> User IDs are part of Throne’s accountability system: After you use a restroom, you’re asked to rate its cleanliness. Meanwhile, each user gets a “Throne score,” similar to Uber, and repeat offenders who abuse the restroom will be blocked. Weight sensors also track if someone’s been in the bathroom too long. “Very few people create issues in [public] bathrooms, don’t respect that amenity, and then ruin it for the majority. Most people really want and value that clean experience and will leave the bathroom as good as they find it,” Heinzelman says, adding that user IDs are a way to “create the accountability that is currently missing in the shared bathroom space.”
Personally, I consider bathroom facilities which track you personally, and can block you for any reason, not to actually be “public” bathrooms. They’re essentially proposing to put a large number of very tiny private clubs all over a city. I would argue that this is not actually solving the public bathroom problem.
Seriously though, accountability is the missing thing. If getting banned for consistently making a mess is what it takes to get public bathrooms back, then so be it. There's no excuse for the shit I've seen. I'm tired of being denied amenities because of other peoples' degenerate behaviour.
Some people think that a dictatorship is OK as long as the trains all run on time.
The right way to solve the problem is not to harden the gatekeeping, but to improve society so that gatekeeping becomes unnecessary. But that’s hard, and has no obvious point where someone can extract money.
What are the options to "improve society" so people don't make a mess in shared bathrooms? PSAs? Public shaming? Collateral put down to use bathrooms? Do you have any better and specific ideas? I can't think of much more gentle and more likely to motivate people to change behavior than a public accountability system, although it is regrettable that it must be run through a for-profit entity and look like a social credit score.
Who makes a mess? People who don’t care, or who hate other people. How do we, as a society, make less of those? By investing in social programs, getting people out of poverty and drugs, civic education. Increasing the minimum wage. Eliminating wage theft. UBI.
Will any of these work? I don’t know. But this is the way. Not stricter and stricter gatekeeping.
People who have all the privileges in the world still do horrible things to bathrooms. Ask any janitor working in a corporate office building.
People who have nothing have no reason to care what others think; but people who have everything, and who never experience consequences for what they do, can be just as detached.
Also, if you think about it, this service is fundamentally not meant to serve (or rather, avoid serving) the sorts of people you're picturing. These washrooms likely aren't intended to be placed in low-economic-class areas of cities. Homeless/drug addicts/etc aren't the problem they're intending to filter out. (Why not? Because those groups of people are used to being cronically un-bathroomed, and so have become inured to just finding a corner outside to do their business. See: San Francisco. When things like open port-a-potties are placed in these areas, the homeless ignore those and continue to do what they do.)
Instead, I imagine that these bathrooms would be placed in generally bougie areas – the article cited public parks, but I imagine a major case would be "near food trucks in business districts." And the group they're trying to restrict access to, are "rich assholes who think society exists to serve them, and they owe nothing back."
Consider, after all, the premise: you scan a QR code on your smartphone in order to get access. Who even has a smartphone with an active data plan? Not homeless people. This service is designed to serve exactly the same target audience as e.g. e-bikes/e-scooter rental services.
I’ve worked in outreach; the average homeless person has a smartphone but can’t afford data, only very basic prepaid call/text only top-up cards. And because they’re frequently losing phones (stolen, damaged by attacker, etc) they can’t keep a stable number, either.
Someone still has to clean the horrible mess; and that costs money (a lot of money, in the case where someone has created what's basically a biohazard by "writing in brown pen" on the walls); and companies / municipalities don't want to pay that money... which leads to the current situation, where there are basically no public bathrooms. "Just accepting it" is something individuals might do, but it's not something rational economic actors (like corporations) can do — they'll look at the costs of maintaining the bathroom, and decide they'd save money by not having a bathroom.
Human civilization survived open sewers, massive public latrines and unseperated water supply and waste. Not something I'd like to go back to by any means. But with modern knowledge and technology, and call me crazy if you like, I believe we can sanitize a few dozen poop disasters a day without bringing on a typhoid plague or breaking the bank.
The more commonplace and universal something is, the less of a big deal people will feel it is to deal with. And vice versa.
The very fact that we don’t all live in filth now, means that you have to pay a high premium to get someone to choose to be the person whose job constantly exposes them to it.
See also: the profitability of electronics recycling (i.e. picking through piles of scrap for base metal to melt) in the developing vs. developed world. When people live in areas with mounds of trash piled all around them, they’ll dig through that trash for Pennie’s, because they already do thing like shoveling it out of the way every day. When people live in a nice house in a clean city, though, you’ll have to pay them a lot more to touch a scrap heap.
(Or, to put that another way: it’s “but I might get tetanus!” vs. “My base risk of getting tetanus is so high that this job won’t increase my risk by much in relative terms… so sure, why not.”)
My job for a long time involved digging up people's septic tanks and fixing them. I know other people who pump them for a living. I know others who buy the waste and dry it. And people of all stripes buy it after it's treated and mixed with mulch and put it on their lawn. This problem is much more minor than you think. Lots of us are not afraid of poop.
Does SF have only a few dozen "poop disasters" a day? The language in this thread suggests the number is higher and the nature is worse than your language would imply, but I wouldn't know as I've only been a tourist there.
Even if "lots" was enough, how much did you earn doing that job? I don't know American politics beyond Team Red vs. Team Blue, are American cities willing to pay for enough cleaners?
poor sanitation is a public health risk, not merely “gross”ness.
i’ve seen some public bathrooms are so mistreated that i don’t know how you pay anyone to clean them. i’d certainly feel awful asking a janitor to clean them without a hazmat suit, a pressure washer and a bag full of tergazyme.
Is it a business model? How much would I have to pay to use a restroom that’s been kept spotless by a well-paid, well-protected maintainer? What would it take to prevent the worst abuses and misuse by paying patrons (flinging, smoking, assignations, camping out, etc.)?
If the problem of where everyone can go is hard, why not at least try to solve the problem of where people willing to pay a lot can go? Lots of empty storefronts in downtown SF right now. $5 or even $10 a go could be cheaper and quicker than buying something I didn’t really want in some restaurant just so I can use their restroom.
Education. Some of which needs to happen through parenting, so this is a multi-generational concept. But to start with, properly fund an education system.
We were taught civics and society alongside math. Children/pupils/young adults also did cleaning, tree planting, everyday group work. I'm surprised some countries don't have that, it helps make a better society.
Schools in America do the same. The issue is that outside of school, the lessons being taught by society are the exact opposite. It’s all about individualism and maximizing utility for one’s self while minimizing what one puts into society.
Relying on our schools will educate us out of the problem won’t work. We have too many narcissists and sociopaths in our society, and we spend too much time catering to and rewarding them.
Given the way human faeces have been treated and disposed of throughout history, then yes, inherently we don't know any better than what we get taught growing up.
People destroy public property because we only spent $20,000 a year per person to educate them through high school? How much more to fix the problem? $1,000? $5,000?
>What are the options to "improve society" so people don't make a mess in shared bathrooms?
300% public shaming. Japan is an example of this working, to an unbelievably ideal extent even.
Public restrooms in Japan are *clean*, they are spotless and sanitary no matter what time of day you visit one. You can probably eat off of those toilet seats, for all I know.
The reason for this is because individuals who do not clean up after themselves in public spaces are shamed and ridiculed by Japanese society at large with no holds barred. It's "just not how upstanding members of society operate" to make a mess, be it in a public restroom or anywhere else, in Japan.
You might see Japanese people picking up trash and cleaning up after themselves when leaving a public venue like a stadium or theater, probably other peoples' refuse too while they are at it. Frankly bewildering acts from the perspective of most westerners, but it's literally that sort of social attitude to be upstanding individuals that leads to clean public restrooms.
That's part of the why but not the root of it. Underneath the social sanction element you mention is the fact that Japanese society raises people to give a thought for the sake of others,
otherwise known in the west as manners / the golden rule.
> The reason for this is because individuals who do not clean up after themselves in public spaces are shamed and ridiculed by Japanese society at large with no holds barred.
Not being from Japan, I’m curious: how does this work in practice? If I were to go into a bathroom in Japan and smear my own shit all over the walls and leave, 1. how does anyone know I did it, 2. if somehow someone actually knew I did it, how exactly would I be shamed and ridiculed, and 3. how would that negatively affect me if I didn’t care about shame or was incapable of feeling shame.
That's the thing: It is deeply ingrained in the very foundations of Japanese culture and society to always conduct yourself in a manner that will at the very least not hinder others unnecessarily.
Japanese are raised from the very beginning to be ashamed of making a mess and not cleaning up, to be ashamed of being irresponsible. Everyone is taught that "the Sun is watching you", that someone (or something!) somewhere is always watching you and judging you for your actions.
A westerner might shit up a public restroom, intentionally or otherwise, and say to himself "I don't care; cleaning this up is the janitor's job."
A Japanese person won't even dare, because they are taught to clean up regardless of a janitor.
It is a common tradition and mandate in Japanese schools for students to clean their classrooms (and every-so-often even restrooms!) themselves at the end of the school day. Yes, the schools have janitors, the students are told to clean up themselves anyway because that's just how good people behave.
