Gang-gang. Light rail stops offer exciting design opportunities

What kind of passenger shelters will decorate these nodes? We urge Capital Metro to think of the provision of the shelters as an opportunity to furnish the route (and so our city) with shelters that are works of art. They should be designs that show some flair, some wit, even some loveliness.

How about, even, an International Design Competition? Canberra is the result of one of those. It should have a fabulous cash prize so as to make the world's best designers prick up their ears. And this would, as a bonus, cause the maximum offence to that noisy minority, Canberra's bean-counting miserabilists who cannot bear public expenditure of shekels on anything new (like light rail), or anything beautiful (like the magnificent powerful owl sculpture on Belconnen Way).

There is nothing radical about the idea that bus and tram shelters can show some flair, some character. Quite apart from the fact that our very own "bunker" bus shelters reveal their designer, architect Clem Cummings, to have had an artist's eye the progressive world bristles with artistic shelters.

Especially loyal readers may even remember a Gang-gang item, with pictures, about how the Austrian townlet of Krumbach invited designers to imagine exciting new bus shelters for the place.

Going online one finds some wonders of sheltering. Try Bus Stop On Pinterest. https://www.pinterest.com/explore/bus-stop

They are varying degrees of practicality. The witty Baltimore bus stop in our picture, by Spanish designers Mmmm, gives pleasure but not very much shelter. Amusing bus/tram shelters in Japan include a giant plump red strawberry and a water melon. Lots of designs, some of them installed and in use, have turf roofs, sometimes dotted with wildflowers.

Then, to get a sense of how splendid shelters can acquire an antique splendour over time, go online to Iron Ladies: Cast iron tram/bus shelters of the British Isles. https://thebeautyoftransport.wordpress.com/2014/02/19/iron-ladies...

One witty (yet somehow poignant and affectionate too) idea that comes to us is that the light rail's shelters might echo the design of their famous predecessors the "bunker" bus shelters, now such an iconic emblem of the national capital.

Perhaps, for light rail, dizzylingly popular, seems set to attract so many patrons, they will need to be far bigger than the bus shelters. If they were enlarged, even giant versions of the "bunkers," that would be fun, and authentically Canberran fun at that.

Another possibility, while we are bombarding a grateful Canberra Metro with ideas, is that the shelters should have spacious concrete flanks so that across the years Australia and the world's best street artists can be invited to decorate them.

Meanwhile the aforementioned ArchivesACT posting, though dwelling on the "bunker" bus shelters, tells the story of a "rival" shelter, a pretender.

In 1979 the Transport Branch concluded there were 66 sites into which the chunky, concrete Sumo-wrestler "bunker" shelter could not be fitted. These places needed bus shelters of some kind but the NCDC long resisted an alternate design until, at last, in 1987 it conspired with a Canberra company called Metal Design to create a prototype.

Our black and white drawing of it (complete with a forlorn little dog and of a sitting man with, inexplicably, a halo) revealing it to be quite dainty and feminine, is from the time of its conception.

During a 1987 meeting between ACTION and the NCDC, concerns were expressed that this new shelter would be climbable and swingfromable and so would be "encouraging to budding gymnasts".

But one prototype was constructed and installed and is still in use, imparting some scarce uniqueness to otherwise unremarkable Curtin. It is on Carruthers Street. It is not clear whether any others were constructed and installed.

And by October of that same year the NCDC had decided this structure was too open to the elements. Yes, from our picture and although pretty, it doesn't seem capable of sheltering anyone, even a dog, from anything much. The project was abandoned.

And while we are giving advice on light rail to a grateful Canberra Metro we alert it to something wonderful being done with public transport in sophisticated, art-conscious France.

Canberra Metro will be keen to make light rail as attractive as possible to possible commuters and so will prick up its ears at the news that SNCF, France's state-owned rail service, is bringing world-famous art to commuters.

The interior of a commuter train has been covered with graphic film that mimics Impressionist art from the Musee d'Orsay; some fabulous stained glass from the Palace of Versailles, and images from Cinema Gaumont, the oldest film company in the world.

The effect is indescribable (even with this columnist's vast and nimble vocabulary) and so we point Canberra Metro and anyone else interested to pictures of it online at Design Boom - France's public trains bring Impressionist art to commuters. http://www.designboom.com/art/france-trains-art-3m-sncf-05-02-2016/ ;