People think its the homeless pooping on the streets of San Francisco but I was an employed software engineer making 6+ figures and pooped on the street one time since I could find a restroom.
Coffee affects me strongly. What can I say. I get a cleanse every morning for 3 bucks. Cleansing your digestive tract is actually really good for you. People pay big bucks for cleanses.
> 100% of the time a doctor can help you in some way
Nothing that starts with the claim "100%" is ever true, you can be 100% certain of that.
Seriously though, you speak as if your digestive system has never betrayed you, and therefore you're unfamiliar with these matters.
Trust me: there are some things your doctor cannot help you with, at least, not to the point you can walk in a city without public restrooms. Some things are not even medical conditions -- and IBS is "idiopathic" in many cases, meaning doctors don't have a clue -- and some conditions that you would consider anomalous actually fall within the normal human spectrum.
You'll feel the urge to contradict me: don't. You probably don't know about this, but both me and the other commenter you're arguing with do. Realize that your experience is not everybody else's.
What does any of this have to do with what I said? Regardless of how much a doctor can help you or not, if you’re shitting uncontrollably in the streets, you need to seek medical attention to determine if they can do anything about it.
If actual an scientific white paper from PubMed with research and data does not convince you that coffee has a strong laxative effect on around 30% of people, then there's not much else to say.
There's still people who believe the world is flat despite all evidence to the contrary.
It's very difficult to have a discussion with someone who prefers their own opinions over science.
Your opinions have been voted down so many times this thread is filled with your dead comments and not a single person has vouched for you other than me. I can no longer vouch for you.
Also youre flame baiting which is a clear violation of HN policy. @dang
You probably need to take a class on improving your poor reasoning skills and as another poster said: seek mental health care.
Are you a doctor or something? You’re not this posters friend nor in a social position where it’s appropriate to insist on their health status. (Pointing this out because you might simply not know you’re crossing a line.)
Yes, you asked a question, and then insisted further because the answer isn’t good enough for you. You’re not this persons friend, you’re not this persons doctor and you haven’t claimed any medical experience. You’re being a weirdo. Let it go, dude.
Nothing the OP said made it seem like they were fine pooping in the street. If anything it’s pretty clear they don’t think it’s acceptable. They just don’t think it’s a medical issue. You’re insisting that it is, but you’re not their friend and you’re not a doctor and you don’t have medical training in identifying what is normal and abnormal bowel behavior. That’s being a weirdo because you’re crossing a social line here. Even if you personally think it is, you’re not in a social position where your insistence isn’t incredibly rude.
Several people are telling you to chill out/back off not because it’s acceptable to shit on the street, but because it’s not acceptable to insist on the health status of someone without first establishing either rapport or appropriate relevant knowledge that justifies breaking a social boundary. You have no justification, so your suggest was a little nosey, and your insistence is flagrantly rude.
Your opinions have been voted down so many times this thread is filled with your dead comments and not a single person has vouched for you other than me. I can no longer vouch for you.
Also youre flame baiting which is a clear violation of HN policy. @dang
You probably need to take a class on improving your poor reasoning skills and as another poster said: seek mental health care.
>Coffee affects me strongly. What can I say. I get a cleanse every morning for 3 bucks. Cleansing your digestive tract is actually really good for you. People pay big bucks for cleanses.
sounds like OP
1. knows that he gets uncontrollable diarrhea from coffee.
If you have irritable bowel syndrome, it's basically hard to treat, very common, and solved by a simple thing: availability of public restrooms.
It's not a shame to feel the sudden urge to take a shit. What's a shame is blaming people for feeling the urge.
> There is no world in which a healthy person must shit on the street.
Healthy people are not the only ones a city must be designed for. From Wikipedia: "About 10–15% of people in the developed world are believed to be affected by IBS."
And note IBS is not the only reason to feel the sudden urge to take a dump.
If actual an scientific white paper from PubMed with research and data does not convince you that coffee has a strong laxative effect on around 30% of people, then there's not much else to say.
