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"We have to make sure the facilities are shared out evenly and this seems like a fair way to stop people grabbing a bench at dawn and staying there all day."
-An official at the Yantai Park in Shangdong province, eastern China, discusses the new method to prevent bench-hogging: sharp steel spikes, which emerge from the benches each time a coin-operated meter expires.
Get me the MTA!
Soon, the loiterers will be carrying bench-sized pieces of plywood into the park each dawn.
So… it's a coin-operated bench? I mean, it's great that it will keep someone from hogging the bench all day, but the solution to make a free bench cost money kind of does the opposite of "[making] sure the facilities are shared out evenly."
The electrified ones cost extra!
But what about blind people that just hop on? So sad.
Squirrel: it's what's for dinner.
Park bosses got the idea from an art installation in Germany where sculptor Fabian Brunsing created a similar bench as a protest against the commercialisation of modern life.
"I've fallen on hard times and I can't get up."
'coin operated' seems to fly in the face of Party ethos.
Yet another problem solved by Giuliani Partners!
Wait, a couple months ago this was circulating as some sort of "art" piece satirizing capitalism's excesses. Now it's real?
http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2010/07/see_pay_sit_the_private_bench.html