This is all a facet of education and parenting, and the result of generations and millenia of such teachings. Their thought processes are fundamentally different from the west: A better society starts by being better individuals themselves first.
Public restrooms in the west being an absolute shit show (pun intended) are a reflection of failed education and parenting in western society. The west can, and should, do better.
>A Japanese person won't even dare, because they are taught to clean up regardless of a janitor.
Great, but this contradicts your other post that seemed to be claiming that bathroom shaming specifically was the solution the bathroom problem, which the parent was rightly incredulous of as how it actually works in Japan.
Japanese social contracts are remarkably complex, and last a lifetime. A person caught smearing shit on the walls could be permanently ejected from their friend groups, families, and workplaces if discovered. Which they would be, if caught by the police. The secret sauce is of course the shared belief that smearing shit on the walls is worthy of ostracisation; and the will to enforce it. Not all communities and cultures around the world punish members for antisocial behaviour. There appears to be a concerted effort in America today to permit antisocial behaviour under the guise of various social movements. This appears to be rooted in an incorrect belief that people aren't responsible for their behaviour. Society is responsible when someone smears shit on the walls. Under such a belief system, social ostracisation doesn't work.
> 300% public shaming. Japan is an example of this working, to an unbelievably ideal extent even.
This also works for obesity, and I've seen it in action in many nations apart from just Japan. Social pressure works. We've known it works for millennia. I'm not sure why we suddenly started believing that social pressure to not litter and eat less was ineffective and even immoral.
The thing is, I think you have the causality wrong. I lived in Japan and I can’t remember anyone being shamed for anything. I think individuals feel shame if they break societal norms because they value cohesion over individualism. They don’t value cohesion over individualism because they will be shamed if they step out of line. That’s a key difference, because there are many people these days who are, for various reasons, effectively beyond shame. Simply attempting to shame people for their actions won’t improve outcomes because the same people causing the issue likely don’t care enough to feel shame.
Ultimately the difference is that American society is one in which individualism is prized over all. The greatest evils are those that would in any way infringe on something that could be considered a personal liberty. And it’s only gotten worse in the last 50 years. I can’t imagine modern American society rising to meet any major challenge of the last 100 years the way we have in the past.
First you have to know what you're actually up against. It's not a particular human behavior that is to blame, but stupidity itself. Some people are total morons and the behavior you're complaining against is merely a consequence of that. You can't defeat stupidity, it's a nature thing.
You can suppress it though. Public shaming, forced fines, get violent with them... All these things work to certain degree and will get you through the day. But again - you're not solving the problem, you're just suppressing. Stupidity is ultimately unsolvable, because nature; and that is why all those utopic dreams always fail with impressive death counts.
You improve society by starting where you are and going from there.
I am glad to see a company trying to do something about this issue. I'm not thrilled with their solution but even if they fail, perhaps it at least gets people to stop accepting that nothing can be done about it.
The time tested way of improving society is widespread shaming and bottom up enforcement of norms. We don’t do that anymore, lest the liberties of the norm breakers are lost, and their feelings injured.
No. They would just go elsewhere to commit offenses.
Retributive justice is not really effective when the offender’s world view internally justifies their actions.
It’s a common theme that criminals are victims of circumstance to such a degree that the enforcing entity is seen as another arm of the system that caused their criminal behavior in the first place.
Imagine being in a car crash, having difficult pains, getting prescribed
oxy- or hydrocodone, and after the script runs out, asking for a refill gets you a stamped as a drug seeker, never to receive another prescription ever again.
But the pain and the withdrawals are still there. This has created an incredible numbed of convicted criminals and homeless people. A Venn diagram of these two populations overlaps with people who spend nights in public toilets.
> No. They would just go elsewhere to commit offenses.
This is just denying the offenders all agency. If they literally cannot help but commit crime, the response from the society should then be to lock them up, as unfit to live in the society.
I do not in fact believe that to be the case. Criminals have agency, and, as can be readily observed, respond to incentives too.
>"but to improve society so that gatekeeping becomes unnecessary."
I understand the sentiment but I ultimately find such a stance unhelpful and counterproductive because it is essentially saying the problems we face would go away if we only just created a utopia. Like, what's stopping us?
Trying to create better public restrooms with a new system seems far more achievable than implementing a new socioeconomic system where no one feels like trashing public bathrooms and common areas.
Apartheid regimes or extreme poverty lead to gated compounds for the rich with depressing predictability.
Toilets that exclude the poor are great for ensuring the rich have access to nice private toilets. Doesn't help those who can't afford the subscription fee.
The problem is that people are using these labels for countries like America, which clearly do not have Apartheid or extreme poverty. When one is so extreme in their beliefs and hyperbole, they are effectively asking for total social restructure. Ignoring the fact that such unhinged people should be nowhere near any such responsibility, the user above is correct: this will never happen. While these extremists wait for the glorious revolution, people in need today are missing out on good but not perfect solutions.
You need a different metric for your thought processes than utopia/not utopia. Ask yourself how close to utopia you have to get for your idea to work instead. The answer in this case is pretty damn close to utopia because such a small percentage of people are needed to ruin it for everyone and it is expensive to run the cleaning regime necessary to cancel that out everywhere.
This is pure fantasy. Society will always need prisons. Sure, there is much that society can and ought to do in order to reduce what may be judged as tragic or unnecessary incarcerations, but the incarceration rate will never be literally zero. Having prisons doesn't make society a "dictatorship".
Not every society has needed prisons, especially smaller, tribal ones. Maybe our complex, global one currently does but I don't think it is a hard requirement.
Dude, I've seen disgusting messes in work bathrooms where everyone is well paid and free from the kinds of stresses and destitution that you're suggesting are the sole cause of this kind of behavior.
Hell, I've seen a university professor walk out of a public bathroom without washing his hands after taking a shit.
To be completely blunt people are fucking animals and many of them do these kinds of disgusting things in private bathrooms because they can do it with impunity. They don't care about other people and they revel in knowing that their disgusting behaviour is detrimental to the rest of us.
Suggesting that we need to raise society up to some post-scarcity Star Trek utopia where all people are paragons of humanity before we can have clean public bathrooms is absurd.
>Some people think that a dictatorship is OK as long as the trains all run on time.
Some people are influenced by propaganda and the historical connotations associated with the word "dictatorship."
There's nothing inherently bad about the word, it's just the association. If you look at dictatorships objectively there are many successful examples. Here are a few modern ones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benevolent_dictatorship
That's just a couple. Your first reaction would be to say that the examples represent a minority. The problem is, though, if you look at ancient history, the most successful civilizations that prospered and succeeded were basically all empires with central rule. It shows that if you were intellectually unbiased, you would not simply dismiss "dictatorship" in a single sentence.
Democracy is a recent phenomenon when viewed in terms of human history and, if anything, still experimental (there are many examples of complete failures of democratic governments).
That being said, to swing it around to your statement. There is no definitive "right" way to solve a problem. Gatekeeping could work, and it could fail. Simply "improving society" can also lead to complete and utter failure. The inputs and various factors influencing the outcomes are so complex we cannot point to one way that works.
So I say give gatekeeping a try. It's not like the government is doing this either... It's a business.
It’s been tried. Many times. Throughout human history. It is littered with stratified societies, where every man had his lessers and betters to kick and cower before, respectively. This did not lead to any good outcomes. I say let equality and mutual respect have a chance.
Improving society without accountability is hardly possible. Humans are not dark matter, they interact with each other very intensely.
It's of course ideal when everyone is so nice and civilized that you don't need to lock your door. The problem is that such a society is a great hunting ground for a rare breaker, because it does not have a mechanism to resist breaking the rules. Such a breaker can inflict disproportionate damage and ruin things for everyone.
Improving mores and living conditions should go hand in hand with protecting these improved mores and conditions from those who try to push the society back to the savage state for a minor benefit for themselves.
You make it sound like the only alternative to solving all problems with shunning, ostracism and lifetime bans is to just let everybody do everything they want, and we don’t want that, do we, so let’s just do the first thing, huh?
There will always be a small amount of people who don’t obey the social niceties. Some are psychopaths, or have some other mental problems. Some may have extenuating circumstances. But I believe that society can be improved such that these people are rare and far between, and society can invest in picking up the remaining slack.
> Improving mores and living conditions should go hand in hand with protecting these improved mores and conditions from those who try to push the society back to the savage state for a minor benefit for themselves.
Sounds great, except whenever such things are actually implemented, it tends to be a lot of steadily increasing punishment; any improvements, whatever they were initially, will eventually be cut from the budget since they do not give immediate visible results, whereas harsh punishment get great ratings. People love a good public flogging.
This is a problem perpetuating itself. People don’t believe in the public spirit and goodwill of others, so they don’t want to invest in actually improving it, since they think it can’t be done. And so it goes.
I’m tired of people being denied basic and non-scarce resources because some people presuppose they’re yucky (even while making people yucky with those presuppositions). If we’re banning anyone from public services, I’d start with those who want to deny those services to people who most need them, in the way most likely to reinforce their biases by denying them access.
