Transportation

Singapore May Have Designed the World's Best Bus Stop

An architecture firm and the government collaborated on a bus stop with books, a rooftop garden, and a swing.
A boy sits on the swing and reads one of the books available at Singapore's experimental bus stop.Courtesy of Infocomm Media Development Authority

While the U.S. is known for its sorry bus stops—despite creative grassroots efforts to improve them—Singapore’s bus stops are already pretty decent. In the year and a half I lived there, I never came across one without seating and a roof—vital in a tropical climate prone to downpours. Still, they’re pretty humdrum affairs, and not places you’d want to spend much time in.

What if the humble bus stop could be a place you actually looked forward to frequenting? That’s the question the Singaporean firm DP Architects aimed to answer. “We wanted to redesign a commonplace thing we take for granted,” says Seah Chee Huang, the firm’s director.