this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2024
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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.
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".
It's more that it makes the area unpleasant and even perhaps dangerous to others. Sucks but it is what it is