From my point of view, it's not about being "yucky", it's about ruining it for others. If a bathroom is provided, and you convert it to a state that it cannot reasonably be used by others, then you don't get to use the next one. If free food is provided for people and you come in and take it all to sell it elsewhere, then you don't get to partake anymore.
There is no way to provide things in a way that people cannot ruin them. And as long as people continue to ruin them (ie, we haven't yet "fixed society" as someone suggested above), we can either prevent those people from ruining them, or not provide them in the first place. I, for one, believe that "don't provide them in the first place" is not the right solution.
In fact, denying the courtesies and benefits to norm breakers is exactly how you improve society. That’s like raising a child: you won’t convince a toddler with a reasoned argument about empathy, the value of preserving shared norms, and the benefits of delayed gratification. Instead, you tell them that if they misbehave, they don’t get to watch TV. Bums respond to incentives too.
This is basically the premise of the oddly compelling 2019 Spanish sci-fi/horror film, The Platform. Prisoners alternately experience privilege and deprivation, and it either makes them animals or socialists. Lots of food for thought, as it were.
The only acceptable short-term solution I can think of at the moment is simply to increase the cleaning until the bathrooms are always acceptable. There are some things which could be done to turn this from prohibitively expensive to simply very expensive one: One idea mentioned in the article is to turn a tradidional timer-based activity to a level-based trigger; i.e. if you have two bathrooms at the same location, and a reporting function so that every time someone sees an unacceptable bathroom, it is promptly cleaned while the other bathroom provides redundancy. This way, it only gets cleaned when necessary instead of periodically.
This is, of course, only papering over the problem in the short run. Which is why the real solution must be to improve society.
Ostracizing people who behave badly will only make society worse.
Ye. People are overstating the problem with having public bathrooms. It is just that it need cleaning like hourly and be closed during night so people don't sleep there.
Even if you don't have users who pee all over the ring and floor the bathroom will look like a mess after 100 visits.
We have 4 people who live in our house. I don’t track bathroom visits, but I’m pretty sure we each average 5 per day or 140 per week, with one bathroom getting 75-85% of the usage.
We clean the bathrooms every two weeks and it’s far from “a mess” when it comes time to clean it, so much so that we need to have a calendar reminder to do it.
I think there’s something about “the public” that’s underlying that difference.
This is a good summary for what it’s like to live in SF. There are lots of people around who are completely immune from any accountability and thus treat the whole city as a literal public toilet (and land fill).
This is what living in a society where winning more than the next person is the only thing that counts will give you. Why should anybody fulfill their part of the unspoken contract with the rest of society, if solidarity only goes one way?
If people shall care about collective goods, there needs to be an actual collective spirit first. Places where this type of public infrastructure actually works are also places where people realized that you can't create a good society by letting the rich hoard their wealth and build walls while the homeless are beaten instead of helped.
Every company I have worked for has a certain number of people that are not capable, or willing, to leave the sanitary facilities in an acceptable state.
From people actively soiling the facilities, to people not giving a fuck about leaving a mess (making a 'seat cover' out of tp, then leaving it on the floor; not cleaning after themselfes), to people with a 'not my job' egocentrical attitude. Those are studied engineers with good salaries, workplace stability. In Europe. The facilities are nice, bright and clean. Until those people leave them...
From these lifelong experiences, I would guess there is a certain, not so small amount of people that are secretly incapable of altruistic behavior. For numerous reasons. Those ruin it for the rest of us.
For this reason, as brutal and as it seems at first glance, I would really like to see such people identified and punished harshly for their parasitic selfishness.
They actively teach the value of collectivism vs. individualism. When I visited a few years ago I read an article in a local paper that asked high school kids what the biggest danger to Japan was. They replied "individualism".
This is why I do not support multiculturalism. This is contentious today for a number of reasons. Moreso because the research is so divided. There are plenty of studies which find in both directions. However, having lived in highly multicultural societies and more culturally homogenous societies, I firmly believe that it damages the social contract. When neighbours hold different and often incompatible values, not only are they less inclined to help each other as part of that unspoken social agreement, but they're more likely to vote for their own interests ahead of those of society at large.
A nation needs a unified direction with unified values. Eating different food is fine. Disagreeing about core tenets of society like free speech, equal rights, and law and justice, is not.
Why have you chosen to inject 'multiculturalism' into a topic about conceptually 'winning' in society? Do you think maybe there is a common economic system underlying everything that enables the concept 'winning'?
Yeah, Money is the system. The more you have of it, the more you've won. It can be measured in terms of dollars or when you compare countries it's GDP or GDP per capita.
You can get all moral about it with his opinion or her opinion or whatever and I get that happiness != money and all that jazz. But in general the one quantitative metric closest to the concept of "winning" is money.
The economic system as the root doesn’t make sense. Why is the decay so sudden despite capitalism dominating western markets for nearly half a thousand years? Why are there so many capitalist economies like Japan or Norway without these issues (almost at all)?
Those 2 cannot be true if the blame is on capitalism.
It's a consequence of a political machine and culture which tolerates it.
People who pretend that SF having drug addicts with open sores assaulting each other and the rest of the citizenry is a housing crisis disgust me. It's a policy which actively aids and abets human misery.
The crisis is one of poverty. While a large portion if the population (and almost everyone on HN) lives in massive, safe homes with upscale communities, good food, good human connection, support networks, they deny nearly everyone else access to the same.
Where can someone on a bartenders wage buy a house and work where they work? Where can they even buy land?
Yet there are vast swaths of land unused. Countless gigantic homes take up enormous spaces. And all the policy protects the people with those homes and property instead of the majority of people.
We don’t have a homeless crisis. We have a resource allocation crisis.
> If getting banned for consistently making a mess is what it takes to get public bathrooms back, then so be it.
we have similar system already in place. It is called "no-fly list". Interesting that most of the people on this site is against it while seem to support the proposed "no-bathroom list". I wonder why so. May be it is because the people here allow for non-zero possibility that they may be subjected to the former while they are sure that the latter would never apply to them.
The no fly list is easy to end up on by simply having the wrong name. The “no bathroom” list blocks you if and only if you treat it poorly and make a mess.
The system could hook into the medical records if we wanted to hear the excuses. The stereotype of old people going to the bathroom with a news paper exist for reasons, and it not because the toilet is such a soft chair to sit for 15-30 minutes. The toilet could include sensors for how soft or hard the stool is, and detect bacteria, in which case it could just add it to the users profile.
Sticky and stinky urine, in combination with frequent needs are three major symptoms for a plethora of problems. Protein, from blood and mucus in either stool or urine are also both a big flag and they are very sticky to surfaces. Really sticky, and really stinky.
Of course there is other reasons like drugs and alcohol. The restroom could detect those too and put it on the users permanent record.
Give it a few decades and the probability of becoming one goes up significant.
If anyone here is an Terry Pratchett fan, there is this scene with Cohen the Barbarian. The quote goes: the three best things in life are hot water, good dentishtry and shoft lavatory paper. Its a joke with a bit of truth to it. Good teeth and good bowel movements are luxury objects that people tend to only notice when they lost them.
I completely agree with you, and it is important to remember that all it takes is very few people to ruin it for everybody. With accountability comes consequences and that fixes the incentive function.
However I also think the system requires something kinda like forgiveness, or maybe better yet, redemption. If, once you have been kicked out there is nothing you can do to be let back in then nothing incentivises you to better your actions.
Maybe you could be let back in again by paying a cleaning fee, and having to provide pictures after you used the toilet for the next 40 times.
Accountability is super important, but if you don't also have redemption then you end up with the US criminal system.
This is actually a reasonable counter-argument, were it not for the fact that practically every such systems, no matter how lofty their goals or how fair their initial rules, all eventually evolve to be instead a tool for oppression.
What happens when you've been falsely accused? What happens when the person before you's 2/10 dirty is the person after you's 8/10 dirty? There's also a privacy problem with there being a poop log attached to our IDs.
No man is an island, entirely of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod is washed away by the sea, Europe is the lesser, as well as if a promontorie were, as well as if a manor of your friends or of your own were; any person’s ban diminishes me, because I am involved in the community; And therefore never ask to know onto who the banhammer falls; it falls on you.
> repeat offenders who abuse the restroom will be blocked.
Forcing the banned people to use some street or park for their relief would be better? They obviously don't care where the literal shit piles up as long as it doesn't diminish their profits.
From listening to a podcast or two, my impression is that the Public Bathroom Problem is an economic one. There were many paid public bathrooms in the past in the US, but they were deemed sexist and banned. Then cities didn't want to foot the bill, so they closed many of them.
Yes, it sounds like their very business model is banned in large parts of the country.
Perhaps they'll do some 'regulatory arbitrage' like Uber? Ie just operate in what's at best a legal grey area, and then use lobbying and lawyers to legitimise your business model?
Took me a while to find how they make money, but I ended up finding this[1] on the most godawful of websites (seriously, either use an adblocker or fucking avoid it entirely, good god)...
