JCDecaux Wins San Francisco Street Furniture Contract

Paris-based digital outdoor advertising company JCDecaux, which also does work throughout North America, announces that it has been awarded the new street furniture contract for San Francisco. The 20-year contract covers the city’s entire street furniture program, including design, installation, management and daily maintenance of 114 three-sided columns as well as 25 fully-accessible automatic public toilets.

The columns, or kiosks, will be placed throughout the city near transportation hubs and other high-traffic locations. They are three-sided, with two panels being used for advertising and the third panel being used to deliver city-produced content.

The columns and the toilets were designed by Detroit-based SMITHGROUP, which won a design competition that included several of San Francisco’s most innovative design firms.

The toilets themselves will be quite unique, according to JCDecaux, which describes them as “curved, fairly abstract, sculptural structures.” It’s the first time since 1996 that San Francisco is getting new outdoor public toilets-apparently a very big deal to the city, which says that in the past 12 months, the city’s public toilets have recorded 850,000 flushes, which it says is the “highest recorded usage in the world.”

The methodology of tracking such a claim notwithstanding, the new sleek aluminum-looking water closets will feature LED panels for advertising displays. The city’s sf.curbed.com has more:

“What’s more, 11 out the 25 new automatic public toilets will be supervised by paid attendants as part of the city’s Pit Stop program, a workforce development effort that pairs people in need to job re-entry with a much-needed service. Prior to the Pit Stop program, San Francisco’s public toilets were infamous for being less than savory affairs.

“Supervised toilet locations open as early as 7 a.m. and close as late as 8 p.m., but all of them have different schedules. A Pit Stop toilet can cost anywhere between $170,000 and $205,000 a year to operate.”

JCDecaux has been working with San Francisco’s street furniture program for the past 23 years, and this new contract will make it another 20.