A month after a group of transit activists installed “guerilla benches” at SF bus stops that had no benches, the city’s Public Works Department says they will demand that these activists remove the unauthorized benches.
It’s been a month since SFist first noticed that some gang of anonymous public transportation advocates had installed rogue “guerilla benches” at San Francisco bus stops that had not previously had benches.
“Despite being the urban center of the bay, SF has the worst bus stops of any cities here, almost always lacking signage, often lacking clear red curbs, lacking shelters, and of course lacking seating,” the anonymous transit activists calling themselves the SF Bay Area Bench Collective said in a statement to SFist at the time. “So it was only natural to return here to provide seating for bus riders at bus stops.”
One of those benches has been tagged pretty hard in the month since, though that is of course a rather common occurrence at Muni stop structures. Yet the rogue benches may be facing a more significant existential crisis than that, as the Chronicle reports that the city’s Public Works department and the SF Municipal Transit Agency (SFMTA) want those unauthorized benches removed.
The Chronicle refers to them as “mystery benches,” though their origin is hardly a mystery. The SF Bay Area Bench Collective has been pretty up front about exactly where they placed the benches, having placed eight of these throughout the Mission District in early June. (They’d already placed dozens in the East Bay that are not pictured above.) Two of the benches on 30th Street have since been removed, though it appears that neighborhood groups or other individuals removed them, so maybe these benches are not unanimously popular with the Mission District at large.
“We’ll go out and assess it and ask the bench folks to remove it,” Public Works spokesperson Rachel Gordon told the Chronicle. “We don’t want to be overly cumbersome. But there are real reasons why we don’t just say, ‘OK, put whatever you want on a public sidewalk.’ There are real things a government needs to take into consideration.”
Those “real things” include the question of who is legally liable if someone trips or injures themselves on the benches, or who is responsible for fixing damage. Gordon also notes that the renegade installers bolted the benches into the sidewalk, so the Bench Collective folks may be asked to repair those holes…