At the base of Bethlehem’s Fahy Bridge, nestled just behind a curtain of urban obscurity, lies a small triangle of green space that most passersby barely notice. But for Karen Beck Pooley and her environmental studies students, this unassuming patch of land—currently a little-known bus stop—has become a site for envisioning more equitable, accessible, and sustainable urban infrastructure.

Pooley, professor of practice in political science and the co-director of Lehigh’s Small Cities Lab, directed a community and economic development project in Fall 2024 that offered students a rare opportunity: reimagine public transit access at the intersection of policy, design, and lived experience. Collaborating with the Lehigh and Northampton Transportation Authority (LANTA), the City of Bethlehem, and South Side community organizations, students were asked to investigate a deceptively complex question — how do we make a bus stop visible, functional, and meaningful?

This site is tucked literally behind everything, Pooley notes. It sits in a park, at the edge of a dense urban area, and most Lehigh students don’t even know it exists. The dream for LANTA is to have express bus stops to service destinations such as the Lehigh Valley Mall and Lehigh Valley International Airport. So, they started to brainstorm, “Well, how do we design these bus stations?” Since the Fahy Bridge stop is closest to Lehigh, LANTA gave the students free rein to think about what kind of amenities would make sense here. At the heart of the initiative was a real-world design challenge. Students were not only asked to propose infrastructure improvements, but also to understand the human barriers that shape transit use — especially among those most in need of affordable transportation options.

Read the full story from CAS News.