About twice a month for the past six years, David Hamilton has taken the bus home to Northbrae from his grocery trip to Trader Joe’s. And every time, while waiting for the bus on Martin Luther King Jr. Way, he’s had to sit on the curb.
The 64-year-old gets around town mostly using his beloved three-wheeled e-bike or public transit, depending on where he’s headed. When he was younger, he used to race bikes, motorcycles and cars — a fact he wears proudly — but after 18 major surgeries, including a recent knee replacement, he is unable to stand for long periods of time and has trouble balancing.
In November, Hamilton was spotted sitting on the sidewalk by his neighbor Darrell Owens, a local housing and transit activist who, with Hamilton’s permission, shared a photo of him online, intending to draw attention to the lack of amenities for bus riders in Berkeley.
Neither was expecting an Oakland Hills resident to literally take matters into their own hands.
But on Sunday, Mingwei Samuel hauled a self-built bench onto the trailer of his cargo e-bike, rode 4.6 miles to downtown Berkeley and tied it to the Line 12 and 79 bus stop on Martin Luther King Jr. Way near the University Ave. intersection, across the street from Trader Joe’s.
“If we want people to use the bus and be sustainable and not cause traffic and drive around everywhere, you actually have to care about people who are using the bus,” said Samuel, a UC Berkeley alum who currently works as a software engineer in Berkeley. “Part of that is proper seating when you wait for the bus, having benches or shelters from the rain. There should just be a bench at every bus stop — period.”
Samuel, who is a member of Safe Street Rebels, a decentralized group of transit activists, pointed to Emeryville, which recently installed quick-build benches at every bus stop in the city, as an example.
“It’s the sort of thing where someone just needs to step up,” he said.
He did not reach out to the city of Berkeley or AC Transit before installing the bench downtown, but said he tried to leave ample room for bus drivers so that they could put down the bus’ wheelchair ramp.
Robert Lyles, a spokesperson for AC Transit, wrote in an email that the city of Berkeley maintains jurisdiction over the placement of outdoor furniture on its sidewalks and streets.
“While we appreciate community support, unapproved outdoor furniture can present unforeseen risks to pedestrians, transit riders, cyclists, and motorists,” Lyles wrote. “To address all safety concerns, we routinely collaborate with the city of Berkeley to review proposed options for riders before any additions are made to city sidewalks and streets.”
Berkeley spokesperson Matthai Chakko wrote in an email that community members can make general service requests, including ones for benches at bus stops, via the city website. The city does not have any record of any request for a bench at 1935 Martin Luther King Jr. Way, Chakko wrote, but is “now treating this as a formal request.” “That means that we will have professional staff go to the site and, among other things, conduct an engineering assessment to see whether it follows legal requirements for sidewalk access.”
Hamilton, whose plight prompted the installation, visited the bench for the first time Thursday after a class at the North Berkeley Senior Center and was delighted.
“What can I say, it blew me away,” he said. “Now that I can have a place to sit, that’s awesome.”
Hamilton said there is no bench at the Northbound Line 12 and 79 stop on Martin Luther King Jr. Way next to the North Berkeley Senior Center. While there is a bus shelter (one of 46 within Berkeley city limits, according to AC Transit’s 2022 bus shelter inventory) directly across the street, at the Southbound stop, it can be challenging for seniors to cross the street when they see a bus coming. “If there’s no bench, I have to sit on the ground and wait and then try to get up fast enough to get the bus, and sometimes I’ve not gotten up quick enough for the bus to stop.”
Samuel said when he saw the photo of Hamilton, he realized he had something on hand that could help. Months earlier, he’d spent an afternoon building the wooden “Duderstadt Bench” in his family’s driveway, following a template from the Public Bench Project in San Francisco.
The bench, which had been sitting unused in the front yard, cost around $50 to build, he said, not including the wood finish, which he didn’t factor into the estimate since it could be used for several projects. Initially, he had intended to place it at a bus stop near Piedmont, but after seeing Owens’ post, he decided the downtown Berkeley spot was more fitting.
“Benches are great — we can always use more of them in public spaces, so there’s really no downside to just making benches and then figuring out where to put them later,” said Samuel, adding that he hopes his actions will inspire others to do the same.
Installing benches the ‘official’ way is a long-winded process, activists say
Owens said he has attempted “for years” to get more benches built at bus stops in Berkeley, often raising the topic during public comments at City Council meetings and even directly with council members, but has not found much success.
He’s noticed there are more benches at bus stops in the Berkeley Hills, some of which he said were built and placed by homeowners, than in the flats.
The wheels for more community-built public benches in Berkeley have already started to turn. On Wednesday morning, Owens told Berkeleyside that he had banded together a group of Berkeley neighbors to build more benches later this week. A top priority for him: placing one at the busy Line 12 bus stop on the other side of Martin Luther King Jr. Way, near the Valero gas station.
“At the end of the day, if we want people to ride transit, they need to have a comfortable place to sit,” Owens said. “I would love to not do this and have the city do it, but considering that the city’s remarkably slow transportation department has been basically gutted since the Hopkins debacle, it’s not coming. The only thing I can do now is just build a bench myself.”
A similar do-it-yourself attitude was what led Samuel to build his first bench and lug it across the bay to San Francisco’s Lake Street in December 2022. (The bench now sits on Page Street after an irritated neighbor threatened to chainsaw the bench in half.)
His experience with carpentry was limited to a woodshop class he’d taken in middle school, but it was a relatively seamless process. Samuel said he has not found maintenance of the bench to be a major hassle as community do-gooders generally remove the trash left behind and rain rinses away the city grime.
“Being able to make a little tiny scratch on the problem is nice,” Samuel said.
On Sunday afternoon, after moving the bench to the bus stop in downtown Berkeley, Samuel took a photo of it on his phone and shared it on X, formerly Twitter. He then biked home, making a quick detour to Home Depot to pick up wood for his next bench, which he’s hoping to build over the weekend.
By the time he got home, the post had begun to go viral, and as of Thursday, it had garnered more than 100,000 likes. Perhaps more importantly, he’d received a handful of positive messages from friends, including some who took photos of them with other strangers seated on the new bench.
This story was updated after publication with additional information.
