Thanks in part to the hard work of advocates with the Transbay Coalition, a plan to remove Oakland's troubled bus shelters was averted. Instead, city staffers presented a new strategy to replace damaged shelters, during the regular City of Oakland-AC Transit Interagency Liaison Committee meeting Wednesday.
From an email blast put out by advocates:
Yesterday [Wednesday] at 9am we got word that the City of Oakland was planning on removing 100 bus shelters without any plan to replace them and that city staff would be presenting this decision to the Oakland/AC Transit coordination committee meeting at 10am that same day.
Since bus shelters are key for making transit better and have been shown to increase boardings at stops by over 80%, we leapt into action to defend them. We alerted you, our other other members in Oakland, and our coalition partners and together we got a huge turnout to the meeting in under 1 hour!
To be clear, Oakland is dealing with a legitimate bus-shelter vandalism problem, as seen in this Bluesky post below:
But as the Transbay Coalition's Carter Lavin told Streetsblog, simply removing bus shelters just ends up hurting bus ridership and fare-box recovery, which costs more in the long run. "That's why it's important that we want things fixed, not removed," said Lavin, acknowledging that maintenance is a serious and costly issue. "Replace it with something better that's easier to maintain."
He opined that the glass shelters are a throw back to a past of thinking of bus shelters as primarily advertising kiosks rather than a way to keep sun and rain off of bus riders.
Thanks to pressure from advocates, the proposed plan is now to replace damaged shelters as money becomes available with "Kaleidoscope" shelters, as pictured in the lead image and below, that don't have easily-tagged and/or smashed glass panels.
Fortunately, that "circle the drain" impulse to destroy the bus shelters to stop vandalism was stopped. The Transbay Coalition further explained the newly proposed plan:
- City will limit the shelter removals to a small limited number of shelters who are in such a derelict state that the pose an immediate hazard
- Oakland will pursue an alternate replacement shelter design with lower maintenance needs and will move to replace shelters – not simply remove them.
- Oakland and AC Transit will pursue a cost-sharing funding proposal between them so that more shelters can be built and maintained.
Sadly, as mentioned in the first bullet point, a handful of the existing shelters are deemed structurally unsound and will have to be removed immediately, leaving only the bench for now. Let's hope they will get Kaleidoscopes as soon as possible.
