No Bus Stop Seating? No Problem. (Actually, There Is Definitely a Problem.)
A bus stop in Staten Island, New York that made the “Sweet 16” in Streetsblog’s 2021 Sorriest Bus Stops competition. (Courtesy of Streetsblog.)
American bus stops can be a sorry sight. For years, Streetsblog chronicled some of the worst in their Sorriest Bus Stops competition.
A bus stop in Trenton, Michigan that made the “Sweet 16” in Streetsblog’s 2021 competition. (Courtesy of Streetsblog.)
The annual event was as amusing as it was a cry for help. After all, transit riders are expected to loiter at these debris-riddled locations for an average of 15 minutes — and often much, much longer. Worse yet, the volume of submissions year after year proved that pitiful waiting areas were the norm, not the exception. Every city had at least a handful to choose from, some from buses with weekly riderships so high that it was hard to understand why city and state leaders would subject their constituents to such an undignified wait.
(Courtesy of Streetsblog.)
That’s why fed-up advocates in Denton, Texas, took matters into their own hands. One sunny weekend in 2023, members of Abundance Denton convened in a backyard, bringing with them stacks of found pallet wood, boxes of tools, a Bluetooth speaker and plenty of snacks. Over the next few hours, they constructed half a dozen benches to plant across the city’s bus stops.
Their motivation: to inject some humanity into the transit system. During a Zoom call, Kristine Bray, one of the organizers, walked me through what an average bus trip in Denton would entail. While awkward routes and abysmal headways were clearly bigger issues, the conditions of the bus stops — demarcated by little more than worn grass and a palm-sized sign hanging for dear life — only rubbed salt into the wound. Abundance Denton couldn’t address equipment or operator shortages, but they could make the long waits a little less hostile.
Their inspiration: a TikTok uploaded by the Chattanooga Urbanist Society, or CUS. At the time, CUS operated under the veil of anonymity — though Jon Jon Wesolowski, who collaborates with Strong Towns and spearheads his own platform, The Happy Urbanist, has since claimed responsibility for CUS’ guerrilla undertakings. The CUS benches couldn’t be linked to Wesolowski initially, but he made sure that the city couldn’t take credit for the new seating either. The benches were as much a statement to local decision-makers as they were a provision for riders.
A bus stop in Denton.
Once the benches were polished — outfitted with accurate bus schedules and route maps — the Dentonites were ready to drop them off. Like CUS, they initially wanted their work to remain anonymous. Even though they were responding to a need in their community, what they were doing was legally questionable at best.
Luckily, legality didn’t impact the benches’ popularity. Both CUS and Abundance Denton got to watch as riders used the DIY benches mere hours after they were placed. Build it and they will sit.
The Bus Bench Movement
Across the country, ordinary people have taken to filling in the gaps in their local transportation systems.
A man in Philadelphia chained a thrifted wrought-iron bench to an unsheltered bus stop, namely for his own sake. With “weak knees” and an unreliable bus schedule, he'd rather sit if he’s expected to wait more than 10 minutes. Over the summer, a Reddit user posted about a pop-up pleather couch at one of Chicago’s many bus stops. “Whoever did that is fkn awesome,” another replied. When Tris Howard’s car broke down, he relied on Portland, Maine’s bus network to get around. Tired of waiting around with no place to sit, he decided to place a bench. "I spent a lot of time standing at that exact bus stop and thinking, 'Wow, it would be really great if there were a bench here to sit on,'" he told the local news.
Illinois
One day in 2015, Illinois Wesleyan University graduate Julie Lewis attended a local town hall meeting out of curiosity. After two hours of listening to the unfiltered concerns of local residents, one issue stood out: the lack of public seating at bus stops. In fact, it was the story of an elderly woman who fell after a lengthy wait for the bus that moved Lewis to ultimately construct and plant bus benches herself. “That was not the moment where I said to myself, 'I need to build benches,’ but it was one of the things that stuck with me,” Lewis recalled. “Of all the problems people talked about, this seemed like one that could be solved.”
She’d never done anything like it before, but as a veteran of Habitat for Humanity builds, Lewis knew her way around hammers and drills. A bit of experience, the occasional Google search, a group of friends, and tools borrowed from the local tool library were all it took to fill a need in her community.
Years later, Bloomington Revivalists, a Local Conversation led by teacher and organizer Noah Tang, picked up where Lewis left off. He was eyeing a bus stop right outside of a Kroger supermarket. “There were people waiting in the rain, holding their bags, sitting on the curb with groceries. I would say it’s demeaning,” he told me. “But also, it would literally take us like $40 to build a bench and put it there so, let’s just do it.”
California
On November 1, 2023, Darrel Owens tweeted a photo of his 64-year-old neighbor sitting on the curb at a bus stop. The caption: “This is my area neighbor who suffers from chronic pain prohibiting him from bending his legs and he just got surgery. Now hes sitting on the ground in downtown berkeley because @CityofBerkeley and @rideact dont have benches at their bus stops.”