>Currently, businesses and other public entities can rent a Throne on a monthly basis, which includes cleaning and servicing. But Heinzelman said the company is also exploring an option to purchase a Throne or to rent a larger volume at once. So far, the startup has raised seed funding primarily from angel investors and will be looking to raise a Series A in mid-2023.
Thanks to that Series-A comment, my pessimistic take is that these will be "public" and "free" for now, and eventually we'll see them implementing monthly fees/subscriptions and/or microtransactions or whathaveyou.
Edit: Seems I'm ignorant in this area and that paid public toilets are against the law in many areas. Still can't help but be pessimistic, though.
What I’m really interested in is why they were deemed sexist; in Europe, which I just came back from visiting, paid toilets were everywhere and they were not usually particularly clean.
So put the charge on the entrance to the bathroom so you have to pay to get into the bathroom. That is how bathrooms in London train stations and airports work. Then it does not matter if you are going to use the urinal or stall, or even the wash basins.
To expand on this, they were specifically coin operated _bathroom stalls_ - they didn't charge for _urinals_, and this put a disproportionate burden on women were charged for number one and number two.
A lot of amenities "worked" before because of aggressive social norm enforcement.
For example, people experiencing persistent mental health issues would literally be locked up "for the common good".
I think what we are seeing is people trying to use technology to replace earlier (primarily social) technologies of control like shaming, religious instruction, tighter communities, aggressive policing etc.
It's not the amenities themselves being reinvented, it's new techniques of social control to uphold good behaviour and care for shared resources.
Yeah everyone is just trying to thread the needle off social Justice by using technology discriminate in ways that are not socially acceptable in highly liberal areas.
> For example, people experiencing persistent mental health issues would literally be locked up "for the common good".
I don’t know that we’re doing much better now. Is it so great that now the same people spend a few decades self-medicating and living like rats on the streets because they can’t escape their inner demons without extremely intense intervention?
Do people really look at a person having a violent psychotic breakdown for the 10th time this year in the street and pat society on the back that at least he’s not in a mental institution..
I am ok with startups attempting to innovate in products that meet the needs of humans beyond wealthy tech workers; sure they deserve criticism when being discriminatory or having bad societal effects, but can we really rely on the public sector to build and deploy new technology?
I’d much rather see brainpower being spent on thinking about innovation in cleanliness than on the next “open source DataDog clone”. Let’s encourage people to go after hard but important problems (but not shy away from valid criticism, of course).
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That would exclude the worst offenders. But it doesn't solve the incentive problem of tragedy of the commons. Once people have paid $1, that's immediately a sunk cost, and from then people have no reason (aside from morals, which are absent in some people) not to shit on the toilet seat and walk out. But it still may be an alright solution (when combined with regular cleaners), even if it isn't a perfect one.
Here, you get a voucher that you can use to get your money back and can use it in the business the bathroom is located in, or in one of the nearby businesses.
That's how it's funded. The incentives to not leave a mess remain unchanged. All you've done is filter out some % of people who would have otherwise left a mess, as well as some % of people who wouldn't have.
I mean, maybe paying for it makes people be more careful because of some psychological reasons... possibly.
Um, solve the public restrooms problem for whom? Granted I’ve been living far from DC for 20 years, but I spent a large chunk of this summer there. Access to public restrooms was the same as it is here in Seattle: only a problem if you’re a street critter. People who can scan QR codes already have plenty of access to restrooms, they just need to at least suggest they’ll buy something. Homeless people and people barely making ends meet need to be able to use a restroom, and they shouldn’t need a smartphone to do that.
I’m not sure if my post was taken as callous but I was explicitly rejecting anti poverty, my usage of the term was as a term of affection for the people I was advocating for, and identification with them. To be absolutely blunt I have only solidarity with my fellow street critters. And I want them to be able to use a bathroom without a QR code. Like everyone who isn’t a street critter can do (despite bullshit whining in other comments)
As a Seattle dweller and an active person, finding a bathroom during a long run or a bike ride is difficult. There are large swaths of the city with no bathrooms. In commercial areas, having to meander through a store to use a restroom is bad for the person trying to use it and the other store customers. Seattle is failing in this regard for all its citizens, not just "street critters".
Agreed that everyone should have access to functional bathrooms and scanning QR codes to do so is silly.
If you could explain to an Australian here: I have either a pub or a McDonalds every two blocks that any person can walk into and use a restroom. This would include industrial areas. Is that not the case in Seattle?
Surprisingly, yes, there's really not a lot of McDonald's or other chain fast food restaurants downtown. You can try exploring in Google maps to get a feel for it (consider eg the area around Mercer and Dexter Ave). You can get to one, but it may be a half hour detour on foot. What is closer will be awkward as they describe.
Thanks for that. I have to agree to being surprised. I've just looked on maps from my last Sydney office, for some comparison: There's a McDonalds at 377 George St and at 600 George St, both about a four minute walk. There's a third inside the Westfield which would have its own bathrooms. KFC is three minutes away with bathrooms.
The Marble Bar is a 3m walk, Century Bar is 5m, Ryan's Bar is 9m, Burrow Bar is 5m, and Papa Gede's is 3m. All of this excludes the mass of pubs and clubs that shutdown due to lockout. I definitely feel out of place with what you've shown me!
When I was in the states I found that a lot of places would have locks / codes on the bathrooms that required you to purchase something prior to using it. Not fun when you're desperate to go and there's a big queue.
The European model is normally coin operated which is still a little annoying but at least if you know and carry a few coins you can get in quickly.
America seems to have some challenges that most developed countries don't have. I don't entirely know why, but one factor seems to be we default to expecting people to do things privately at home that get done in public spaces elsewhere. This leaves our public spaces under developed.
We meet friends at my place or yours. We don't have a lot of pubs. Etc.
In parts of the Bay Area, sometimes you can't find a restroom no matter who you are. The UC Berkeley campus during school breaks is one such place. The campus has 0, and the businesses in the surrounding city have very few restrooms, even for paying customers. The subway has restrooms, but they're nearly always closed. You pretty much have to go to a sit-down restaurant (good luck if it's after 9pm). In 2020-1, this was 10X worse with everything being closed.
In San Francisco JCDeaux already does that. Those units are self-cleaning, handicapped-accessible, and cost about $300K each. They're complicated, with motors, sensors, and valves. All the hardware and controls are Telemechanique industrial grade. SF has a big problem with those. Vandalism, people shooting up inside, people dumping trash in them, etc. There's no problem providing public bathrooms for rich people. It's providing public bathrooms for homeless people that's a problem.
Wheelchair accessibility triples the size and price of the units. Here's what JCDEaux installs in countries that don't require it.[1]
San Francisco has an attended 24 hour portable restroom operation in poor parts of the city, called "Pit Stop". Total operating costs are around $30 per flush.[2]
The most workable low-end solution currently seems to be the Portland Loo.[3] "The sleek and modern kiosk discourages crime with graffiti-proof wall panels and open grating that allows you to see if and how many people are inside." It's not self-cleaning like the expensive JCDeaux units, but it can be hosed down or if necessary pressure-washed.
> San Francisco has an attended 24 hour portable restroom operation in poor parts of the city, called "Pit Stop". Total operating costs are around $30 per flush.
At this price, isn't it cheaper to operate traditional restroom with full time janitor instead?
What a frightening solution that Portland loo is. Compromising on the most basic sense of privacy that a bathroom should provide. And putting the hand washing station on the outside? This just reeks of cultural bias and not considering the bathroom uses of others.
Some people like to carry bidets they can fill to clean themselves, some people like to wet toilet papers they use for cleaning, some people feel safety and more secure being able to clean themselves and make ablution in an enclosed bathroom environment.
> San Francisco has an attended 24 hour portable restroom operation in poor parts of the city, called "Pit Stop". Total operating costs are around $30 per flush.[2]
This is some questionable math. They took the costs of the units and staff and divided by the number of late night usages to arrive at ~$30 per usage.
But if they were used twice as much that rate would be halved, etc.
In any case the fixed costs are the same regardless of usage metrics.
It's very misleading to take a highly fixed cost and label it like a usage-based cost.
US suffers from an additional culture problem that doesn't allow us to have nice public things. Every public restroom in NYC I can think of outside of Bryant Park ends up turning into a shithole, literally.
What keeps the Bryant Park restrooms clean? What's different about it? I've never actually used it.
The Port Authority bus terminal bathrooms recently had a full renovation. It was nice enough for a little while, but it didn't take long for it to become a shithole. The money spent to clean it up and renovate it turned to shit.
Why do they need to be nice? It's a place to shit. I get it. We all like a dandified street but people's right to a place to do what they biologically have to do trumps anyone's right to aesthetic purity, IMO.
Cleaning on a daily basis does not make a bathroom sanitary. And the worse your issues the more frequent the cleaning needs to be.
When I worked in a gas station we cleaned on the hour and signed for it and this was in a place where people were generally decent about not making a mess.
More tham paying cops tp arrest people and jailers to jail them?
