighborhood amenities, a bus stop placement policy would fall short of community needs. "I think this is really helpful for the community, especially the Chinatown neighborhoods. The people who live here need bus stops because they need to take the bus to buy food and other stuff for their basic needs."

Yu and Ming Le Zhang noting survey data at a bus stop on Kearny Street

To come up with the bus stop scorecard categories, CCDC worked with the Community Tenants Association (CTA) and the Adopt-an-Alleyway (AAA) Youth Cabinet, both active in Chinatown's planning and transportation policy issues. Surveyors noted whether stops had shelters, measured the dimensions of them if they did, measured sidewalk widths, and identified nearby community amenities, such as educational facilities, community institutions, non-profits, senior centers, senior facilities, and medical facilities. They researched SFMTA ridership volumes at the bus stops and noted whether they were active transfer points.

The students also conducted interviews with bus riders throughout the survey process, asking why they chose a particular bus stop and what they thought were the most pressing problems for Chinatown bus stops.

CCDC created a database of land uses around bus stops and the quality of rider experience at the bus stops, which Chan said the group hopes will assist in providing further nuance to the SFMTA's bus stop spacing policy and inform decisions on what stops are most in need of upgrades. CCDC will share the data and their analysis of it with the CTA and AAA in the next few weeks, before finalizing a list of priority improvements to bring to the SFMTA shortly thereafter.

"We can't really wait for the city to do things, so in many ways we're taking this on proactively to collect the data," said Chan. "We're going to use this to educate our community in tenants' meetings and focus groups to report back on what our results have been."

Chan added, "This could become a process that other community groups might want to model if they want to do a more comprehensive survey of the bus stops."

Greatest Mismatch Between Amenities and Stop Importance

1. Stockton Street and Pacific, 30/45/91 Lines, (Outbound to Divisadero & Chestnut)
2. Clay & Mason, 1 Line, (To Howard & Main Weekday)
3. Clay & Kearny, 1 Line, (To Howard & Main Weekday)
4. Pacific Ave and Stockton, 10/12 Line, (Inbound to Van Ness/North or Jackson/Fillmore)
   

Greatest Mismatch Between Amenities and Ridership Volume

1. Stockton Street and Columbus, 8BX, 8X, 30, 45, 91 Lines, (Inbound to Townsend & 4th Street)
2. Stockton Street and Pacific, 30/45/91 Lines, (Outbound to Divisadero & Chestnut)
3. Sacramento and Stockton, 1 Line, (To 33rd Ave & Geary)
4. Sacramento and Powell, 1 Line, (To 33rd Ave & Geary)

Measuring the width of the sidewalk.

Photos: Matthew Roth

Designed by Ollie Lundberg of Lundberg Design, the top of the shelters are identical to the Geary trial, inspired by San Francisco's hilly topography. These Market Street shelters are an amber color, in contrast to the red of the Geary Boulevard solar-powered shelter. The composite waves on one shelter are frosted amber, with neon shining up from the stainless steel structure; the other is clear amber, with neon running along the side.

The shelters are part of Clear Channel's advertising contract with the city and every shelter is expected to be replaced by 2013.

MTA spokesperson Judson True said the agency has seven new shelters, but many more are coming. "We expect mass installation to begin in the next few months."

True said not all of the new shelters would be outfitted with solar due to shadows, regular fog, or an inability to hook into the grid.

Our latest call for photos was inspired by the picture at right,
taking by Streetsblog New York’s own Ben Fried. It’s an all too
familiar scene — transit riders crammed together, waiting for a bus
(or train) that doesn’t come when it’s supposed to (if you
missed the story that went with the picture, it’s here).

Crowding is just one indignity transit users have to face. Others include
inadequate bus shelters, nonexistent or vandalized seating, blocked
entrances — you know the stuff.

Send us your pictures of
crummy transit service and infrastructure where you live and we’ll put
together a new slide show. You can e-mail JPEGs to me at sarah [at]
streetsblog [dot] org, or tag them with "streetsblog" and "transitfail"
in Flickr. Get your submissions in by next Thursday.

Our past slide shows have been on bike traffic, space hogs and work bikes. Check them out if you haven’t already.

At a ribbon cutting ceremony on Geary and Arguello Boulevards in the Richmond District yesterday, Mayor Gavin Newsom, MTA Chief Nat Ford and representatives from Clear Channel presented the next iteration of the city's bus shelters, the first of 1100 new shelters that will be installed between now and 2013. The shelters combine innovative solar technology with a design that is meant to evoke both a seismic wave and the hills of San Francisco.

"San Franciscans who are waiting for their bus or streetcar to arrive will be pleasantly surprised when they see the new transit shelters we're putting in across the City," said Mayor Newsom. "Transit shelters that use photovoltaics, LEDS, and WiFi are going to be standard in the future and I'm proud that San Francisco is once again acting like the pace car for other cities by trying and implementing these technologies."

The prototype shelter has two maps and more room to display transit information, NextMuni displays and a push-to-talk system to read NextMuni information for the visually impaired. The wave-like red roof of the shelter is embedded with photo-voltaic cells that will power the LEDs and are expected to pump the excess electricity they generate back into the city's grid. WiFi is being tested at the prototype shelter and is expected to be included in other shelters, assuming no problems arise.

The shelters are made of materials that are meant to reduce maintenance costs and resist some forms of graffiti and etching, which Mayor Newsom said was a bane of the older shelters and an eyesore. 

"We're going to see a very stringent maintenance schedule adopted and implemented," said Newsom. "I'm looking forward to seeing this shelter looking like this four, five, ten years from now. I'll be driving by--and riding by, because little do you know I take Muni in spite of some of those who wish I didn't so they'd have another reason to criticize me."

As part of the contract for the shelters, Clear Channel will pay to fabricate and install the shelters and share 55 percent of revenues with the MTA for the first 15 years of the 20-year contract, what will amount to an anticipated $300 million total. Clear Channel Northern California Region President Bill Hooper estimated that each shelter would cost the company between $25,000-30,000, costs that Hooper said they expected to recoup, though it would take some time.

The polycarbonate roof structure was designed by 3form Materials Solutions with photovoltaic laminates by Konarka Power Plastic.  Neither company had previously implanted photovoltaic cells into a polycarbonate base, but developed a technology that realizes negligible electricity loss, and subsequently patented the process. Because the shelters will be wired, instead of using batteries, the extra power that is generated will feed back into the grid.

Rather than use an off-the-shelf design, the MTA and Clear Channel held a design competition and selected a local architect, Lundberg Design. Olle Lundberg of Lundberg Design said that this was his first civic project, that his firm traditionally designed and constructed restaurants, including the Slanted Door.  He explained that the steel used to create the structures is 75 percent recycled material; the polycarbonate roof is 40 percent post industrial recycled materials

As for the color of the roof? "I like red," said Lundberg, though he added the Market Street shelters are going to have amber colored roofs and stainless steel structures.

"It's been fun to leave your signature on the city," said Lundberg. "We've done some really beautiful buildings in the city, but honestly nothing will have the same impact as [1100] of these will.  These are going to be everywhere and are going to be this kind of icon.  I do hope that they become part of the street vocabulary of San Francisco."

Designer Olle Lundberg explained that the bolted construction was meant to evoke the Bay Bridge.

Materials manufacturer 3form pioneered a new polycarbonate manufacturing technique that permits photo-voltaic laminate to be sandwiched between layers of polycarbonate without impeding solar energy production.