“Which stop?” Mingwei Samuel replied. “I can put a bench there.”
A few days shy of Christmas, Samuel delivered. “Took me a bit, but it’s here,” he tweeted, adding, “and yes, the fact that I’m doing this instead of the city of Berkeley is a policy failure.”
By December 28th, the city had taken away his bench, replacing it with something more permanent. This is exactly what Owens and Samuel wanted, though the city hasn’t been as swift elsewhere. The two have since teamed up and continue to supply the region’s bus stops with seating, having since improved on their design. “We added cross bracing. We replaced the legs with treated wood so it should last longer,” Samuel told NextCity. “A lot of thought has gone into making these benches safe and durable for the real world, even though they aren’t official.”
North Carolina
After “watching his neighbors stand out in the hot sun, the rain, the cold, waiting for their buses at utterly neglected patches of sidewalk, with cars whizzing past, and not even a place to sit while they waited,” one resident of Asheville, North Carolina, decided to try his hand at building benches too. Within a few months, his solo effort grew into a volunteer-coordinated campaign aptly titled the Asheville Bench Project.
When he appeared on The Bottom-Up Revolution podcast in 2022, he noted that the benches were as much a statement directed at city leaders as they were a provision for riders. “The city might not care, but we do!”
That initiative inspired another one about 130 miles east, in Charlotte, North Carolina. “I thought this would be a low-cost way where we can really help make the transit experience better,” Jacob Unterreiner, who spearheaded the idea when he was a lead organizer for Charlotte Urbanists, told reporters.
Turns out, he was right. Rodolfo Mora, a local bus rider, told the news that he was grateful for the effort, adding that “elderly people can use them when they’re waiting for the bus.” Support for the seating also came in the form of donations. In November 2022, the group launched a fundraising campaign to help cover the cost of purchasing 18 durable metal park benches. “As before, we will install them at bus stops all over Charlotte that lack the basic amenity of a place to sit,” a post announcing the fundraiser reassured. Their goal was $1,500. They ended up raising $3,960, or 264% of their goal.
The people spoke and Charlotte Urbanists delivered. Yet, as proud as they were to deliver over 80 benches, the advocates couldn’t help but think that it shouldn’t be up to them. “A big part of what we are trying to do here, not just provide seating, but kind of highlight the need,” Unterreiner told Queen City News. “Our end goal is that ultimately the city would take care of this as they should in the first place.”
(Before and After) - Our first official Benches for Bus Stops bench has been installed! 🎉 This was one of our most-requested stops by bus riders who responded to our survey stickers. pic.twitter.com/LKhGZTNOpS
— Charlotte Urbanists (@CLT_Urbanists) March 21, 2022
Wisconsin
Strong Towns Metro Milwaukee, a Local Conversation based in Wisconsin’s most populous city, aims to build 100 bus benches in the next year. “We’ve been building ‘Bill’s Bus Benches’ for several months now,” they wrote in a blog post. “Strong Town Metro MKE has its hands in a number of things, but this has been our first get-our-hands-dirty project, in which we intend to make good use of a grant received from America Walks and hopefully make the day of MCTS riders go just a little bit easier.”
(Courtesy of Strong Towns Metro Milwaukee.)
Stonewalled by the City
Both the rogue solo endeavors and the coordinated group efforts prove that providing seating can be low-cost, swift and popular.
In every instance, no sooner were DIY bus benches planted than they were in use. Yet, these largely unobjectionable initiatives have struggled to find allies in local government. Lewis in Illinois was lucky — she reportedly had the blessings of the local transit agency. Owens and Samuel in California got a thumbs up from local officials too. More relevantly, “no one’s really asked Darrell and I to stop,” Samuel told NextCity. Charlotte Urbanists never received an official green light, but they didn’t feel they had an enemy in their local transit agency, CATS, either.
Elsewhere, things got a little muddy.
In Denton, the advocates were essentially served with a cease and desist order. Some of the group’s benches were unceremoniously removed to the jeers of the bench-loving public, and others threatened with removal. However, they weren’t met with total disapproval. The city quietly praised their efforts and promised to replace some of the benches with more permanent seating — a definite win, yet one tempered by questions of why? Why only some? And then why remove the rest?
The answer was a mix of bureaucracy and complications regarding right-of-way, the same reasons Denton had so few bus benches in the first place. There didn’t seem to be an easy way to navigate these complications — nor, by some impressions, the will to do so.
Bus benches in Bloomington were dealt a similar fate. Tang talked to an engineer who appeared paralyzed by red tape. From challenges with ADA compliance to nonnegotiable design standards, there were a hundred reasons not to give bus riders a place to sit. The irony, he points out, is that Lewis’ effort nearly a decade earlier didn’t receive the same pushback, and some of the homemade benches placed by the West Bloomington Revitalization Project years ago remain, seemingly without issue.