More than the $500,000 the Downtown Seattle Association spent last year alone on hosing out one alley?
I have my doubts. However, were it the case I'd still say it is the right thing to do. Jury trials cost a lot of money, death penalty appeals are whoppingly expensive, eminent domain is costing Sound Transit a fortune for its light rail network. As it turns out, living in a free society is expensive.
Yeah I can see how that would be confusing. The downstream consequence of a society which both prohibits public defecation and removes public accommodation for that act is that some people will find themselves unable to comply with the law.
Frequent arguments against public accommodation is that it is gross or unsanitary it requires expensive maintenance.
To me, there is no question. A free society should have to go very far to accommodate people so that it avoids taking their freedom over something biologically necessary.
I don't know why cities don't offer a tax break to businesses to make their bathrooms publicly available. Make it enough that they can hire an extra employee to make sure there's someone to check the bathroom periodically and do some random checks to make sure businesses aren't cheating. It would have to be cheaper than operating separate public bathrooms.
I live in Hong Kong and am still a little amazed at the ubiquitous, free, clean public restrooms. They're not luxurious usually, but they're available and never a disaster. As far as I can tell, the city employs a pretty large staff to check and clean them throughout the day. But then there's also no massive homeless and drug problem like there is in the US.
> But then there's also no massive homeless and drug problem like there is in the US.
Well that's the key. Go somewhere without that problem in the US, and every amenity is easy to find. In some places, you can visit a stranger's house and ask to use the toilet, which I've seen before.
Because it's a service the business is performing for the public and they should be compensated for it. It also makes it easier to opt out and reduces the regulatory burden, which benefits small business.
McDonald's and Starbucks etc. will have no problem figuring out how to qualify for the tax break and jump through the hoops to get it. Then the city gets hundreds of new public bathrooms that they don't have to maintain for minimal cost.
A small mom and pop bodega or flower shop or whatever that barely makes a profit might decide it's not worth it. If it's a requirement, that business just ceases to exist and the city is deprived of it. If it's optional, they can still operate, and the city doesn't end up a homogeneous wasteland of corporate brands. They just don't get a tax break, but if they're not making much money, they probably aren't paying much tax anyway.
If it can be a law to require you to use the bathroom in a specific way, the collective should provide a way to comply with the law. Anything else is unjust.
Being upset that people dirty public restrooms, shoot up in them or over occupy them is not a justification for creating a situation which takes people's freedom away.
It is illegal in most places to defecate or urinate in public, or really anywhere other than a toilet. This company shouldn't need to exist. Facilities should be provided by the government if they wish to have such a law in place.
This and several other laws create a situation in America where it is a crime to be destitute.
When the government provides those facilities, they get destroyed or monopolized by drug users. People can't destroy the provided facilities and then complain that they aren't available. Society does require a modicum of cooperation from the public in order to function.
Where do you use the bathroom? I do it at home, at work or in a business I am patronizing. All three things a destitute street person does not generally have access to.
Train/Bus stations, shopping malls, libraries, homeless shelters, fast food restaurants, gas stations, hotel lobbies, churches
The destitute do also patronize businesses as well from time to time. You do nobody any favors by infantilizing them. Grown adults can find a place to relieve themselves without fouling the public space. If not, perhaps they need to be placed in a facility where they can receive the care and supervision they need.
I'm all for the government providing and maintaining public restrooms as well (or subsidizing businesses that do, per my other comment), but that needs to be coupled with enforcement against people who would abuse them, as well as a general societal will to not let people rot in the street in the name of respecting their life choices.
I'm not sure what it's like where you live but where I live it's like this.
Train/Bus stations don't have bathrooms.
Homeless shelters and the churches which do provide services make you leave during the day and do not let people back in under any circumstances until around 5 PM.
Fast food restaurants, gas stations and hotel lobbies all lock their bathrooms and allow access to patrons only.
Which leaves shopping malls and libraries. In a huge city, that's a pretty low toilet density.
> but that needs to be coupled with enforcement against people who would abuse them,
I have no problem with this. Vandalizing public utilities should be a crime which is enforced. Having to answer the call of nature should not be.
Train stations / bus terminals in major cities absolutely do have bathrooms. Union Station in DC, Grand Central / Penn Station in New York, similar stations in other cities, all have bathrooms. They’re usually open 24/7 too.
Even places with locks on the bathrooms will usually let people use them if they ask. It is not unreasonable to imagine someone, no matter how destitute, getting something off the dollar menu at McDonald’s. Many do. Many certainly have no trouble finding enough money for drugs or alcohol so it’s not unreasonable to expect they can get a fast food meal and use the bathroom.
In the absolute worst case scenario, find a secluded place in a park and dig a hole, or get a plastic bag and throw it away. There’s no excuse for leaving feces on the sidewalk.
Sorry, but “don’t shit in the common area” has been table stakes for participating in human society since the beginning of time. Even in a hunter gatherer society someone taking a dump next to the campfire would be rightly ostracized.
> similar stations in other cities, all have bathrooms. They’re usually open 24/7 too.
Less than you think. I ride the bus all around the Seattle area and I can't think of a bus station here that has a bathroom.
> Even places with locks on the bathrooms will usually let people use them if they ask.
Not here.
> It is not unreasonable to imagine someone, no matter how destitute, getting something off the dollar menu at McDonald’s.
You're talking about a couple bucks a day for people subsisting on $200 of snap benefits a month.
> any certainly have no trouble finding enough money for drugs or alcohol
It's almost as if people suffering from substance abuse disorder make poor financial choices
> In the absolute worst case scenario, find a secluded place in a park and dig a hole, or get a plastic bag and throw it away.
Just to be clear, that is still illegal.
> There’s no excuse for leaving feces on the sidewalk.
I agree. People shitting right on the sidewalk are probably in need of medical attention.
> Sorry, but “don’t shit in the common area” has been table stakes for participating in human society since the beginning of time.
You know that people used to empty their chamber pots on the street right? You know India is undergoing a campaign right now to decrease ubiquitous public defecation and that involves building a million plus toilets?
> Even in a hunter gatherer society someone taking a dump next to the campfire would be rightly ostracized.
Probably. I don't think they'd lock you in a cage for it though.
What it comes down to is, if you want to have a society where there’s not people living in tents on every corner or shitting outdoors, you have to make and enforce a rule that people aren’t allowed to do that.
Then when you find someone breaking that law, stop them. If they’re addicted to drugs, send them to rehab, whether they want to go or not. If they’re mentally ill, send them to an institution. If they’ve just decided they’d rather live that way, then jail, because it’s simply not allowed.
Yet when we try to make and enforce laws like that, people get told they’re “criminalizing poverty” and we end up with the situation we have now.
Yes, you can reasonably expect adults to function and take care of themselves, including finding shelter, food and appropriate restroom facilities, without a government agent holding their hand every step of the way. Indeed, the vast majority of people do and we depend on it.
What it comes down to is, if you want to have a society where there’s not people living in tents in every corner or shitting outdoors, you have to make and enforce a rule that people aren’t allowed to do that and enforce it.
You can make all the rules you want and enforce it in whatever draconian manner you choose and there will still be tent cities etc as long as America keeps underbuilding adequate levels of the right kind of housing.
If you can’t comply with the law that says you can’t urinate or defecate in public, you should be institutionalized somehow (drug treatment, mental health treatment).
A sane person cam struggle to find a place to use the bathroom in downtown Seattle. I've had to hold it myself from Cherry street to the Issaquah Transit Center for lack of a place to go in-between. The facilities at Tibbets Creek Park have been quite a relief on more than one occasion. Though that's an expensive trip for someone who doesn't have much money. And quite out of the way for anyone not living in the suburbs.
And in case you didn't know, America gutted public mental health over the past 50 odd years.
The real public bathroom problem isn’t that middle class people have a dearth of options, it’s that people with no money at all, especially homeless people, have no options whatsoever.
I don't know why you're downvoted. My son had to really do a pee (he was 3-4?) and the staff at a grocery store wouldn't let him use their bathroom. I asked: "do you really want to clean pee off the floor, because that is his next option." They told us to leave so I had him pee on the inside of the front door and we left, never to return.
Edit: we had a cart full of food doing proper grocery shopping, we weren't there to just to use the bathroom.
This is really the crux of the issue, if you gotta go you gotta go. Sure you will try to find a suitable place but eventually you get to make a decision between your pants and whatever is around (and hence the need for high enough density of publicly accessible facilities)
At root is that an individualist culture exposes itself as seriously broken in the public space. There can be no public good if the individual always comes first.
Paid high tech street toilets are a logical conclusion of a culture with little shared public good. The human rights and priority of the individual is respected and maintained.
Public toilets will go away as the public goes away.
I’ve lived in some places that emphasize the collective over the individual, and I’ve come to the same conclusion. I have little hope that America improves at all in any of these dimensions. Individualism is too engrained.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 245 ms ] threadI sincerely hope not.
Personally, I consider bathroom facilities which track you personally, and can block you for any reason, not to actually be “public” bathrooms. They’re essentially proposing to put a large number of very tiny private clubs all over a city. I would argue that this is not actually solving the public bathroom problem.
