What do bus stops tell us? A long-term perspective on a family of objects (not only) designed and used for waiting

Arnaud Passalacqua (1)

1 UPD7 - Université Paris Diderot - Paris 7

The bus system is probably the oldest public transport system in the European cities. Directly linked to the processes of industrialization and urbanization, it has been operated during the 19 th century with horse-‐drawn vehicles, before getting motorized during the first decades of the 20 th century. By the way, the bus system has slightly become the slowest one, in comparison with the underground and the tramway, but also with the car. As a consequence, buses have built a peculiar relationship to speed, and more generally to time. This paper proposes to shed light on this relationship by addressing the problem of waiting for buses and the historical evolution of technical devices designed for this activity. Different generations of bus stops can be identified : small connexion stations with employees, bus poles, bus shelters of different scales, etc. These objects raise different questions. Who are the actors behind them and how are they conceived, designed and financed? What are the uses developed by people around them? How do they integrate the landscape of the city and become a constitutive element of the local identity?

Keywords: Public transport; History of technology

Domains: Humanities and Social Sciences; History; Humanities and Social Sciences; Architecture, space management

Arnaud Passalacqua. What do bus stops tell us? A long-term perspective on a family of objects (not only) designed and used for waiting. The Future of Mobilities: Flows, Transport and Communications, Traffic, Transport and Mobility, Sep 2015, Caserta, Italy. ⟨hal-01374135⟩