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Street furniture is a collective term for objects and pieces of equipment installed along streets and roads for various purposes. It includes benches, traffic barriers, bollards, post boxes, phone boxes, streetlamps, traffic lights, traffic signs, bus stops, tram stops, taxi stands, public lavatories, fountains, watering troughs, memorials, public sculptures, and waste receptacles.
Street furniture is a collective term used in the United States, [1] United Kingdom, [2] Australia, [3] and Canada. [4] [5] It refers to objects and pieces of equipment installed along streets and roads for various purposes. The design and placement of furniture should take into account aesthetics, visual identity, function, pedestrian mobility and road safety. For example, street furniture can be positioned to control overspill parking in addition to its primary purpose; for example a bench and a number of bollards may be used to block access to a sidewalk or verges for vehicles. [6]
Street furniture is used unofficially as sports equipment for skateboarding, parkour and street workout.
Street furniture itself has become as much a part of many nations' identities as dialects and national events, so much so that one can usually recognise the location by their design; famous examples of this include:
Since most items of street furniture are of a utilitarian nature, authorities generally keep them up-to-date and replace them regularly (usually to conform to regulations, safety codes, etc.). Because of this, old, outdated, obsolete, or even non-functional street furniture can be rare sights and hold a special fascination and inspire nostalgia for many people.
The Tiergarten park in Berlin has a collection of antique streetlamps from around the world, both gas and electric.
Some concealed cell sites disguise the tower with a structure that can fit into street furniture.
Large displays in central streets can provide information, advertise events or products, or warn citizens about potential problems. Interactive displays can show information on key places and monuments and allow parking payments. They can serve as a cell site with low visual impact.
Some cell sites have a structure that make it look pleasant. In this case it is not concealed but highlighted, becoming a part of the street furniture that can be admired by citizens.
The use of power from renewable sources may be a design criterion.
A sidewalk or pavement is a path along the side of a road. Usually constructed of concrete, pavers, brick, stone, or asphalt, it is designed for pedestrians. A sidewalk is normally higher than the roadway, and separated from it by a curb. There may also be a planted strip between the sidewalk and the roadway and between the roadway and the adjacent land.
Traffic lights, traffic signals, or stoplights – also known as robots in South Africa, Zambia, and Namibia – are signaling devices positioned at road intersections, pedestrian crossings, and other locations in order to control the flow of traffic.
Traffic calming uses physical design and other measures to improve safety for motorists, car drivers, pedestrians and cyclists. It has become a tool to combat speeding and other unsafe behaviours of drivers. It aims to encourage safer, more responsible driving and potentially reduce traffic flow. Urban planners and traffic engineers have many strategies for traffic calming, including narrowed roads and speed humps. Such measures are common in Australia and Europe, but less so in North America. Traffic calming is a calque of the German word Verkehrsberuhigung – the term's first published use in English was in 1985 by Carmen Hass-Klau.
A street is a public thoroughfare in a built environment. It is a public parcel of land adjoining buildings in an urban context, on which people may freely assemble, interact, and move about. A street can be as simple as a level patch of dirt, but is more often paved with a hard, durable surface such as tarmac, concrete, cobblestone or brick. Portions may also be smoothed with asphalt, embedded with rails, or otherwise prepared to accommodate non-pedestrian traffic.
A bus stop is a place where buses stop for passengers to get on and off the bus. The construction of bus stops tends to reflect the level of usage, where stops at busy locations may have shelters, seating, and possibly electronic passenger information systems; less busy stops may use a simple pole and flag to mark the location. Bus stops are, in some locations, clustered together into transport hubs allowing interchange between routes from nearby stops and with other public transport modes to maximise convenience.
Traffic signs or road signs are signs erected at the side of or above roads to give instructions or provide information to road users. The earliest signs were simple wooden or stone milestones. Later, signs with directional arms were introduced, for example the fingerposts in the United Kingdom and their wooden counterparts in Saxony.
A telephone booth, telephone kiosk, telephone call box, telephone box or public call box is a tiny structure furnished with a payphone and designed for a telephone user's convenience; typically the user steps into the booth and closes the booth door while using the payphone inside.
A curb extension is a traffic calming measure which widens the sidewalk for a short distance. This reduces the crossing distance and allows pedestrians and drivers to see each other when parked vehicles would otherwise block visibility. The practice of banning car parking near intersections is referred to as daylighting the intersection.
Outdoor advertising or out-of-home (OOH) advertising includes public billboards, wallscapes, and posters seen while "on the go". OOH advertising formats fall into four main categories: billboards, street furniture, transit, and alternative.
