Knights Landing Bus Stop
Project Origin
In 2017, Sacramento Area Council of Governments (SACOG) approached the Center for Public Interest Design with a project proposal for the design of a bus stop in Knights Landing, California. This grew from an interest, expressed by YoloBus (YCTD), to create a ‘bus stop as community center’ for the town based on principles developed by the CPID for SACOG. This bus stop could potentially provide the community with not only a better transportation connection outlying towns and cities, but also a better connection to a neighborhood resource or amenity.
The town of Knights Landing, located 13 miles north of Woodland, contains just over one thousand people and operates like many small towns in the Unites States with shared community resources and alternate modes of transportation. It is a predominantly agricultural economy relatively isolated from other towns or cities.
To better understand Knights Landing, CPID took an asset-based design and research approach. Through conversations with residents and the YCTD team, CPID found that a bus stop in Knights Landing could potentially amplify the impact of incoming community gardens and create a meaningful community space through partnerships and an emphasis on providing market spaces, gathering areas, and wifi.
This project was jump-started through an undergraduate design studio at PSU taught by Sergio Palleroni and Lisa Patterson in the fall of 2018, informing design strategies that Patterson developed in the following months toward a final bus stop design.
Project Description
The final design for this bus stop embodies the feedback from community members in Knights Landing by providing public wifi and a safe, multi-generational, shaded, and well-lit gathering space next to a community garden. In the future, the area next to the bus stop will be painted as a community parklet in order to extend the gathering space for the community. The street painting will become the wayfinding for the bus stop that ties back to the center of town. The intersections along this route will also become beautiful street paintings completed by community members.
On market day, based on a schedule determined by the community, the shelter transforms into a small vending space in which vegetables from the garden can be displayed and sold by the church or youth groups in the neighborhood. This allows the bus stop to serve as both a community space but also a partial solution to the area’s food desert condition.
The shelter is made of tube steel, wood and an integrated solar glass roof. The wooden elements become the interior, providing the seating and shelves. The tube steel structure holds up the glass photovoltaic panels in order to provide the bus stop the required shade and lighting capacity.
Location
Knights Landing, California, United States
Next Steps
This project builds upon the CPID’s work seeking to maximize the impact of transportation investment in California through community-engaged design projects. This bus stop is scheduled to be constructed by the end of 2019, and will hopefully be the first of many enhanced bus stops in the Sacramento region.