City of Boston Seeks Better Sidewalk Amenities In New ‘Street Furniture’ Contract
The City of Boston is soliciting bids to renew its “street furniture” contract, which provides for the maintenance of hundreds of bus shelters, wayfinding maps, and advertising kiosks around the city.
Since 2001, Boston has had a contract with outdoor advertising company JCDeceaux to install and manage hundreds of kiosks and bus shelters where the company can hang up advertisements.
In exchange for being subjected to sales pitches on the sidewalks, Boston’s taxpayers received hundreds of additional bus shelters across the entire city (like the one pictured above in Kendall Square), plus a handful of new public toilets.
Under the 2001 contract, JCDeceaux pays the city a fixed $1.5 million annual fee, plus a percentage of its local advertising revenues. Those payments added up to a total of to $2.7 million for the City of Boston in 2025.
But that contract is due to expire on May 1, 2027, and the city is ready to re-negotiate the terms of the deal.
Earlier this month, City Hall issued a formal “request for proposals” (RFP) for companies that could take on a new outdoor advertising contract – one that reflects changes in the quarter-century that has passed since the current deal took effect.
The document indicates that the city is interested in upgrading its sidewalks with more digital screens, fewer newsstands, and new amenities like bike parking shelters and shade structures to mitigate extreme heat.
‘More comfortable, inviting, and accessible’
“Every street block in our City has the potential to be more accessible and welcoming for everyone,” Mayor Michelle Wu said in a statement announcing the new RFP earlier this month. “With input from urban design partners, we developed an RFP that connects essential street amenities with public art to make street infrastructure more comfortable, inviting and accessible.”
The 74-page RFP has been posted online and can be read in its entirety here.
Here are a few of the new amenties the city is interested in getting from the new contract:
- Green roofs and shade structures: The new RFP acknowledges that the city’s sidewalks are getting hotter. In 2024, City Hall partnered with JCDeceaux to add 30 “green roofs” to bus shelters along the Route 28 bus line in Mattapan and Roxbury; the RFP asks bidders to maintain those and expand green roofs to more bus shelters. The RFP also asks bidders to provide “pricing and conceptual designs for 40 standalone shade structures at bus stops and other appropriate public locations.”
- Hundreds of additional bus shelters: The RFP also “seeks to significantly expand” its inventory of bus shelters, “with a goal of installing over 500 additional shelters” over the term of the new contract. The city also asks bidders to provide a variety of shelter designs, including bus shelters that could fit into narrow sidewalks and larger shelters for high-ridership stops. The city also wants to see “a balanced geographic distribution” for new bus shelters and names specific locations where it wants to build new amenities for riders: “the Route 23 corridor along Washington Street in Dorchester” and “Warren Street in Roxbury.”
- Real-time bus arrival information: The RFP requires the winning bidder to “provide real-time transit and travel information” at all of their bus shelters (there are about 281 bus shelters under the current contract).
- Bike parking: The RFP indicates that the city has been planning 20 new bike parking shelters “in major activity centers, such as the Seaport or the Longwood Medical Area,” and that these new shelters – and more like them – could also be incorporated into the new street furniture contract.
- Sidewalk benches: The city would also like its bidders to take over and potentially expand its age-friendly bench program, which has installed over 100 city-owned benches in public rights-of-way across the city since 2019.
- Pop-up shelters for large events and MBTA diversions: The RFP also asks respondents to provide “designs and prospective uses of mobile, modular street furniture” that could be deployed on a temporary basis for major events and “during major MBTA diversions, long-duration construction, and other service disruptions.”
Multiple firms expected to bid
The RFP also makes it clear that City Hall feels like it’s in a good bargaining position for the new contract. It cites industry data that estimates that the Boston outdoor advertising market is worth $136 million a year, with particularly strong growth in ad sales on digital screens.
In 2025, the city issued a non-binding “request for information” to gauge interest from potential bidders. Six national outdoor advertising firms responded, including JCDeceaux. Another respondent was Intersection, the firm that manages advertising for the Bluebikes system and MBTA-owned bus shelters.
City officials told StreetsblogMASS that those responses helped shape the terms of the current RFP.
Proposals are due by November 4, and the city aims to select its preferred contractor by December 16.
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