Last Thursday, the Los Angeles Department of Transportation held a press conference with Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez and representatives from KDI, a design consultancy firm, to launch “La Sombrita,” a prototype of a device that was supposed to provide a bit of shade (as its name implies) as well as lighting for bus riders as night.

Almost immediately, the backlash was fierce. People accused the city of wasting taxpayer money, of creating things that don’t actually solve anything, and of performative acts instead of real solutions. A sheet of perforated metal became the symbol of consultancies running wild and a city celebrating incompetence.

It’s not as bad as it looks. We have confirmed that no taxpayer money was spent on the project; it was entirely grant funded, and that the prototype itself actually cost around $2,000, not the “under $10,000” reported. While La Sombrita isn’t the answer, we do want to recognize a city department that went outside of their comfort zone to find a creative solution to a very real problem — most bus stops across Los Angeles lack shelters (only 26% have shelters according to a recent UCLA study). We need to take bus shelters seriously, and not just in better off areas where the advertising makes it worth it for a private company to pay for the facility.

Death by a thousand bureaucratic cuts. As KDI explained in a subsequent tweet thread, while they designed a larger device with no holes that likely would have provided more shade, the city’s own bureaucracy sprung into action and started forcing changes to the project: “to avoid permit and multi-agency coordination, it had to be less than 24” wide, maintain 4 foot clearance, be entirely on the pole, be durable, and be removable.” The holes were added so the device could stand up to strong wind and not bring the pole down with it. Does this make the end result more useful? No, but it explains how we got to this.

It’s good that LADOT is willing to try new things. LADOT is sometimes criticized for following older, bureaucratic standards that sometimes prevent progressive solutions to transportation or public space problems. To their credit, they have started to change (for example, LADOT’s 10’ lane width standard, is narrower than Caltrans’, and they routinely narrow lanes and add limit lines with every repaving project, which slows drivers down; they also have good day lighting standards at intersections). Do we want a city department to be scared to try new things for fear of a public outcry? In this instance, we think a tweet and maybe blog post would have been sufficient as opposed to a press event with a City Councilmember and top LADOT leadership.

We need things that we can deploy quickly at scale. The city is desperate for solutions. Shade at bus stops. Sidewalks that aren’t broken. Trees. Bike and bus lanes. Many of these things have absurd timelines to implement and require multiple city agencies to sign off. They also often lack dedicated funding sources. It’s smart for a department to try and find solutions that the city can afford even in a hard budget year and deploy quickly at scale — even if La Sombrita falls short. We want to give space to city agencies willing to try new things and think outside the normal, bureaucratic way of doing things. Frankly, we need more of that thinking, because eventually we’ll get real solutions at scale quicker than we otherwise would. While this project was hampered by city regulation, here’s the thing: the city controls the regulations, and city council should act to streamline them. Just like we quickly sprung up outdoor dining on public space nearly overnight to help restaurants survive the COVID pandemic, we could provide a similar, highly streamlined process so that a city agency could install bus shelters – much faster, and for a much lower cost.