I found out quite a few random facts whilst working on my part of the “Ways to Make our City Better Now” article. Most of these didn’t really fit into my articles, but I found them interesting regardless, and figured I’d use my next few blog entries to share them.
Today’s Item—
As a fairly new Halifax resident, a bus enthusiast, and a “sitting down” enthusiast, I’ve often wondered why there’s such a marked lack of benches in our fair city’s bus shelters. I had always assumed that the shelters had contained benches at one point, but that they had been removed at some point during the passage of time—the victims of vandalism, perhaps.While I was on the bus shelter beat this past week, trying to find out the reason for the lack of a bus shelter on Inglis Street across from Saint Mary’s (check The Coast in January for the answer!), I figured I’d take the opportunity to satisfy my curiosity regarding the city’s bus-shelter-bench shortage. According to Lori Patterson, Metro Transit’s spokesperson, the city’s lack of benches can be attributed to a lack of money in the past to pay for them. For the most part, the shelters that lack benches never had benches to begin with. She says that now, when the city orders new shelters, they attempt to order benches for them as well. “We try to order a bench for every shelter.” She says that Metro Transit has been making this effort to include benches in its shelters during the past few years, and hopes eventually to go back and add benches to the shelters that were installed without them. Every year Metro Transit gets a set amount of money to further the cause, and looks at which shelters without benches need them the most—“if there’s a shelter outside a senior’s manor, then obviously we try to accommodate those ones…first,” says Patterson. In the meantime, standing won’t kill us—although it will make us feel every second of that twenty minute wait for the next #7 bus. Stay tuned for more bus news, and some words about Aliant’s policy on quarter-eating payphones.
This article appears in Nov 30 – Dec 6, 2006.