A bollard is a sturdy, short, vertical post. The term originally referred to a post on a ship or quay used principally for mooring boats. In modern usage, it also refers to posts installed to control road traffic and posts designed to prevent automotive vehicles from colliding with pedestrians and structures.
Shared space is an urban design approach that minimises the segregation between modes of road user. This is done by removing features such as curbs, road surface markings, traffic signs, and traffic lights. Hans Monderman and others have suggested that, by creating a greater sense of uncertainty and making it unclear who has priority, drivers will reduce their speed, in turn reducing the dominance of vehicles, reducing road casualty rates, and improving safety for other road users.
A waste container, also known as a dustbin, rubbish bin, trash can, garbage can, wastepaper basket, and wastebasket, among other names, is a type of container intended to store waste that is usually made out of metal or plastic. The words "rubbish", "basket" and "bin" are more common in British English usage; "trash" and "can" are more common in American English usage. "Garbage" may refer to food waste specifically or to municipal solid waste in general. The word "dumpster" refers to a large outdoor waste container for garbage collectors to pick up the contents.
Road signs in Iceland are visual communication devices placed along roads and highways throughout the country to provide information, warnings, and guidance to motorists and pedestrians. Iceland never ratified the Vienna Convention on Road Signs and Signals, but road signs in Iceland conform to the general pattern of those used in most other European countries, with certain design elements borrowed from Danish and Swedish practice. Signs tend to be more sparsely employed than in other European countries, especially in rural areas.
Majo-kit is a toy line developed by the Majorette company of France. Together, they form a complete city traffic environment that also includes farms and factories.
Cycling infrastructure is all infrastructure cyclists are allowed to use. Bikeways include bike paths, bike lanes, cycle tracks, rail trails and, where permitted, sidewalks. Roads used by motorists are also cycling infrastructure, except where cyclists are barred such as many freeways/motorways. It includes amenities such as bike racks for parking, shelters, service centers and specialized traffic signs and signals. The more cycling infrastructure, the more people get about by bicycle.
Road signs in Indonesia are standardized road signs similar to those used in other nations but with certain distinctions. As a former Dutch colony, until the 1970s road signs in Indonesia closely followed The Netherlands rules on road signs. Nowadays, Indonesian road sign design are a mix of European, US MUTCD, Australia, New Zealand and Japanese road sign features. According to the 2014 Minister of Transport's Regulation No. 13 concerning Traffic Signs, the official typeface for road signs in Indonesia is Clearview. Indonesia formerly used FHWA Series fonts as the designated typeface though the rules are not being implemented properly.
The KX series of telephone boxes in the United Kingdom was introduced by BT in 1985. Following the privatisation of BT in 1984, the company decided to create a newly designed and improved take on the British telephone box, which at this point consisted of only red telephone boxes which BT had recently acquired, the most common being the iconic K6 box. These red boxes were considered flawed in parts by BT for several reasons, including cost, lack of ventilation, accessibility and maintenance. BT announced the £160 million series of new boxes, the KX series designed by GKN, as well as announcing the eventual replacement of all existing telephone boxes. The main telephone box in the KX range is the KX100. Upon launch, there were five models in total. The boxes were produced at a rate of 5,000 a year, with the total count of all BT-owned kiosks reaching 137,000 by 1999, a number which has since decreased by more than seventy per cent.
Road signs in Cambodia are standardized road signs are similar to those used in Europe but much of it resembles road signage systems used in South American countries with certain differences. The designs of road signage match their neighbours of Thailand and Malaysia, both of which adopt a modified version of the South American road signage system. Until the early 1980s, Cambodia closely followed American, European, Australian, and Japanese practices in road sign design, with diamond-shaped warning signs and circular restrictive signs to regulate traffic. Unlike Thailand and Malaysia, Cambodia does not use the FHWA Series fonts typeface, favouring Helvetica instead.
Road signs in Azerbaijan are similar to the road sign system of post-Soviet states that ensure that transport vehicles move safely and orderly, as well as to inform the participants of traffic built-in graphic icons. They generally conform to the Vienna Convention on Road Traffic and Vienna Convention on Road Signs and Signals.
The Street furniture in Barcelona is managed by the Department of Ecology, Urban Planning and Mobility of the City Council of Barcelona. It developed in accordance with the progress made in urban planning of Barcelona as a whole and, in general, with the historical and territorial evolution of the city, and in line with other defining factors of public space such as architecture, urban infrastructures and the adaptation and maintenance of natural or construction spaces. Although their main characteristic has always been functionality, as a general rule they have often been objects of design and aesthetic consideration, since they furnish the public space where urban society develops.