The right way to solve the problem is not to harden the gatekeeping, but to improve society so that gatekeeping becomes unnecessary. But that’s hard, and has no obvious point where someone can extract money.
Will any of these work? I don’t know. But this is the way. Not stricter and stricter gatekeeping.
People who have nothing have no reason to care what others think; but people who have everything, and who never experience consequences for what they do, can be just as detached.
Also, if you think about it, this service is fundamentally not meant to serve (or rather, avoid serving) the sorts of people you're picturing. These washrooms likely aren't intended to be placed in low-economic-class areas of cities. Homeless/drug addicts/etc aren't the problem they're intending to filter out. (Why not? Because those groups of people are used to being cronically un-bathroomed, and so have become inured to just finding a corner outside to do their business. See: San Francisco. When things like open port-a-potties are placed in these areas, the homeless ignore those and continue to do what they do.)
Instead, I imagine that these bathrooms would be placed in generally bougie areas – the article cited public parks, but I imagine a major case would be "near food trucks in business districts." And the group they're trying to restrict access to, are "rich assholes who think society exists to serve them, and they owe nothing back."
Consider, after all, the premise: you scan a QR code on your smartphone in order to get access. Who even has a smartphone with an active data plan? Not homeless people. This service is designed to serve exactly the same target audience as e.g. e-bikes/e-scooter rental services.
You might be surprised.
Alternatively flip it around and the toilet scans your QR - this could even be a bit of paper. Ultra low tech.
I'm good with that. It seems easier, and more important, it would work, and you're just singing Kumbaya.
The very fact that we don’t all live in filth now, means that you have to pay a high premium to get someone to choose to be the person whose job constantly exposes them to it.
See also: the profitability of electronics recycling (i.e. picking through piles of scrap for base metal to melt) in the developing vs. developed world. When people live in areas with mounds of trash piled all around them, they’ll dig through that trash for Pennie’s, because they already do thing like shoveling it out of the way every day. When people live in a nice house in a clean city, though, you’ll have to pay them a lot more to touch a scrap heap.
(Or, to put that another way: it’s “but I might get tetanus!” vs. “My base risk of getting tetanus is so high that this job won’t increase my risk by much in relative terms… so sure, why not.”)
Does SF have only a few dozen "poop disasters" a day? The language in this thread suggests the number is higher and the nature is worse than your language would imply, but I wouldn't know as I've only been a tourist there.
Even if "lots" was enough, how much did you earn doing that job? I don't know American politics beyond Team Red vs. Team Blue, are American cities willing to pay for enough cleaners?
If a law is too expensive to enforce justly, maybe we need to reconsider that law.
The only thing stopping it in first world countries is an aversion of democratic oversight of corporations.
https://www.rts.com/blog/what-is-urban-mining/
i’ve seen some public bathrooms are so mistreated that i don’t know how you pay anyone to clean them. i’d certainly feel awful asking a janitor to clean them without a hazmat suit, a pressure washer and a bag full of tergazyme.
If the problem of where everyone can go is hard, why not at least try to solve the problem of where people willing to pay a lot can go? Lots of empty storefronts in downtown SF right now. $5 or even $10 a go could be cheaper and quicker than buying something I didn’t really want in some restaurant just so I can use their restroom.
Relying on our schools will educate us out of the problem won’t work. We have too many narcissists and sociopaths in our society, and we spend too much time catering to and rewarding them.
300% public shaming. Japan is an example of this working, to an unbelievably ideal extent even.
Public restrooms in Japan are *clean*, they are spotless and sanitary no matter what time of day you visit one. You can probably eat off of those toilet seats, for all I know.
The reason for this is because individuals who do not clean up after themselves in public spaces are shamed and ridiculed by Japanese society at large with no holds barred. It's "just not how upstanding members of society operate" to make a mess, be it in a public restroom or anywhere else, in Japan.
You might see Japanese people picking up trash and cleaning up after themselves when leaving a public venue like a stadium or theater, probably other peoples' refuse too while they are at it. Frankly bewildering acts from the perspective of most westerners, but it's literally that sort of social attitude to be upstanding individuals that leads to clean public restrooms.
Not being from Japan, I’m curious: how does this work in practice? If I were to go into a bathroom in Japan and smear my own shit all over the walls and leave, 1. how does anyone know I did it, 2. if somehow someone actually knew I did it, how exactly would I be shamed and ridiculed, and 3. how would that negatively affect me if I didn’t care about shame or was incapable of feeling shame.
Japanese are raised from the very beginning to be ashamed of making a mess and not cleaning up, to be ashamed of being irresponsible. Everyone is taught that "the Sun is watching you", that someone (or something!) somewhere is always watching you and judging you for your actions.
A westerner might shit up a public restroom, intentionally or otherwise, and say to himself "I don't care; cleaning this up is the janitor's job."
A Japanese person won't even dare, because they are taught to clean up regardless of a janitor.
It is a common tradition and mandate in Japanese schools for students to clean their classrooms (and every-so-often even restrooms!) themselves at the end of the school day. Yes, the schools have janitors, the students are told to clean up themselves anyway because that's just how good people behave.
This is all a facet of education and parenting, and the result of generations and millenia of such teachings. Their thought processes are fundamentally different from the west: A better society starts by being better individuals themselves first.
Public restrooms in the west being an absolute shit show (pun intended) are a reflection of failed education and parenting in western society. The west can, and should, do better.
Great, but this contradicts your other post that seemed to be claiming that bathroom shaming specifically was the solution the bathroom problem, which the parent was rightly incredulous of as how it actually works in Japan.
This also works for obesity, and I've seen it in action in many nations apart from just Japan. Social pressure works. We've known it works for millennia. I'm not sure why we suddenly started believing that social pressure to not litter and eat less was ineffective and even immoral.
Ultimately the difference is that American society is one in which individualism is prized over all. The greatest evils are those that would in any way infringe on something that could be considered a personal liberty. And it’s only gotten worse in the last 50 years. I can’t imagine modern American society rising to meet any major challenge of the last 100 years the way we have in the past.
You can suppress it though. Public shaming, forced fines, get violent with them... All these things work to certain degree and will get you through the day. But again - you're not solving the problem, you're just suppressing. Stupidity is ultimately unsolvable, because nature; and that is why all those utopic dreams always fail with impressive death counts.
I am glad to see a company trying to do something about this issue. I'm not thrilled with their solution but even if they fail, perhaps it at least gets people to stop accepting that nothing can be done about it.
If the offenders thought that the locals might punish them, they would behave better.
Retributive justice is not really effective when the offender’s world view internally justifies their actions.
It’s a common theme that criminals are victims of circumstance to such a degree that the enforcing entity is seen as another arm of the system that caused their criminal behavior in the first place.
Imagine being in a car crash, having difficult pains, getting prescribed oxy- or hydrocodone, and after the script runs out, asking for a refill gets you a stamped as a drug seeker, never to receive another prescription ever again.
But the pain and the withdrawals are still there. This has created an incredible numbed of convicted criminals and homeless people. A Venn diagram of these two populations overlaps with people who spend nights in public toilets.
This is just denying the offenders all agency. If they literally cannot help but commit crime, the response from the society should then be to lock them up, as unfit to live in the society.
I do not in fact believe that to be the case. Criminals have agency, and, as can be readily observed, respond to incentives too.
I understand the sentiment but I ultimately find such a stance unhelpful and counterproductive because it is essentially saying the problems we face would go away if we only just created a utopia. Like, what's stopping us?
Trying to create better public restrooms with a new system seems far more achievable than implementing a new socioeconomic system where no one feels like trashing public bathrooms and common areas.
Apartheid regimes or extreme poverty lead to gated compounds for the rich with depressing predictability.
Toilets that exclude the poor are great for ensuring the rich have access to nice private toilets. Doesn't help those who can't afford the subscription fee.
The problem is that people are using these labels for countries like America, which clearly do not have Apartheid or extreme poverty. When one is so extreme in their beliefs and hyperbole, they are effectively asking for total social restructure. Ignoring the fact that such unhinged people should be nowhere near any such responsibility, the user above is correct: this will never happen. While these extremists wait for the glorious revolution, people in need today are missing out on good but not perfect solutions.
I don't think leaving toilets in a usable state after using them has anything to do with being rich or poor. It's not something that requires money.
This is pure fantasy. Society will always need prisons. Sure, there is much that society can and ought to do in order to reduce what may be judged as tragic or unnecessary incarcerations, but the incarceration rate will never be literally zero. Having prisons doesn't make society a "dictatorship".
Not every society has needed prisons, especially smaller, tribal ones. Maybe our complex, global one currently does but I don't think it is a hard requirement.
Prisons are an improvement over that.
Hell, I've seen a university professor walk out of a public bathroom without washing his hands after taking a shit.
To be completely blunt people are fucking animals and many of them do these kinds of disgusting things in private bathrooms because they can do it with impunity. They don't care about other people and they revel in knowing that their disgusting behaviour is detrimental to the rest of us.
