I saw this in Hong Kong, which I know isnt known for its walkability or anything but it has amazing public transport you can get anywhere to, and then it has like absolutely no sits anywhere… if there were they are taken by the other thousands that are looking for a sit hahaha
Asians make their own seat.
right hahaha
By the time we have walkable cities we’ll probably have cybernetic legs and hover mobility scooters
What do you mean, I sit in my car all the time
But do you shit in your car?
Sittable cars means shittable cars send tweet
Never assume a bottle of apple juice in a footwell is apple juice.
Could well be brake fluid or coolant. I know at least one guy who got their bottles mixed once.
It’s the brownies in the glove compartment I’m worried about.
Oh man. I want unread this.
Benches are just so nice. The value-to-price proposition is amazing and I don’t see why any city would disagree with this other than incompetence. I recently ordered a bench for a little public garden in my neighbourhood and plopped it there for 100usd. People love it :)
Cities discourage benches because the homeless might use them and that would mean acknowledging the homeless exist.
That’s not always the case tho. Sometimes cities just forget benches exist. My town has no real homeless issues but still lacks of benches for some reason and the public parks team would rather spend the money on touristy shit like “dancing fountains” smh
Send them a letter saying it would be nice for your old grandpa to sit on a bench and look at those dancing fountains.
Also benches, like any public property, get vandalised, stolen and covered in bird and other droppings and need costly maintenance to keep in usable condition.
What costly maintenance do benches need?
And like any public property (like, say, roads), we have the mean to repair them.
It’s more that it makes the area unpleasant and even perhaps dangerous to others. Sucks but it is what it is
They did that in my city. They build a whole station with zero benches because according to the asshole architect, “station are meant to board train, not to wait”.
If 3 minutes is too far of a walk you may need a mobility scooter/other mobility aid.
From What is a Walkable city:
These spaces incorporate elements like seating areas, public art installations, water features, and greenery, enhancing the overall aesthetic appeal and providing a respite from the built environment.
and
Ample green spaces, street trees, and seating areas provide comfortable resting spots and encourage people to enjoy their surroundings.
So… yes? Like I know it might be cathartic to someone driving-by (heh) the concept, but seating is very much in the design of walkable cities.
I think their point is that even in situations that able bodied people might consider to have “ample seating,” it may not be enough for those with disabilities. 3 minutes of walking between benches, I’d say, would probably be considered pretty ample seating by most city planners. It would be no where near enough for my dad, or for my mom before she went full time in the wheelchair. One solution to this could be something along the lines of the little carts they have at Walmart, but like, owned by the city and able to be checked out for free, combined with some people with mobility issues actually getting a say in how the city is planned out, and where the ramps and stuff are for the sidewalks.
No, we absolutely don’t need to inundate every city with eight benches per block. (Two per side.)
There’s a point at which you have to meet halfway, and if you can’t walk for five minutes straight you should probably be in a walker or wheelchair.
In general I agree that cities need to be more walkable, and that includes seating. But the “some people can’t walk three minutes” idea needs to go.
Yeah, totally unreasonable for people to have seating options. I mean the downsides are just so numerous…
Mandates often have unforeseen consequences and always create some burden. It’s important to consider them carefully, even if they sound good on the surface, and make sure they’re worth the cost.
A quick social media comment that “there should be benches every three minutes” isn’t well considered policy. What even is a three minute walk to someone not capable of walking for five?
The sentiment is in the right place. The words are not.
I’m a part time wheelchair user with some walking ability and there are a lot of spaces in my city that are too inaccessible for me to use. I don’t mean internal space, I mean the built environment of the city itself. There’s one route which, if I’m walking, is 0.2 miles. If I’m in my wheelchair, it’s just under 0.6 because I have to take a weird route that doubles back on myself, because city designers put little ledges everywhere without considering how mobility aid users can be impacted
Of course you’re right to highlight that a properly supportive and inclusive world requires more components than just modifications to the built environment, but I think that making accessible spaces needs to be in people’s minds from the get go, and that “some people can’t walk three minutes” is a useful idea for this.
Thanks for adding context Yeah, wheelchair accessibility is still a very relevant thing for us to work on. (Not to mention general walkability.) I think a bench quota is a bit tangent to that.
There’s a good YouTube video on “Stroads” and how they’ve ruined our cities.
My city removed all the benches during covid, but they didn’t give them back. So I bought a BAGOBAGO for my parents. (backpack you can sit on)
Typical government. Amiright?
Hrm. Tokyo probably wouldn’t be considered a walkable city in that person’s view. Benches can be thin once you get outside the station area. Most people live within 20 minutes of their station (rents drop dramatically after that in most cases), but 3 would probably be too expensive, especially for a pensioner (not sure how old this self-proclaimed old person is). Tokyo is doing better than it used to in terms of escalators and elevators, but a lot of places still just have stairs for now. I certainly wouldn’t want to be in a wheelchair or on crutches around here, though it’s mostly doable.
I don’t think they referred to themselves as old. I think they’re disabled and bringing up the fact that old people have similar issues because everyone gets old.
OK, I can see that interpretation, too.
My first thought: Tokyo is highly walkable but not sittable. You are always supposed to go somewhere. You sit at your destination or in the subway.
We do have a lot of small parks, but basically yes
I think people were laughing less at the sentiment, and more at the “send tweet” at the end.
I know I was.
And there’s a good chance you’ll be disabled before you even get old.
With how the world seems currently, getting old might not even be on the table
Huh?
Sits on the ground
I don’t know what’s going on here.
If you’re like me and have to sit down frequently for low blood pressure reasons, sure. But if you have to sit down for mobility disability reasons that unfortunately just won’t do because it’ll be hard to sit down so low let alone get back up.
So much this
Also, what’s three minutes for one person could be ten or twenty for someone else who can barely stand for five
There’s a restaurant I like to go to that if you have certain disabilities, good luck getting there. The closest handicap parking spot is a block and a half away and there’s only one, or a bit further there are a few in a parking garage. It’s an uphill incline to get there and there’s not a single bench the entire way between parking and the restaurant. If you’re disabled but not to the point of being in a wheelchair, or don’t have someone who can push that wheelchair uphill, and don’t have a mobility scooter, you ain’t getting there
And that’s with our current car infrastructure, and just one example out of many of disabled hostile design in our car centric reality that people who’ve not had to navigate it from that perspective just don’t understand. And they never bother asking someone who does experience it. So, I’m pretty tired of hearing the bullshit excuse of how it would be bad for disabled people if we went to walkable cities with public transit.
Stop using disabled people as your gotcha argument
Dude. I’m 59 and big. Just looking at that picture made my knees pop.
Quickest thing to notice about the part of the town I’m in near the senior center, where the walking trails go through it there’s SIGNIFICANTLY more seating and trash cans. There’s benches spaced out around the rest of town too but honestly the buses are probably more reliable for that, unless it’s a busy day or time and you have to stand there too. Downtown has a lot of public seating too but the spacing is weird and it’s just a busy area where that seating might be taken, or sticky, because there’s a bunch of ice cream shops over there and people dripping or spilling has become enough of an issue that it’s not uncommon to see a “NO ICE CREAM” sign.
Doesn’t seem to work in IB, CA, USA. There are four benches that I know exist, but none are marked.
This uses Open Street Map so if no one mapped them then they won’t show up.
I use https://every-door.app/ to map them in my vacinity when I go for a walk. I have already mapped dozens of benches
