At a bus stop, a picture of a guy sitting on the ground with a cane sparked outrage and a resolve to put things right.
That awkward situation gave rise to a local movement in Berkeley, California.
It began when Darrell Owens saw his neighbour waiting for a bus on the curb. The neighbour had recently had surgery to treat persistent leg pain.
“For many years, I had complained about the lack of seating for bus benches in Berkeley and got no response from either the city of Berkeley or AC Transit,” Owens stated.
When Owens shared a picture of his neighbour sitting awkwardly on the sidewalk on social media, Mingwei Samuel, a local software engineer, saw and volunteered to move his own bench to the spot.
After discovering the Public Bench Project, which installs benches and donates them to nearby companies and organisations in an effort to “promote community-oriented public spaces,” Samuel had started constructing benches.
Samuel shared a photo of the issue resolved after his bench was eventually positioned at the notorious bus stop.
Soon after, Samuel’s social media post received over 100,000 Likes and generated a great deal of goodwill and positive energy in the neighbourhood. A movement and an idea started.
Soon, dozens more benches would start arriving.
The SFBA Bench Collective is a bench building project that Samuel and Owens, who had been strangers only a few weeks before, began working on together. They launched a basic website that lets anyone join the movement, report issues, or request a bench.
Their group has put in about 77 benches at neighbourhood bus stations so far. Every bench conforms to the rules set forth by the Americans with Disabilities Act and AC Transit.
The group prioritises placing benches at the stops with the largest ridership, and each bench is expected to cost only $70.
The transit community now plays a sort of cat-and-mouse game as a result of the initiative. Occasionally, the bench collective will install their own benches, only to have the city replace them.
“That means the collective’s work is complete: We got the cities to build benches for its citizens,” Owens says, expressing satisfaction.
The movement continues to expand elsewhere. A video of a bench build that was released by a climate activist who volunteered for the bench collective had 3.2 million views. The topic is still gaining traction on social media, as many organisations nationwide are advocating for comfortable facilities to promote public transportation.
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“After the election, I think there’s been more energy to do something good in the world, for once, so other people have helped step up to organize bench-build weekends,” Samuel stated.
The campaign was started in Berkeley by a single bench, but the good Samaritans are continuing it around the country.
