At first glance everything about bus bench advertising seems wonderful. The advertiser gets their message out there, the bus passenger gets a place to sit, and the advertising can be incredibly local.
Sometimes I am one of those bus passengers. Perhaps I shouldn’t rock the boat.
It’s just that those benches are covered in snow in the winter. The people that clear away the snow from the bus stops don’t clear the snow from the benches. Even if there is a huge thaw where all the snow melts, the temperature is too cold to sit down on these benches. When the temperature gets to below zero, the heat gets sucked directly from your booty to the bench. Which makes you numb and gets you to stand up while waiting for the bus.
In the other three seasons, temperatures are warm enough that you might wish to sit on these benches. It’s just that in my city with our particular benches, they don’t drain from the rain particularly well. Water stays on them until it has managed to evaporate. A simple design with holes, like my patio chairs, and they could drain more and thus speed up the evaporation of any remaining water.
Again, in my particular city with our particular benches there is a design flaw when in the sun. The benches somehow superheat when out in the sun for as little as ten minutes. If there is a sufficient breeze and a low temperature and I am particularly lazy, I will sit on these benches. After only a couple minutes my booty heats up to the point that I end up with sweat on my forehead.
Let me dissuade you from the idea that all this is an accident. After all they’ve had bus bench ads for a very long time now and they should have had all the bugs worked out of it by now.
There’s a fundamental concept flaw with bus bench ads. You see if anyone sits on the bench, passersby will not be able to read the ad. So the providers of the benches are doing everything in their power to get people to not sit on the benches.
There is one particularly bad bus bench that I know of in the city. It has a nest of wasps in it, preventing any rational being from using it to sit on. I could tell the providers of the bench about it. But I now know what their response will be. They will not fix this problem and it will add to the visibility of this bench sign.
I am, however, hoping that the representative of the company that changes the ad will get stung.
