Just a bus-stop

This is a bus-stop near where I live, and as a bus-stop, I guess it ticks the box. Buses, um, stop there. I quite liked the bleakness of this. It's not a quiet road, but this makes the stop look quieter, and maybe a little intimidating - would you wait alone at night?

It's just a bus-stop, as we've gathered, but it doesn't quite hit the spot as a shelter. Protected from wild football shots from the park to the left, perhaps this was designed with a Mediterranean climate in mind. Sunning oneself on a beautiful day, yes. Shielding oneself from all that a South Lanarkshire winter (let's face it, summer too) can throw? Not so much. There's a roof, which is nice, so on that rare occasion when the rain falls vertically, you'll be fine.

When you see what a bus-stop can be, the interactive ads and the innovative design, this pales a little. Of course it does a job - it's an infrequently-used stop of a popular route - but, and irrespective of budget controls, I just wish we could raise our design bar a little higher. Function wins over beauty an awful lot in this country, but when the function bit fails, you wonder what else is out there. Money plays the leading role in this of course, but we see this movie played out in so many fields. Beauty first. Always.