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Still not as bad as La Sombrita

I think there is a image-based social media reason to why these things tend to attract more praise & funding than boring policy advocacy. It's the kind of instagrammable feel-good story a non-profit can use to convince a philanthropy board, especially one of generalists doing it as a side job.

in general perhaps, but isn't a tree next to the bus stop more instagrammable too?

The people yearn for La Sombrita.

?? In Hamburg we have way too many bus stops without any shelter against hot sun nor rain. And why not combine it with insect places?

New york has that problem too, this isn't installing new bus shelters it's just putting planters on top of the existing ones. New shelters at stops that lack them would be a much better use of this money.

Genuinely wondering, what makes this idiotic? It seems basically fine to me at first glance, but I'm not particularly well-informed on the subject.

Bus stops and shelters are a rounding error yet we’re innovating here??

It's small (necessarily – it has to be supported structurally by a bus shelter) so it cannot absorb any real quantity of rainwater. Any maintenance will be difficult since it's off the ground (so you have to bring in a truck with a ladder). Brown water will drain off of it onto a clear bus shelter.

It isn't going to make any difference in temperatures, which is the stated claim, for two reasons: 1) it doesn't provide any shade, and 2) it's so small that any evapotranspiration provided will be very minimal. Everything it claims to achieve is done 100x better with a normal street tree.

On the topic of ineffective altruism, it's easy to make fun of EA, but *this* is the current state of the art in philanthropy. "Resilient Cities Catalyst" is a Rockefeller Foundation production and lists a bunch of huge corporations and foundations as "partners" (donors?) www.rcc.city/our-partners