Mass transit brainstorming
By John Estus
Staff Writer
The bench at NW 80 and Western Avenue is nothing but three wobbly wooden planks tacked to a concrete block.
It's a typical city bus stop: a gloomy place with no shelter, shade or sidewalk, but plenty of trash and tall grass.
Sights like this are one reason citizens and city officials have had changing Oklahoma City's mass transit system on their minds and they're not alone.
An architecture group has vowed to replace dirty, dated bus stops with cutting edge hubs meant to attract people to mass transit rather than shoo them away.
The plan started as a design competition that asked architecture students to come up with the ultimate Oklahoma City bus stop.
Once the designs came in more than 80 of them from around the world the architecture group decided to try to make the designers' dreams a reality.
"The main thing we want to get across with this competition is upscaling the image of riding the bus, said local architect David Brewer, who helped design one of the seven bus stops featured on the Web site: OKC Bus Stops.
Replacement project
The central Oklahoma chapter of the American Institute of Architects is trying to raise money to start replacing Oklahoma City's bus stops with one of the artsy, modern designs on the Web site. In the meantime, the Web site's visitors can vote for their favorite bus stop design.
The design Brewer worked on calls for a covered hub with a colored roof that would identify which routes the bus stop serves.
He said he came up with the colored roof idea while sitting at bus stops talking with people about what could make waiting for the bus more enjoyable.
"They felt like there wasn't attention paid to them, Brewer said. "They said: I can be sitting on the bench in the rain waiting on the bus to get to work to feed my family, and evidently no one cares because they won't give me shelter here.'
Starting small
Another local architect thinks the new homes and businesses popping up in and around downtown present an opportunity to make a major overhaul to the metro area's mass transit system. Building new bus stops is one way to start, he said.
"Metro transit is just on the bubble of a lot more use, said Kenny Dennis, an architect at TAParchitecture.
"A lot more people are going to want to use it not because they have to, but because it's convenient and it's environmentally friendly and it's the right thing to do.
Other designs
One of the bus stops on the Web site is a green design done by a group of Columbia University students. It's called ParkStop and features sustainable wood and glass, a grass roof with a hole for a tree to grow through and a solar-powered sign.
Another was designed by University of Oklahoma architecture graduates Bernie Colbert and Shawn Lorg. The stop's loopy design was inspired by the way bus routes are drawn on transit maps, Colbert said.
The design also includes a fairly simple item a trash bin missing from the bus stop on Western Avenue, where an empty pack of Kool cigarettes and crumpled can of Mountain Dew were resting beneath the rickety bench.
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