Policy decisions or budget constraints faced by our cities and states can have a real impact on our lives. When it comes to public transit, these abstract problems can translate to genuine human discomfort at your local bus stop. Daily. And it’s easy to feel helpless in the face of these struggles. But San Francisco Bay Area residents proved there are problems we can fix with our own two hands.

Darrell Owens is a Bay Area transportation advocate. He told SFGate, “For many years, I had complained about the lack of seating for bus benches in Berkeley and got no response from either the city of Berkeley or AC Transit.”

Frustrated, Owens posted an especially heart wrenching photo to X (formerly Twitter). The photo shows a gray-haired man sitting on the curb, his cane laying on the sidewalk next to him. “This is my area neighbor who suffers from chronic pain prohibiting him from bending his legs and he just got surgery. Now hes sitting on the ground in downtown berkeley because @CityofBerkeley and @rideact dont have benches at their bus stops.”

Eight million X users viewed the bus stop photo, 7,800 liked it, 254 reposted it to raise its visibility, 34 commented, and one closed his computer and went outside to do something about it. Mingwei Samuel builds benches and gives them away to local businesses and organizations. He had an unused bench so he put it onto his bike trailer and pedaled it down to the bus stop where Owens had taken the picture.

One activist took the bus stop problem into his own hands

Samuel re-posted the original picture and commented with his own picture of the bus stop. In his picture, a new wooden bench is cable locked to the bus stop sign. “Took me a bit, but it’s here.”

Mic drop.

Samuel has received 95,700 likes. But more importantly, he’s inspired copycats. The resulting SFBA Bench Collective declared,  “When cities fail to provide benches we build and install our own.” It claims 77 new benches at high traffic bus stops that didn’t have them.

Building a bench for a bus stop isn’t as simple as tossing a plank on a couple of cinderblocks. The new bench must follow the Americans with Disabilities Act guidelines and AC Transit bench rules. But the Bench Collective publishes the outlines with directions to put a compliant bench together with $70 in materials.

When activist Elise Joshi posted a video of herself assembling and placing a bench at a stop, one commenter summed up everyone’s amazement when he said, “It’s cool to remember that you can just do stuff like this.” You can indeed. It’s cool to remember there are countless ways we can help those around us with our own two hands. It’s even cooler to do it.