Berkeley replaced one DIY bench with a city-approved one, but a pair of activists have since added at least four more wood benches in Berkeley and Oakland.
After a transit activist’s guerilla installation of a bench at a Berkeley bus stop spurred the city to action, more benches are popping up at stops around the East Bay.
The seating insurgency began on Dec. 17, when Cal grad Mingwei Samuel moved a DIY bench to a downtown Berkeley bus stop after seeing a photo of a 64-year-old Northbrae resident with chronic pain sitting on a curb on Martin Luther King Jr. Way as he waited for a bus after grocery shopping. Samuel’s goal was to help the man and highlight the lack of infrastructure for public transit riders.
When we reached out to city spokesperson Matthai Chakko on Dec. 18, he said that Berkeley was treating the homemade bench “as a formal request” for the city to install one of its own. And by the end of December, the city had replaced Samuel’s wooden bench at 1935 Martin Luther King Jr. Way, which cost him around $80 and an afternoon to build, with a green metal bench of its own.
“We had a bench in stock, and it was the only request in our queue,” Chakko said this week. Samuel’s bench was returned to him by the city.
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