Decorating in the Dark

I feel safer outside the bus shelters than inside them.

by Bruce Schimmel

Have I got an offer for you. How'd you like someone to redecorate your living room? New sofa, chairs, even new art. And all for free

Here's the catch: You'd get a new living room at no charge, but you'd have no choice over what you'd get. And that's all you'll have for the next 20 years.  

Not so great, huh? If it's got to last for 20 years, you want a big say.

Well, tell that to City Hall. Because by year's end, they'll be putting out a request for proposals to refurnish our streets with hundreds of replacement bus shelters — and perhaps new info/advertising signs for sidewalks.

The new street furniture would be paid for by advertising on shelters and signs. Big ads, certainly. Blinking and flashing ads, maybe.

Now, for sure, new shelters are sorely needed. To succeed, SEPTA must treat its riders better, and attract new riders — including people like me. I take the occasional bus. But I'm less willing, if I have to sit on a dirty bench in a metal cage. And as for safety — a key to increased ridership, to be sure — well, I feel safer outside the bus shelters than inside them.

So, three cheers for the Nutter administration's move to rebid the contract, currently held by CBS Outdoor — whose maintenance has lagged even as their profits climbed. The city estimates that CBS takes in an average of $2.5 million annually from the shelter ads (of which the city gets about $500,000). The next vendor could double that, or more. There are some 250 shelters today, which may increase to 450. And that's before adding in the new sidewalk info/ad signs currently under discussion. 

Forum on the Future of
Bus Shelters and Street Furniture

But to make this succeed, the people who'll use it need to be heard. It's a project that screams for the highest level of transparency. To their credit, the Nutter folks have already cast far more light on the process than the Street administration — which wasn't much. With nary a peep from the public, Street's people planned to dump CBS and award the contract to Clear Channel Adshel just before leaving office. Nutter decided to retain CBS for another year while opening up bids on the 20-year contract by year's end. Major players CBS Outdoor, Clear Channel Adshel, Cemusa and JCDecaux recently made their first and (for now) only planned public presentations about their ideas at the Academy of Natural Sciences.

I missed the Oct. 26 event, which received no press except a skeletal planphilly.com write-up. As of press time, the Academy's video of the event is still not available. (They've promised to rectify that this week.) The city has a survey (at nextgreatcity.com), but it's uninformative. So your best bet, for now, are the four companies' presentations, available exclusively through citypaper.net/canon.

If you're a bus user, or hoping to be, look this stuff over and speak up. And if you're an industrial designer or architect, I especially hope you'll share your thoughts, because the companies are open to using local designers. (Imagine that!) Think about what bus shelters should look like, but also about other amenities — like real-time bus arrival information or security cameras.

Please e-mail me. Next week I'll share some of your ideas here. And who knows? If we turn on the lights and don't try to decorate in the dark, we might even get something we like.

Weigh in on the comments below or at schimmel.com.