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.

According to the Chronicle’s report, Public Works has reportedly received at least one complaint about the benches. Still, both the Public Works department and the SFMTA have been pretty silent about these benches over the full month now since they’ve been installed, perhaps because of the question of which department has responsibility for the locations in question. Public Works generally has jurisdiction over city sidewalk issues, but Muni stops are the SMFTA’s responsibility.

SFist has reached out to the SF Bay Area Bench Collective for their thoughts on the threatened crackdown by Public Works. "We have local friends and neighbors helping maintain the benches by keeping them clean and buffing graffiti regularly," the team told us. "The website exists primarily so that anyone can report problems with the benches and we can deal with them quickly. Of course we appreciate when the very busy Public Works employees help maintain the benches as well (as they have already done!) but ultimately we're not counting on that."

"We are trying to take all possible concerns into consideration; safety, accessibility, maintenance," they added. "We buff the benches regularly, position them to ensure there's adequate ADA loading area for the bus ramps, have continually strengthened the design, etc.. We're open to suggestions from the city on how to best (re) position or improve the benches to meet everyone's needs. But ultimately doing this 'properly' would be if the city installed these much-needed benches themselves."

Though the coalition also said, "If the city requests us to remove any particular bench then we will do so as quickly as possible, and will refill the holes with sealant."

The public at large, though, seems to love and frequently use the benches. One 90-year-old woman the Chronicle spoke to said the benches were “beautiful,” and her caretaker added, “This is an adequate bench.” The benches’ seemingly sturdy design was taken from the blueprint of the Chris Duderstadt Public Bench Project that has built and installed more than 200 community benches, largely in SF’s Sunset District.

So we’ll see how this bench drama plays out, considering that Muni riders largely seem to love the donated benches. And in the East Bay city of Richmond, that town’s city council approved a process for “community-built benches” in early June. So there’s some possibility that a framework could emerge to make these “guerrilla benches” not so “guerrilla” anymore, though right now, SF City Hall does not seem to be standing for that.

Note: This post has been updated with comment from the SF Bay Area Bench Collective.

Related: Renegade Transit Activists Install their Own ‘Guerilla Benches’ at SF Bus Stops That Don’t Have Benches [SFist]

Images: Joe Kukura, SFist