City’s blind eye to street furniture is a blessing for pedestrians

Our cities do provide some benches. They are often found in designated parks. In Ottawa, the NCC provides lots of benches in its riparian green spaces. But other than benches for “recreational” areas, they are hard to find. Some rejuvenated traditional main streets are now being furnished by the City, but most streets everywhere are naked of furniture or other pedestrian amenities. Bus shelters sometimes have benches, for those who like to be manikins in glass boxes until their bus arrives.

I guess maybe the planners all feel people bring their own seats with them in the form of their automobiles. Or they should pay for their seats by buying something in a café that has a carefully fenced off patio. Or maybe it is a residual fear of encouraging the wrong sort of people to hang around, bothering the worthy taxpayers. Teens! Men with pony tails! Tonsil inspectors! Whatever the reason, benches are conspicuously absent.

Because the city comes with a heavy bureaucracy, it is difficult for them to install a bench anywhere. The city pegs the cost of supplying and installing a bench along a sidewalk at about $5000 minimum, up to $10,000. Those rates include extensive overhead costs for engineering, site design, property survey, the actual vandal-resistant furniture itself, etc, etc. And this is after the citizen or business has expended huge amounts of time in correspondence to get the bench even on someone’s agenda. Why fight city hall?

When New York Mayor Bloomberg suggested furnishing Times Square once Broadway was closed to cars and opened to pedestrians, the bureaucracy leapt into action. They proposed architectural consultants, engineer advisors, lengthy committee structures, leading to  heavy tables and benches, bolted down, un-tippable-over so they couldn’t injure anyone, all available within a year or two, for a big city ransom.

Instead, the Mayor’s team recalled the Paris street furniture. Thin metal chairs. They’ve been used there for a hundred years. And they turned out to be cheap too. A container load of them was ordered and promptly delivered to Times Square. Before City crews could set them out, pedestrians grabbed them to do it themselves. Yes, a few hundred were stolen, but once those apartments or fire escape patios were furnished, surprisingly few have since been stolen.

Alas, we haven’t a Bloomberg at hand, but I have noticed more and more merchants are simply foregoing the permit and approval process, and simply setting out furniture on the sidewalk. Along with the example at the top of the story, here are a few more examples:

I don’t want to propose that City bureaucrats actually acknowledge these seating services. If they deigned to do so, they would feel obliged to inspect them, develop standards and a permitting process, and eventually turn them into a revenue source. Better to turn a blind eye, much like those worn-in-the-dirt trails that show where pedestrians really want to go but the City doesn’t approve of your route, so it can’t get paved. Anything informal is sure to offend some set of standards somewhere.

So why do merchants set up street furniture? Is it so that people will linger? Because only part of a typical group will actually enter the shop and the other half stays outside? Is it to cater to the elderly, the infirm, or the leisurely? Civic pride?

I should point out this is not the same as suburban lawns with a nice cast metal bench or wooden “park bench” set out on the lawn by the flower bed. These are purely for show, the illusion of being welcome, but don’t expect to actually walk over someone’s grass to sit there, unless you want a visit from the cop car responding to the 9-1-1 call.

I am pleased to see the current blindness by City bureaucrats to informal street furniture. It holds some promise for the pedestrian of having a more pleasant walk. It is a private encroachment on the public realm that rewards the public and stewards the public environment. Let’s hope it is contagious.