The Bus Stop Bench Problem

The bench at Marlow and Ninth cost $1,140 and took four years, and as far as I can reconstruct, about eleven minutes of that time was spent on the actual bench.

Mrs. Odessa Vance called it in on April 4, 2022. She was 81, she had ridden Route 11 to her pharmacy and her church for longer than I have been alive, and she had been bringing her own seat, a green folding camp stool she carried hooked over her forearm like a handbag. Route 11 comes every forty minutes. The stop is a pole in a strip of concrete. She asked the 311 operator whether the city might put a bench there, and the operator, in the last moment of innocence this story contains, said she would pass that along.

Year one: whose bench

Calloway has three departments with a claim on a bus stop, and you might think this would mean three groups of people eager to help. Transit, my shop, owns the pole, the sign, and the schedule. Public Works owns the sidewalk the pole stands in. Parks and Recreation owns the bench, any bench, on any public land, because of a 1988 ordinance written so a council member could count street seating as park amenities on a state grant. The grant ended in 1991. The ordinance did not.

So the ticket went to Transit, which sent it to Parks, which said it couldn’t place anything in the right-of-way without a Public Works permit. Public Works said it issued those permits only at the request of the responsible agency. I asked which agency was responsible, and each of us turned out to have a form saying it was one of the others. The ticket moved seven times in eleven months. I know because I printed its history and taped it to my cubicle wall, where it looked like the family tree of a troubled dynasty.

Year two: six feet

By then I had taken it on personally, which is a thing planners do when they have lost perspective. We went out and measured. Federal accessibility standards call for a clear boarding area at a stop, five feet along the curb and eight feet back from it, so a ramp can deploy and a wheelchair can turn. Between the grass strip and the six-foot sidewalk we had exactly that, and no room for a bench inside it.

So the bench had to slide down the block. Twenty feet along there’s a water shutoff in the slab. Nine feet past that you’re in front of a house, and in Calloway a fixture in front of a house means a notice to the abutting owner, which means, if the owner objects, a hearing. It took most of a year to learn that the owner objected.

Year three: attracting sitting

Fourteen people came to a hearing about one bench, more than came to the hearing on the entire Route 11 budget. The abutter, Gil Ferrante, is a perfectly nice man who keeps excellent tomatoes. He said a bench would attract sitting. Someone asked what kind of sitting. He said the wrong kind, at night. Mrs. Vance had brought her stool to the meeting because the community room chairs hurt her back, and she asked him, from the stool, what hours he would prefer.

Risk Management, which insists it’s an office and not a department, sent a memo requesting a center armrest to keep anyone from lying down. I argued against it. A center armrest has never housed a single person. It only moves them somewhere worse. We settled on armrests at the two ends, which older riders need anyway to push up from. That is the one argument I won in four years, and I would like it noted.

Year four: the pad

Parks buys exactly one bench, a six-foot slatted model called the Heritage, from one approved vendor. After a fire at the vendor’s foundry it was back-ordered for fourteen months. The bench also needs a concrete pad, the pad needs a Public Works crew, and Public Works stops pouring on October 31. The Heritage arrived on November 2. It spent the winter in a Parks garage under a tarp, with a ticket number taped to it, and on my lunch breaks I sometimes thought about driving over to visit.

When it was finally done, I pulled the timesheets from all three departments. Across four years we had logged 212 staff hours, which at our loaded rate comes to a bit over $14,000. The bench cost $1,140 and the argument about the bench cost about $14,400.

That number got me five minutes with the three department heads, and it’s the first time I have seen a spreadsheet embarrass anyone. They signed a two-page agreement that lets Transit place seating at stops from a preapproved checklist. Parks gave up its benches with what I can only describe as relief. There were eleven more requests in the queue, some older than Mrs. Vance’s. The second bench took seven weeks.

We installed Marlow and Ninth on Tuesday, June 9, and I drove out to watch, as I would for a grandchild. Mrs. Vance came down the block around 9:30, now 85, stool on her arm. She walked around the bench once. She lowered herself onto it with the expression of someone testing a melon.

“It’s low,” she said.

It’s 18 inches, squarely in the standard range of 17 to 19, and I told her so. She looked at me for a while. Then she took hold of the armrest and got her feet under her, in stages, and the 11 came, and she went to the pharmacy.

I drove by the following Tuesday. She was on the bench with her purse in her lap, waiting, and the green stool was folded against her knee, in case.