Randall Winston drives the installation of digitally enhanced bus shelters that will add safety, convenience and equity to the experience of Los Angeles transit riders.
As a teenager growing up in Redlands, Calif., a Los Angeles suburb 60 plus miles east of downtown, Randall Winston always had a hunch he would end up in public service. His mom, an elementary school teacher, devoted countless hours to teaching at-risk youth––many of them of color, all of them from challenging circumstances––to read and write.
“Watching her nurture and guide these young people to become productive citizens left an indelible impression on me,” Winston recalls. “Having grown up in a very supportive two-parent family––I’m the middle child of five children––I learned early that the world is filled with unmet needs. I knew I had to give back to make life better for others.”
Creating Climate-Resilient Infrastructure
Today, as the Deputy Mayor of Infrastructure for the City of Los Angeles, Winston is giving back to local residents. He oversees and guides all City investments in infrastructure related to the public right of way, transit, and mobility access, viewing them painstakingly through the interrelated lenses of public health, heat mitigations, climate resiliency and equity.
A key focus within his public right-of-way bucket––which includes streets, sidewalks, access ramps, streetlights, tree canopy, and urban forestry––is LA’s Sidewalk and Transit Amenities Program (STAP).
Between now and the start of the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, STAP, led by the City’s Bureau of Street Services (StreetsLA), plans to install and upgrade 3,000 bus shelters with amenities to provide shade, safety and comfort for pedestrians and transit riders. The program is designed to support public transit and the shared use of the sidewalk; improve access and mobility; and improve transit schedule information through real-time digital delivery services.
“STAP addresses a critical situation, namely the dearth of transit shelters throughout Los Angeles,” explains Winston. “The need is greatest in areas such as East LA and South LA that experience the greatest amount of heat. Our most transit-dependent citizens, particularly those in lower-income or underserved communities, also experience the most negative health effects of standing out in the sun waiting for buses to arrive. “
Leaning into Public Service
Winston was born in Washington, D.C. His dad’s work as a manager with the U.S. Census Bureau, however, brought the family to Southern California when he was just six. After several job-related moves within the region, the family landed in Redlands.
During high school, Winston’s desire to serve others started gaining momentum. As a freshman at Redlands High School, he was elected vice president of the Class of 2000. During Winston's sophomore and junior years, he served as class president. And during his senior year, he was elected Youth Governor of California as part of the California YMCA Youth and Government program, a mock legislature program for middle and high school students.
Blending Law with Architecture
Encouraged by this early success, Winston attended Harvard University, where he studied government and political philosophy. But he was also anxious to add architecture to the mix.
So, when he graduated Harvard in 2004, Winston pursued a university-sponsored internship and language immersion program that offered an opportunity to work in architecture in Beijing. It was a heady time in China, as leading architects jockeyed for new projects in the run-up to the 2008 Summer Olympics.
Ultimately, Winston spent two years in China working for architecture and urban development firms SOHO China and Lab Architecture Studio. The experience would produce a major inflection point in his career.
“When I got to China, I realized it had all these superlatives that were not good: the worst smog in the world, the highest consumption of concrete, the most cranes, etc.,” Winston recalls. “I realized that if I’m going to commit myself to contributing to the built environment, then it’s incumbent on me to do my utmost to help solve the environmental and climate crisis.”
Celebrating Messy Tech
After the Olympics, Winston returned to the U.S., eventually enrolling in a three-year Master of Architecture program at the University of Virginia (UVA).
During Winston's UVA tenure, he learned of an opportunity in Los Angeles to use his architectural skills to help solve the climate crisis. In 2010, then-LA-Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa designated a 2,000-acre zone of dilapidated industrial sites along the Los Angeles River as a Clean Tech Corridor. The former Mayor’s vision was to transform the blighted zone into an incubator for green technology and manufacturing jobs, solidifying LA’s role in the clean tech revolution.
Taking its cue from Villaraigosa’s office, the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) and The Architect’s Newspaper staged a competition to solicit ideas from architects, industrial designers and urban planners on how best to revitalize the Clean Tech Corridor. Winston jumped in with both feet, forming and leading a team of UVA architecture students. Ultimately, their entry, “MessyTECH,” won first place in the student category.
“The work we did for that competition sort of rolled into my master’s thesis, ‘Infrastructure in Los Angeles,’” Winston offers. “It also helped form many of the ideas that drive me now in thinking about the challenges of creating a more climate-resilient environment for Los Angeles.”
Connecting with Climate Goals
After grad school, Winston returned to his political roots, taking a job as an Executive Fellow in the Sacramento office of then-Governor Jerry Brown.
“I learned a tremendous amount from Gov. Brown, both from his understanding of California’s and the nation’s political history regarding the environment and the efforts he championed to fight climate change,” Winston says.
Under Gov. Brown, he also led a state agency called the Strategic Growth Council (SGC) that invested in transit-oriented development and other climate infrastructure. Funded by California’s cap and trade program, the SGC exposed Winston to the challenges of designing equitable programs and policies for climate resilience.
“My time with SGC was a wonderful experience,” Winston observes. “With an annual budget of about $400 million, we worked on great, multi-benefit projects in underserved communities. The projects improved people's lives, reduced greenhouse gases and took us toward our climate goals.”
Expanding the Team
While working in Sacramento, Winston also met his future wife.