There's still people who believe the world is flat despite all evidence to the contrary.
It's very difficult to have a discussion with someone who prefers their own opinions over science.
Your opinions have been voted down so many times this thread is filled with your dead comments and not a single person has vouched for you other than me. I can no longer vouch for you.
Also youre flame baiting which is a clear violation of HN policy @dang.
You probably need to take a class on improving your poor reasoning skills and as another poster said: seek mental health care.
Exactly. You can get a venti coffee at Starbucks and get a refill for 52 cents and if you're not from San Francisco, you don't realize how brutal the public toilet situation is until its too late.
Not sure about the corollary as long flights always have restrooms and the time to use them. But maybe you are just uncomfortable on airplane toilets which is fine.
You just say whatever you think with no supporting evidence.
Viewing ones unsupported opinions as more accurate than science (especially in a medical context) is considered delusional thinking by the psychiatric community and it's definitely indicative for a referral to a psychiatrist.
.Your opinions have been voted down so many times this thread is filled with your dead comments and not a single person has vouched for you other than me. I can no longer vouch for you.
Also youre flame baiting which is a clear violation of HN policy. @dang
You probably need to take a class on improving your poor reasoning skills and as another poster said: seek mental health care.
Your opinions have been voted down so many times this thread is filled with your dead comments and not a single person has vouched for you other than me. I can no longer vouch for you.
Also youre flame baiting which is a clear violation of HN policy. @dang
You probably need to take a class on improving your poor reasoning skills and as another poster said: seek mental health care.
Your opinions have been voted down so many times this thread is filled with your dead comments and not a single person has vouched for you other than me. I can no longer vouch for you.
Also youre flame baiting which is a clear violation of HN policy. @dang
You probably need to take a class on improving your poor reasoning skills and as another poster said: seek mental health care.
You and OP appear to agree there is a significant problem, you just disagree where the "blame" lies.
OP suggests the built environment is insufficient. You baselessly assume OP must have a serious medical issue as, apparently, you can't imagine that the built environment is really the appropriate villain to finger in this case.
Before anyone jumps up to accuse me of nefarious intent and of being secretly on the side of "America's built environment could stand to be improved" I'll just openly admit that's exactly where I stand and save you a bit of furious typing.
Whether the GP has a medical issue or not, people with bowel-control problems still deserve to be able to travel the city. There just need to be restrooms available for them. There's no simple cure, so their doctor won't be able to solve that problem for them.
Your opinions have been voted down so many times this thread is filled with your dead comments and not a single person has vouched for you other than me. I can no longer vouch for you.
Also youre flame baiting which is a clear violation of HN policy. @dang
You probably need to take a class on improving your poor reasoning skills and as another poster said: seek mental health care.
Was there a possibility of finding a cafe or Macdonalds and just buying a coffee or something so you could use their restrooms? (as you said you were making 6+ figures) I mean I imagine that would be preferable to pooping on the street. But I don't know San Francisco, was there a reason why that wasn't possible e.g. no cafes open or something?
Starbucks the world over. If they might give you any trouble, stare vaguely at the menu on the way in. One can always change their mind to not order something on the way out.
Starbucks has restroom codes in large cities with homeless populations. They won't give out unless you buy something.
One of the Boulder Colorado Starbucks has a biohazard needle disposal box. Either that's for people with diabetes or there a high population of IV drug users.
Los Angeles was rough for public restrooms I remember when I was there!
I do remember if you were on the west side the Santa Monica boardwalk and the beaches all having public restrooms which was a lifesaver numerous times for me!
But that was around 2015ish not sure how it is now.
Europe solved this problem ages ago with pay toilets and regular police patrol. Some even clean themselves which has an added benefit of dissuading long term residents. The problem has been solved but city's avoid this because NIMBY's will say it incentives drugs, sex, homelessness, etc.
Citizens do not trust that the government will maintain and police them properly, and I think the homeless and sanitary situation in San Francisco is a perfect example.
