Can a city put tags on street furniture?
Yes, and the street decides the rest. Weather and pressure washing end an ordinary tag, anyone can stick another tag over yours, and the uses that work are the ones a passer by has a reason for: reporting a fault, or finding out what this object is.
What a passer by would tap
Reporting something broken is the use with a built in reason: a light out, a bench damaged, a bin overflowing, a defect that the person standing there can see and the city cannot. The tap sends the report with the asset already identified, which removes the part people get wrong, describing where they are.
Telling someone what they are looking at is the other: a tree species, a historic marker, a public artwork, a viewpoint. Here the tag competes with a printed panel, and it wins only on depth and on languages.
Timetables and live information belong to the operator's own app or to a printed code most people already recognise, and adding a tag beside them buys little. Be honest about which of the three a project is, because they have different success rates.
What the street does to a tag
Ultraviolet light, freeze and thaw, rain, road salt and whatever the cleaning contractor uses. The outdoor page ranks those, and the adhesive is the first thing to go, as it is everywhere else.
Pressure washing is the one people forget. Graffiti removal puts a hot jet at close range onto exactly the flat surfaces a tag was stuck to, and no adhesive label survives it.
Most street furniture is metal, so an on metal construction is the default rather than an upgrade. A tag moulded into a plate, or behind the face of an existing sign, outlives a sticker by years.
And a dark metal surface in summer sun runs far above air temperature, which the temperature page says the adhesive feels first.
Anyone can cover it
A tag in a public place can have another tag stuck over it by anyone who walks past, and the person doing it wants to be the destination rather than to read anything. The same risk decides the design of a table tag, and in the street there is nobody dressing the room every morning.
What helps: a recessed or mechanically fixed plate rather than a flat sticker, a tamper evident construction, the city's own domain printed beside the tag so a resident can see where they should have landed, and a maintenance round that looks at the tags as part of the sweep.
What does not help is anything written on the tag, since the attacker supplies their own. The unknown tag page is the resident's side of the same problem.
One asset, one identifier
A fleet of street furniture is an asset register with tags on it. Each tag carries an identifier and the register holds everything else, which the asset tag page sets out and the fleet page plans.
Keep the mapping on the server. Benches get moved, posts get renumbered, and a scheme that encoded the location into the tag has to be rewritten in the street every time that happens.
Measure before the second phase. A hundred tags on the assets people actually stand next to will show whether anyone taps at all, and that answer is worth more than a plan for ten thousand, which the pilot page argues in general.
Frequently asked questions
What do people actually tap in the street?
Fault reporting, where the person can see the problem, and interpretation, where they want to know what they are looking at. Timetables rarely justify a tag.
Will a tag survive pressure washing?
A sticker will not. Graffiti removal puts a hot jet on the flat surfaces tags are stuck to, so the tag belongs in a plate or behind a sign face.
How do you stop someone covering the tag?
Physically and by routine: a fixed or recessed plate, a tamper evident construction, the printed domain beside it, and a maintenance round that looks.
Should the location be written on the tag?
No. Write an identifier and keep the location in the register, so moving a bench is a database change rather than a visit with a phone.