“We both worked in government and were both members of the California Capitol Fellows Program,” he explains. “When we married in 2017, we moved back to Southern California to be closer to our families. But I was still keen to combine my interests in architecture and climate policy with law.”
In 2018, Winston was accepted at the UC Berkeley School of Law where he completed his juris doctor (J.D.) degree in 2021. Upon graduation, he returned to Los Angeles to work for the law firm of O’Melveny and Myers LLP.
Following His Heart
His long-term goal, however, was to get back into government. So, when then-Congresswoman Karen Bass announced her intention to run for Mayor of Los Angeles, Winston raised his hand.
“I had heard a lot about (Congresswoman Bass’s) work in Sacramento, and a lot of my colleagues knew her and respected her work, so I knew I wanted to help with her campaign,” Winston recalls.
During the campaign, he chaired Bass’s environmental policy committee. After Congresswoman Bass won the 2022 LA mayoral election, Winston was invited, in early 2023, to join the Mayor’s Office in his current capacity.
Renovating Transit Infrastructure
STAP will include the renovation and redesign of existing shelters and the installation of new ones. StreetsLA’s goal is to ensure that 75% of bus riders in each LA City Council district have easy access to a new or renovated shelter.
The updated shelters will feature amenities such as dynamic schedule information, hydration stations, hand-sanitizing dispensers, WiFi, induction phone charging stations, bicycle or scooter docks and e-lockers.
The shelters will be funded largely by digital or static advertising panels at each station (StreetsLA may provide some shelters and shade structures without advertising).
Offering New Options
In the past, Winston explains, LA bus shelters have been built in locations perceived to bring in higher advertising revenues, i.e. wealthier areas of the city. Under STAP, however, shelter locations will be based on ridership levels; exposure to heat; proximity to minority, low-income and zero-vehicle households, and low-frequency routes (read: longer wait times.)
He’s also excited about the digital display technology being used in many of the new shelters.
"Digital billboards can tell you what bus is coming and when,” he offers, “but they can also provide information about connection points, rail options and other transit opportunities offered by Metro such as bike sharing.
The technology also gives bus riders a simple but powerful way to think about how they use buses and by extension, the broader LA transportation system.”
Paying Its Way
The goal for STAP, advises Winston, is to be self-sustaining. It plans to use advertising revenues to pay for capital, operations, maintenance and other transit-related streetscape improvements. If this revenue falls short, the City could also choose to fund shelters with general fund dollars or some other revenue source, he says.
So far, he admits, the proposed advertising has been somewhat controversial––some people are worried that bright, flashing advertising may be visually disruptive to their community. The main complaint he’s heard about the bus shelters, however, is why they aren’t being installed faster.
“People want more shelters, faster and now,” he emphasizes.
Getting Up to Speed
So far, people have a right to be frustrated.
“We hope to build up to 100 shelters this year, and then exponentially increase that once we have our fabrication and rollout processes moving at full steam,” Winston promises.
Fabricating shelters is the easy part, he adds. It's the street design work and concrete formwork required to make the shelters ADA-accessible and compliant with city requirements that make it a more time-intensive process.
Adopting Discipline
Workdays begin early in the three-bedroom home in the Baldwin Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles that Winston shares with his wife and two pre-schoolers. His morning routine includes coffee, a smoothie (with very specific ingredients) and a prescribed push-up routine. He also helps his wife get the kids ready and out the door to daycare by about 8:15. A 30-minute drive in his Tesla puts him to his office at City Hall in downtown LA before 9:00.
Winston’s workdays are filled, he says, with “events of many stripes,” including town halls, civic events, groundbreakings and more formal meetings with colleagues, constituents and stakeholders. On any given day, he’s as likely to be in the San Fernando Valley or South LA as San Pedro or the Port of Los Angeles.
Whenever he can, Winston squeezes in a three-mile run in the late afternoon or early evening, a ritual outside of work that he finds to be "mentally clarifying.”
Serving His Country
And as if his days aren’t already packed with giving-back activities, Winston also serves one weekend per month as a Judge Advocate General (JAG) with the U.S. Army National Guard Reserve. This duty takes him to Joint Forces Training Base in Los Alamitos, Calif.
"Most of my life is devoted to public service, and the more I can contribute, the better,” he reflects. “Serving as a JAG is quite different, however, because it involves national security, not my day-to-day work.”
Staying Present
When asked to sum up his passion for public service and insatiable hunger for knowledge, Winston turns to a quote by German polymath and writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: “Nothing is worth more than this day.”
“Goethe’s observations, to my way of thinking, sum up the immediacy and the importance of being present with the people who are right here now before you, and renewing that sense of quest each day,” he offers.
In other words, the transit riders of Los Angeles, particularly the disadvantaged and the underserved, can count on Winston to have their back when it comes to adding climate resiliency to critical transit infrastructure.
“We’re taking it step by step to make riding transit in LA a safer, more comfortable, more positive experience,” he suggests. “Don’t be surprised if we start attracting more riders.”
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If you found this profile of Randall Winston engaging, you might enjoy other articles I’ve written about transportation advocates such as Jennifer Pyrz and Joshua Schank. If you need assistance writing feature articles about your company or its innovative employees, please drop me a line at brooks@personsofinfrastructure.com. Many thanks.