Suggesting that we need to raise society up to some post-scarcity Star Trek utopia where all people are paragons of humanity before we can have clean public bathrooms is absurd.
Some people are influenced by propaganda and the historical connotations associated with the word "dictatorship."
There's nothing inherently bad about the word, it's just the association. If you look at dictatorships objectively there are many successful examples. Here are a few modern ones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benevolent_dictatorship
That's just a couple. Your first reaction would be to say that the examples represent a minority. The problem is, though, if you look at ancient history, the most successful civilizations that prospered and succeeded were basically all empires with central rule. It shows that if you were intellectually unbiased, you would not simply dismiss "dictatorship" in a single sentence.
Democracy is a recent phenomenon when viewed in terms of human history and, if anything, still experimental (there are many examples of complete failures of democratic governments).
That being said, to swing it around to your statement. There is no definitive "right" way to solve a problem. Gatekeeping could work, and it could fail. Simply "improving society" can also lead to complete and utter failure. The inputs and various factors influencing the outcomes are so complex we cannot point to one way that works.
So I say give gatekeeping a try. It's not like the government is doing this either... It's a business.
It’s been tried. Many times. Throughout human history. It is littered with stratified societies, where every man had his lessers and betters to kick and cower before, respectively. This did not lead to any good outcomes. I say let equality and mutual respect have a chance.
I'm saying try it with restrooms. Because this hasn't been tried yet at all.
It's of course ideal when everyone is so nice and civilized that you don't need to lock your door. The problem is that such a society is a great hunting ground for a rare breaker, because it does not have a mechanism to resist breaking the rules. Such a breaker can inflict disproportionate damage and ruin things for everyone.
Improving mores and living conditions should go hand in hand with protecting these improved mores and conditions from those who try to push the society back to the savage state for a minor benefit for themselves.
There will always be a small amount of people who don’t obey the social niceties. Some are psychopaths, or have some other mental problems. Some may have extenuating circumstances. But I believe that society can be improved such that these people are rare and far between, and society can invest in picking up the remaining slack.
> Improving mores and living conditions should go hand in hand with protecting these improved mores and conditions from those who try to push the society back to the savage state for a minor benefit for themselves.
Sounds great, except whenever such things are actually implemented, it tends to be a lot of steadily increasing punishment; any improvements, whatever they were initially, will eventually be cut from the budget since they do not give immediate visible results, whereas harsh punishment get great ratings. People love a good public flogging.
This is a problem perpetuating itself. People don’t believe in the public spirit and goodwill of others, so they don’t want to invest in actually improving it, since they think it can’t be done. And so it goes.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/loco-motive/
There is no way to provide things in a way that people cannot ruin them. And as long as people continue to ruin them (ie, we haven't yet "fixed society" as someone suggested above), we can either prevent those people from ruining them, or not provide them in the first place. I, for one, believe that "don't provide them in the first place" is not the right solution.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Platform_(film)
This is, of course, only papering over the problem in the short run. Which is why the real solution must be to improve society.
Ostracizing people who behave badly will only make society worse.
Even if you don't have users who pee all over the ring and floor the bathroom will look like a mess after 100 visits.
We clean the bathrooms every two weeks and it’s far from “a mess” when it comes time to clean it, so much so that we need to have a calendar reminder to do it.
I think there’s something about “the public” that’s underlying that difference.
Don't give someone a roof and a toilet and they may just find any old place to go!
If people shall care about collective goods, there needs to be an actual collective spirit first. Places where this type of public infrastructure actually works are also places where people realized that you can't create a good society by letting the rich hoard their wealth and build walls while the homeless are beaten instead of helped.
SF is a truly dystopian place in a certain sense.
From people actively soiling the facilities, to people not giving a fuck about leaving a mess (making a 'seat cover' out of tp, then leaving it on the floor; not cleaning after themselfes), to people with a 'not my job' egocentrical attitude. Those are studied engineers with good salaries, workplace stability. In Europe. The facilities are nice, bright and clean. Until those people leave them...
From these lifelong experiences, I would guess there is a certain, not so small amount of people that are secretly incapable of altruistic behavior. For numerous reasons. Those ruin it for the rest of us.
For this reason, as brutal and as it seems at first glance, I would really like to see such people identified and punished harshly for their parasitic selfishness.
A nation needs a unified direction with unified values. Eating different food is fine. Disagreeing about core tenets of society like free speech, equal rights, and law and justice, is not.
You can get all moral about it with his opinion or her opinion or whatever and I get that happiness != money and all that jazz. But in general the one quantitative metric closest to the concept of "winning" is money.
Those 2 cannot be true if the blame is on capitalism.
These economies lean towards socialism more then capitalism. In fact you can even call them socialist governments.
Homeless people are coddled and taken care of. Free syringes so they don't get HIV. Homeless people aren't beaten. If you're homeless SF is paradise.
People who pretend that SF having drug addicts with open sores assaulting each other and the rest of the citizenry is a housing crisis disgust me. It's a policy which actively aids and abets human misery.
The implication being that without policies that are friendly to struggling/addicted/ill/homeless folks there would somehow be less of them?
Where can someone on a bartenders wage buy a house and work where they work? Where can they even buy land?
Yet there are vast swaths of land unused. Countless gigantic homes take up enormous spaces. And all the policy protects the people with those homes and property instead of the majority of people.
We don’t have a homeless crisis. We have a resource allocation crisis.
we have similar system already in place. It is called "no-fly list". Interesting that most of the people on this site is against it while seem to support the proposed "no-bathroom list". I wonder why so. May be it is because the people here allow for non-zero possibility that they may be subjected to the former while they are sure that the latter would never apply to them.
Not equivalent.
Sticky and stinky urine, in combination with frequent needs are three major symptoms for a plethora of problems. Protein, from blood and mucus in either stool or urine are also both a big flag and they are very sticky to surfaces. Really sticky, and really stinky.
Of course there is other reasons like drugs and alcohol. The restroom could detect those too and put it on the users permanent record.
If anyone here is an Terry Pratchett fan, there is this scene with Cohen the Barbarian. The quote goes: the three best things in life are hot water, good dentishtry and shoft lavatory paper. Its a joke with a bit of truth to it. Good teeth and good bowel movements are luxury objects that people tend to only notice when they lost them.
However I also think the system requires something kinda like forgiveness, or maybe better yet, redemption. If, once you have been kicked out there is nothing you can do to be let back in then nothing incentivises you to better your actions.
Maybe you could be let back in again by paying a cleaning fee, and having to provide pictures after you used the toilet for the next 40 times.
Accountability is super important, but if you don't also have redemption then you end up with the US criminal system.
(With apologies to John Donne)
You need more budget put into these things.
The best question ever "Which VC would invest in WC ?"
Forcing the banned people to use some street or park for their relief would be better? They obviously don't care where the literal shit piles up as long as it doesn't diminish their profits.
What's this startups' business model?
Perhaps they'll do some 'regulatory arbitrage' like Uber? Ie just operate in what's at best a legal grey area, and then use lobbying and lawyers to legitimise your business model?
>Currently, businesses and other public entities can rent a Throne on a monthly basis, which includes cleaning and servicing. But Heinzelman said the company is also exploring an option to purchase a Throne or to rent a larger volume at once. So far, the startup has raised seed funding primarily from angel investors and will be looking to raise a Series A in mid-2023.
Thanks to that Series-A comment, my pessimistic take is that these will be "public" and "free" for now, and eventually we'll see them implementing monthly fees/subscriptions and/or microtransactions or whathaveyou.
Edit: Seems I'm ignorant in this area and that paid public toilets are against the law in many areas. Still can't help but be pessimistic, though.
[1]https://agadir-group.com/dc-startup-throne-is-bringing-tech-...
To expand on this, they were specifically coin operated _bathroom stalls_ - they didn't charge for _urinals_, and this put a disproportionate burden on women were charged for number one and number two.
Here's a Lockpicking Lawyer where he picks & demonstrates the coin operated lock: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0foSHWP7rc
See eg https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-19/why-the-u...
For example, people experiencing persistent mental health issues would literally be locked up "for the common good".
I think what we are seeing is people trying to use technology to replace earlier (primarily social) technologies of control like shaming, religious instruction, tighter communities, aggressive policing etc.
It's not the amenities themselves being reinvented, it's new techniques of social control to uphold good behaviour and care for shared resources.
I don’t know that we’re doing much better now. Is it so great that now the same people spend a few decades self-medicating and living like rats on the streets because they can’t escape their inner demons without extremely intense intervention?
Do people really look at a person having a violent psychotic breakdown for the 10th time this year in the street and pat society on the back that at least he’s not in a mental institution..
I’d much rather see brainpower being spent on thinking about innovation in cleanliness than on the next “open source DataDog clone”. Let’s encourage people to go after hard but important problems (but not shy away from valid criticism, of course).
Hey American cities! Charge $1 to use a toilet like they do in Europe.
I mean, maybe paying for it makes people be more careful because of some psychological reasons... possibly.
