Town aims to ban unofficial bus shelters
ESOPUS, N.Y. » The Town Board will hold a public hearing Oct. 20 on a proposal to prohibit unlicensed shelters at bus stops.
The session is scheduled for 7 p.m. in the Town Hall in Port Ewen, where limited public seating will be available. The session also will be accessible online through the Zoom videoconferencing platform.
Town Supervisor Shannon Harris the ban is needed because current private shelters are safety hazards and their exteriors have been turned into advertising space.
“We’re looking at this because, a couple of decades ago, a series of bus shelters were dropped in our town without anyone knowing where they came from or why,” Harris said.
“They have been serving as billboards for a company out of state,” she added. “They are run down, situated in wetlands, some of them have been moved around, others have been filled in, and they are not transparent, so nefarious activities could occur and no one would ever know.”
Harris said one unauthorized bus stop shelter, on U.S. Route 9W near the Ulster BOCES Career & Technical Center, has been sealed off to prevent its use.
“It was a concern that someone could be accosted and dragged into one of them,” she said.
The proposal to ban unlicensed shelters would include provisions for shelters sanctioned by the town, Ulster County or the state to be placed at Ulster County
Area Transit stops, as well as multifamily and senior housing sites and locations with a large number of tenants or customers.
Such shelters would be 8.5 feet long, 4.5 feet deep and 8 feet tall, and all walls would be transparent. And no commercial advertising would be allowed on the shelters.
Harris said there currently are five or six unauthorized shelters in Esopus and that if the ban is enacted, the owners will have to remove them within 90 days or face penalties.