Gimme Shelters: After years of planning, and a 100K+ price tag, the City's gets its first new bus shelter

...with more to come.

New bus shelters like the one shown here in front of the Downtown Transit Center are scheduled to be installed at several locations around town this year.

Tomorrow, Tuesday, February 18, work begins on a new bus shelter at Belmont Park, a Charlottesville Area Transit (CAT) project that has been years in the making and will cost more than $100,000 when it's finished in about three weeks. On the one hand, it's an example of the City's perseverance, on the other hand, an example of how absurdly complicated and expensive it is to install bus shelters.

"It's probably my biggest surprise in this job," says Bruce White, a Senior Project Manager with CAT who was hired last June. He's been shepherding along the Belmont Park bus shelter project and others since then. "All the wickets you have to go through to put up a bus shelter... it’s quite amazing, really."

Indeed,…