In Portland, Maine, Howard’s efforts were stonewalled by standards. “City leaders say as much as they appreciate this kind gesture, the benches must be removed because they are in direct violation of federal, state and city transit guidelines,” the local news reported. “For one thing, all benches must have a 5-by-8-foot concrete pad to be ADA compliant.”
When Strong Towns Director of Community Action Edward Erfurt reached out to Maine’s Department of Transportation, it turned out there were no bench standards on record. A Local Conversation leader in Portland learned the same after they got in touch with someone from the U.S. Access Board (USAB), the federal agency that develops and maintains design criteria for the built environment.
“Just got off a call with USAB’s Technical Assistance team, and they confirmed that there are no requirements for the ground to be paved. Only that it be ‘firm and stable.’” the advocate said. “They also confirmed that South Portland wouldn’t actually be at risk of being sued.”
Of course, even if there were standards, the ball was in Portland’s court to build benches to code. After all, the advocates were merely pointing out where the city had fallen short. "I think it's wrong because he's trying to help people. He's trying to give them a place to sit,” South Portland bus rider Rozmarie Lau said. "I have to sit on the sidewalk when I'm waiting for a bus. It's not right. I'm 67 years old."
The bus bench in South Portland that the city is asking Howard remove. (Courtesy of WGME.)
Even in Charlotte, where advocates didn’t necessarily have an adversarial relationship with the transit agency CATS, there was an overwhelming disappointment that the agency wouldn’t pick up where they left off. During a meeting with the agency, Unterreiner recalled agency personnel expressing anxiety over liability and maintenance of nonstandard materials. At a glance, the concerns seem entirely fair. If a DIY bench breaks underneath a passenger, who is liable?
Yet, raising concerns without troubleshooting solutions falls into what advocates recognize as the “technical brush-off.” Moreover, it’s hard to take the sudden interest in the safety and welfare of passengers seriously. After all, if that were a legitimate concern, why would the agency subject passengers to miserable, unsheltered, bench-less bus stops in the first place? "Not only are you sometimes left with nowhere to sit, sometimes you are standing out there waiting on the bus in the rain with no shelter," one Charlotte bus rider told the local news back in August.
It’s not that barriers to building official benches don’t exist. Meeting ADA standards is important and retrofitting formerly non-ADA-compliant projects may require some extra cash and creativity. Yet, for Erfurt, a trained architect and urban designer, citing guidelines as an excuse betrays a lack of will more than a surplus of red tape. “There are many ways to accomplish seating in a city that do not cost $10,000 or trigger three levels of approvals,” he said.
For him, cities that have embraced outdoor dining (like Cincinnati, Ohio) and quick-build demonstrations (like Salt Lake City, Utah, and Jersey City, New Jersey) are the evidence. Those cities have just as much bureaucracy enshrined in their processes as any other. Where they differ is leadership. That, and a focus on what can be done, rather than what can’t be done.
Advocates in Bloomington almost got lucky on that front. When they were just starting out with their DIY benches, they had an ally in the bus company who suggested a sort of “adopt-a-bench” program. Such a program wouldn’t fix the bureaucratic makeup of the agency, but it would formalize support for community members who wanted to place benches themselves. It was a starting point, and it signaled a willingness to collaborate. There was even talk of replacing some of the DIY benches with more permanent benches. Things were really looking up. That is until their ally in the agency left.
Ever since, the conversations between advocates and the agency stalled. Tang admitted that the bus benches have taken a backseat for his advocacy group. Nevertheless, the progress they were able to make, even conversationally, with that former agency ally remains a testament to the fact that when there’s a will, there’s a way.
Moving Past the Red Tape
Today, Tang’s students are looking to install a bench on school grounds to avoid triggering city and transit agency scrutiny. In Denton, advocates have entertained cooperating with private property owners located near bus stops for the same reason.
Looking towards non-public property for bus benches is definitely a workaround, Erfurt noted. Even park benches can evade regulations otherwise imposed on bus benches. “There are lots of requirements for transit and actually no rules for parks,” he said. “Bureaucracy is all about labels and classification, so instead of doing ‘transit benches,’ these [could be] labeled as ‘park benches.’”
These workarounds aren’t foolproof, of course. Neither are they "pro tips" for advocates. Instead, these examples should inspire allies in local government to look for places where the barrier of entry is lower when it comes to something like bus benches. After all, the DIY benches are a call to action as much as they are a place to sit. As for concerns regarding liability, maintenance or ADA compliance, Erfurt suggests defining what those look like before citing them as an excuse.
Asia (pronounced “ah-sha”) Mieleszko serves as a Staff Writer for Strong Towns. A dilettante urbanist since adolescence, she's excited to convert a lifetime of ad-hoc volunteerism into a career. Her unconventional background includes directing a Ukrainian folk choir, pioneering synaesthetic performances, photographing festivals, designing websites, teaching, and ghostwriting. She can be found wherever Wi-Fi is reliable, typically along Amtrak's Northeast Corridor.