Um, solve the public restrooms problem for whom? Granted I’ve been living far from DC for 20 years, but I spent a large chunk of this summer there. Access to public restrooms was the same as it is here in Seattle: only a problem if you’re a street critter. People who can scan QR codes already have plenty of access to restrooms, they just need to at least suggest they’ll buy something. Homeless people and people barely making ends meet need to be able to use a restroom, and they shouldn’t need a smartphone to do that.
HN is the garden spot of Ceti Alpha Six.
The general plan seems to be that the mental patients can't be misstreated if they get no treatment.
I blame the "One flew over the coconest"-mentality.
Agreed that everyone should have access to functional bathrooms and scanning QR codes to do so is silly.
The Marble Bar is a 3m walk, Century Bar is 5m, Ryan's Bar is 9m, Burrow Bar is 5m, and Papa Gede's is 3m. All of this excludes the mass of pubs and clubs that shutdown due to lockout. I definitely feel out of place with what you've shown me!
The European model is normally coin operated which is still a little annoying but at least if you know and carry a few coins you can get in quickly.
We meet friends at my place or yours. We don't have a lot of pubs. Etc.
In parts of the Bay Area, sometimes you can't find a restroom no matter who you are. The UC Berkeley campus during school breaks is one such place. The campus has 0, and the businesses in the surrounding city have very few restrooms, even for paying customers. The subway has restrooms, but they're nearly always closed. You pretty much have to go to a sit-down restaurant (good luck if it's after 9pm). In 2020-1, this was 10X worse with everything being closed.
As someone with IBS and a few other related things this sounds like it has the potential to be incredibly annoying and frustrating.
Wheelchair accessibility triples the size and price of the units. Here's what JCDEaux installs in countries that don't require it.[1]
San Francisco has an attended 24 hour portable restroom operation in poor parts of the city, called "Pit Stop". Total operating costs are around $30 per flush.[2]
The most workable low-end solution currently seems to be the Portland Loo.[3] "The sleek and modern kiosk discourages crime with graffiti-proof wall panels and open grating that allows you to see if and how many people are inside." It's not self-cleaning like the expensive JCDeaux units, but it can be hosed down or if necessary pressure-washed.
[1] https://www.jcdecaux.lt/en/news/modern-public-toilet-klaiped...
[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/san-francisco-public-pit-sto...
[3] https://portlandloo.com/
At this price, isn't it cheaper to operate traditional restroom with full time janitor instead?
Some people like to carry bidets they can fill to clean themselves, some people like to wet toilet papers they use for cleaning, some people feel safety and more secure being able to clean themselves and make ablution in an enclosed bathroom environment.
Certainly hope the project fails.
This is some questionable math. They took the costs of the units and staff and divided by the number of late night usages to arrive at ~$30 per usage.
But if they were used twice as much that rate would be halved, etc.
In any case the fixed costs are the same regardless of usage metrics.
It's very misleading to take a highly fixed cost and label it like a usage-based cost.
The Port Authority bus terminal bathrooms recently had a full renovation. It was nice enough for a little while, but it didn't take long for it to become a shithole. The money spent to clean it up and renovate it turned to shit.
When I worked in a gas station we cleaned on the hour and signed for it and this was in a place where people were generally decent about not making a mess.
More than the $500,000 the Downtown Seattle Association spent last year alone on hosing out one alley?
I have my doubts. However, were it the case I'd still say it is the right thing to do. Jury trials cost a lot of money, death penalty appeals are whoppingly expensive, eminent domain is costing Sound Transit a fortune for its light rail network. As it turns out, living in a free society is expensive.
Frequent arguments against public accommodation is that it is gross or unsanitary it requires expensive maintenance.
To me, there is no question. A free society should have to go very far to accommodate people so that it avoids taking their freedom over something biologically necessary.
I live in Hong Kong and am still a little amazed at the ubiquitous, free, clean public restrooms. They're not luxurious usually, but they're available and never a disaster. As far as I can tell, the city employs a pretty large staff to check and clean them throughout the day. But then there's also no massive homeless and drug problem like there is in the US.
Well that's the key. Go somewhere without that problem in the US, and every amenity is easy to find. In some places, you can visit a stranger's house and ask to use the toilet, which I've seen before.
McDonald's and Starbucks etc. will have no problem figuring out how to qualify for the tax break and jump through the hoops to get it. Then the city gets hundreds of new public bathrooms that they don't have to maintain for minimal cost.
A small mom and pop bodega or flower shop or whatever that barely makes a profit might decide it's not worth it. If it's a requirement, that business just ceases to exist and the city is deprived of it. If it's optional, they can still operate, and the city doesn't end up a homogeneous wasteland of corporate brands. They just don't get a tax break, but if they're not making much money, they probably aren't paying much tax anyway.
In Italy all the public business like coffee shops ("bars") have to let free access to the toilet by law, even if you don't buy anything.
The big difference ? I usually had to pay a nominal amount - 1 euro, to use it. Totally worth it IMO.
Although I found it odd they sometimes had a person with a white lab coat outside. Why the lab coat ?
Being upset that people dirty public restrooms, shoot up in them or over occupy them is not a justification for creating a situation which takes people's freedom away.
This and several other laws create a situation in America where it is a crime to be destitute.
The destitute do also patronize businesses as well from time to time. You do nobody any favors by infantilizing them. Grown adults can find a place to relieve themselves without fouling the public space. If not, perhaps they need to be placed in a facility where they can receive the care and supervision they need.
I'm all for the government providing and maintaining public restrooms as well (or subsidizing businesses that do, per my other comment), but that needs to be coupled with enforcement against people who would abuse them, as well as a general societal will to not let people rot in the street in the name of respecting their life choices.
Train/Bus stations don't have bathrooms.
Homeless shelters and the churches which do provide services make you leave during the day and do not let people back in under any circumstances until around 5 PM.
Fast food restaurants, gas stations and hotel lobbies all lock their bathrooms and allow access to patrons only.
Which leaves shopping malls and libraries. In a huge city, that's a pretty low toilet density.
> but that needs to be coupled with enforcement against people who would abuse them,
I have no problem with this. Vandalizing public utilities should be a crime which is enforced. Having to answer the call of nature should not be.
Even places with locks on the bathrooms will usually let people use them if they ask. It is not unreasonable to imagine someone, no matter how destitute, getting something off the dollar menu at McDonald’s. Many do. Many certainly have no trouble finding enough money for drugs or alcohol so it’s not unreasonable to expect they can get a fast food meal and use the bathroom.
In the absolute worst case scenario, find a secluded place in a park and dig a hole, or get a plastic bag and throw it away. There’s no excuse for leaving feces on the sidewalk.
Sorry, but “don’t shit in the common area” has been table stakes for participating in human society since the beginning of time. Even in a hunter gatherer society someone taking a dump next to the campfire would be rightly ostracized.
Less than you think. I ride the bus all around the Seattle area and I can't think of a bus station here that has a bathroom.
> Even places with locks on the bathrooms will usually let people use them if they ask.
Not here.
> It is not unreasonable to imagine someone, no matter how destitute, getting something off the dollar menu at McDonald’s.
You're talking about a couple bucks a day for people subsisting on $200 of snap benefits a month.
> any certainly have no trouble finding enough money for drugs or alcohol
It's almost as if people suffering from substance abuse disorder make poor financial choices
> In the absolute worst case scenario, find a secluded place in a park and dig a hole, or get a plastic bag and throw it away.
Just to be clear, that is still illegal.
> There’s no excuse for leaving feces on the sidewalk.
I agree. People shitting right on the sidewalk are probably in need of medical attention.
> Sorry, but “don’t shit in the common area” has been table stakes for participating in human society since the beginning of time.
You know that people used to empty their chamber pots on the street right? You know India is undergoing a campaign right now to decrease ubiquitous public defecation and that involves building a million plus toilets?
> Even in a hunter gatherer society someone taking a dump next to the campfire would be rightly ostracized.
Probably. I don't think they'd lock you in a cage for it though.
Then when you find someone breaking that law, stop them. If they’re addicted to drugs, send them to rehab, whether they want to go or not. If they’re mentally ill, send them to an institution. If they’ve just decided they’d rather live that way, then jail, because it’s simply not allowed.
Yet when we try to make and enforce laws like that, people get told they’re “criminalizing poverty” and we end up with the situation we have now.
Yes, you can reasonably expect adults to function and take care of themselves, including finding shelter, food and appropriate restroom facilities, without a government agent holding their hand every step of the way. Indeed, the vast majority of people do and we depend on it.
You can make all the rules you want and enforce it in whatever draconian manner you choose and there will still be tent cities etc as long as America keeps underbuilding adequate levels of the right kind of housing.
And in case you didn't know, America gutted public mental health over the past 50 odd years.
Someone: It's time to get shwifty in here...
Edit: we had a cart full of food doing proper grocery shopping, we weren't there to just to use the bathroom.
Paid high tech street toilets are a logical conclusion of a culture with little shared public good. The human rights and priority of the individual is respected and maintained.
Public toilets will go away as the public goes away.