To combat the effects of extreme heat in the city of Los Angeles, political officials gathered at a bus stop in Panorama City Nov. 27 to announce funding for up to 3,000 shade structures to be built over bus stops.
“We’re standing near the intersection of Woodman Avenue and Roscoe Boulevard, where there is no shade or protection from the weather for Angelenos waiting for the bus. That will change,” Mayor Karen Bass said. “This location will be one of the first to have a new bus shelter.”
The $2.5 million funding will allow for the construction of 3,000 bus shelters throughout LA, including 400 in the Northeast San Fernando Valley, and the implementation of cool pavement on street segments in the valley. These shelters will have several features, including a canopy, a display panel for city announcements and emergency broadcasts, real-time bus arrival information, lighting for enhanced visibility and accessibility features such as push-to-talk buttons and wheelchair-friendly spaces.
Which bus stops will receive these new shelters first will be decided on five criteria: transit ridership, heat index, equity-focused community, key destinations and long wait times.
The first round of bus shelters will be installed in different parts of LA in early 2024, Dan Halden, senior advisor for external relations for StreetsLA, explained. The hope is that it will begin in January.
“Climate change is real, especially here in the San Fernando Valley where it gets to 105, 110, sometimes as hot as 115 degrees [Fahrenheit], and for someone to be sitting on a bench like this and have no shade is literally dangerous,” Congressman Tony Cárdenas said. “And we’re here to change that.”
In addition to the bus shelters, there will also be certain street segments that will have cool pavement applied to lower the temperature during the summer heat. One such street is Buffalo Avenue, which is a stone’s throw away from where the conference was held.
“There are very few trees in some communities, like this one, [meaning] no shade and a lot of people use public transportation to go to work every day and they’re standing out here, waiting in 110-degree weather in the middle of a heat wave,” Assemblymember Luz Rivas said. “We have to do something about it, and [the heat] is going to get worse.”
This ceremonial check is the latest from Cárdenas after he secured more than $26 million in community project funding from Congress last year. The funds have been going towards Northeast Valley projects that support job creation, youth programs, community empowerment, mental health care and more.
These include $1 million for New Directions for Youth to increase mental health services, $2 million to LA Mission College to expand its STEM workforce programs and $800,000 for the City of San Fernando to hire mental health clinicians and to support 988 cases – the phone number for the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.
City officials gathered for the announcement included Bass, City Councilmembers Imelda Padilla, Bob Blumenfield and Nithya Raman along with Cardenas, Supervisor Lindsey Horvath, and Rivas. The funding is a small part of a much larger $93.5 million that will go towards providing cooling relief from the heat in the valley.
“The reason why Los Angeles hasn’t had enough bus shelters built over the last 20 years is because we didn’t put real money behind it,” Raman said. “It’s going to cost us $238 million to build these 3,000 bus shelters. But guess what, for the first time in this city’s history, we are actually committing dollars that are going to be going toward these bus shelters.
“Just to put that into perspective, in the first year of the contract, we’re going to build more bus shelters than we built in the last decade here in the city of Los Angeles.”