The sky is bright white. It’s 12:30 p.m. on a Sunday, and two dozen people are lined up in front of Courage Bagels on Virgil Avenue. Everyone is desperate for shade. Some foodies hold paper parasols to block the sun. Lucky diners, lox and schmear in hand, sit under frilly outdoor umbrellas. Half a block away, an unhoused person sprawls under a jacaranda.

I’m driving—AC blasting, terrier panting in the back seat—on the hunt for some recently deployed bus shelters designed by SOM with BMW’s Designworks and Studio One Eleven. The irony is not lost on me.

At the corner of Virgil and Sunset, I spy a seafoam green folly: an assembly of sliding planes with perforated steel Q*bert- block seats. It’s just one of the three thousand shelters promised by StreetsLA (an initiative of the Department of Public Works), which will roll out over the next decade. Modular and packed with amenities (lighting, digital displays giving arrival times and temperature, an emergency call box), SOM’s designs are stylish without being too cute. California modernism junkies might identify hints of Neutra in the tilted roof or Schindler’s volumetric massing in the chunky signage and advertising kiosk.

It’s hot and a holiday weekend. No one is waiting for the bus. Still, there are traces of earlier occupation: a spilled Big Gulp, a limp T-shirt left behind. This is not meant as your typical “Los Angeles is car dependent” indictment. LA Metro reported more than eight hundred thousand weekday boardings in 2024—a figure downwardly impacted by fear of arrest by ICE and US Customs and Border Patrol among migrant communities. According to the Los Angeles Times, more than 60 percent of bus riders are Latino.

Despite ongoing efforts to update urban infrastructure (especially with the 2028 Olympics on the horizon), bus shelters have proved tricky design problems in Southern California. Thousands of people a day engage these little architectures. Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects’ 2016 reimagining of Santa Monica’s Big Blue Bus stops was criticized for its ineffectual circular canopies and toadstool seating. In 2023, prototypes for the pole-mounted La Sombrita, developed by the Los Angeles Department of Transportation and Kounkuey Design Initiative, met harsh backlash. Arising from an earlier study, the low-cost, tactical solutions were meant to serve women—the largest users of public transit—providing minimal shade and nighttime lighting. Indeed, the “little hat” designs were never intended as bus shelters, yet they were interpreted as such and ridiculed as symptomatic of the systemic inequity impacting the mothers, grandmothers, housekeepers, and caretakers who rely on the bus.

Altogether, I found five new shelters as I toured Los Feliz, Silver Lake, Virgil Village, downtown, and Koreatown. One was tucked (inexplicably) under the broad canopy of a Mission fig tree. Another was tagged in orange paint. Some had people waiting under them; others presided over dubious sidewalk stains below. None were particularly welcoming or unwelcoming. Compared with earlier missteps, maybe that’s enough. SOM’s design is a successful glow-up of LA Metro’s existing brown bus shelters—kind of like when a local coffee shop gets a matcha makeover. But as LA faces more and more 90-plus- degree days, mobility and climate collide, throwing the need for coordinated approaches to urban infrastructure that mitigate heat into stark relief. Gentrified bus stops are just one salve in parallel to more parks, trees, etc.—each managed by a different slice of city bureaucracy.