Sidewalk Amenities

Street furniture and other amenities help create pedestrian-focused sidewalks and streetscapes that increase opportunities for regular physical activity, promote social interaction, and can support equity for vulnerable populations.

Key Terms

• Wayfinding is the process of orienting users to their location within a set environment. Wayfinding most often utilizes navigational signage or directional signage to cue users to their surroundings, providing distances, destinations, and other helpful information to help aid and ease traversing a site.

For full strategy and documentation requirements, please refer to the digital scorecard made available on the Fitwel Platform. 

Strategy Insights

• Street furniture elements and/or amenities located within a public access plaza are acceptable provided that the plaza is open and accessible to the general public.
• Credit cannot be awarded for sidewalk amenities within a gated or locked community, as this does not meet the strategy intention to be accessible to the general public.
• Similarly, credit cannot be awarded for any indoor amenities such as water fountains, bathrooms, or WiFi or charging stations that are inside a lobby. Amenities must be outdoors on sidewalks.
• “Parklets” are converted parking spaces that are reallocated for pedestrian and public use and include furnishings such as seating, benches, tables, planters, etc.
• Basic street signage cannot qualify as wayfinding.

Documentation Guidance

• When showing an amenity that is designed to double as seating (e.g. a seating feature attached to a planter), include plentiful annotated photographs to confirm that the amenity is intended to be used for seating.
• When showing public art that is not located directly on the sidewalk, include plentiful annotated photographs to confirm that the public art is visible from and intended to be seen from the public sidewalk.

Sample Documentation

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