The problem is that some people do not want pay toilets. They want free public toilets and would call Europe backward/racist/whatever for making people pay for toilets.
Because they don't care, can't be bothered to wait for one, and any ones with personnel are probably not going to admit them because they will make a big mess.
If a person were begging outside of a toilet I'm sure someone would help them out until it becomes a regular hustle like people outside of grocery stores is.
Someone who needs to pee is going to pee, whether they have a dollar to spare or not; I'd rather they are able to pee in a restroom rather than on the grass, sidewalk, or someone's doorway. It is cheaper and healthier for society as a whole if people do their business in restrooms, which is basically the reason why we've converged on a society where toilets exist in the first place, rather than fleets of trucks circling around and washing the streets constantly.
Even if you want to pay, it is hard to find toilets that are clean and do not have a big line. It is a horrible situation, especially when visiting with young children.
I won't assume what people would call "Europe" which is a big place. However, it's certainly true that pay toilets are not a thing in the US in general and certainly not in train stations, restaurants, etc. as you at least sometimes see in other countries.
It's probably complicated at this point in that I assume most people in the US don't carry change today and tap to pay small amounts is fairly nascent.
Citizens do not trust that the government will maintain and police them properly
This is the problem not NIMBYs, It is the correct assessment that the bathrooms will not be policed or maintained. If they were policed and maintained, no one would even notice them.
The toilet situation in Europe is pretty bad from the few places I've been: France, Italy, Greece, Spain, UK.
You can't find clean, free toilets and there is a line to use many of the toilets all the time. Most toilets do not have disposable seat covers, some don't even have toilet seats, some don't have toilet paper, etc. It is a sad state of affairs and makes me miss the much better (though still lacking) situation in the US.
Perhaps it is area dependent in UK. When I lived in the North I think access to toilets was a lot worse than down South. We went visiting to many tourist places like the east coast, Yorkshire moors, various historic places. All these trips had to be planned carefully as usually there were no toilets available. Even in food places in such tourist areas. The only place one could always find a toilet at were petrol stations. Another thing is toilet availability for people going for a night out.
In contrast when I lived in London I always felt access to public toilets was pretty good. There were lots of places like McDonald's, Starbucks etc that always let the public use their toilets for free. Then there are free toilets on many large rail stations past the barriers as well as paid toilets before the barriers. Finally there are free standing paid toilets dotted around the city. Back then one had to put a coin to open them.
Personally I think London is one of the better European cities in this regard.
Public toilets in France are frankly horribly maintained and smelly (wtf is wrong with ventilation there?) that San Francisco is a toilet paradise in comparaison.
Shameless plug: I developed a site to help with this in my city Winnipeg called Winnipee.
It went viral last summer and had a flurry of activity with community contributions (locations, updates). Winter came, traffic levelled off, and it didn't spike again this summer (though it has remained stable).
I tried to track whether it was OK to use the washroom without a purchase, wheelchair accessibility, size. When I worked at McDonald's, an executive told me they wanted their customers to know there was always a bathroom they could use anywhere in the world even if they weren't making a purchase this visit.
AFAIK, Starbucks had a similar policy for a long time.
It was interesting to see how some locations featured immediately locked down their washrooms.
I had a Tim Hortons franchise owner email me and freak out, so we marked her location as "purchase required."
It's been pretty brutal here with the meth crisis, though, so I also get it.
At the end of the day, I would love for our governments to provide taxpayer funded facilities around the city and even on several of our major highways. We used to have a lot here but they closed almost all of them.
McDonalds in the US 1000% does not have bathrooms available to non-customers. Was that a long time ago, or is that actually the policy in Canada today?
I can't speak to in US cities (where indeed restaurants tend to police non-customer restroom use more regularly) but I've never had an issue with using a McDonald's restroom when I've been driving someplace in the US.
Same experience here. Just got back from a six-day driving trip where my wife and I used McDonalds restrooms without issue multiple times. Some of them were even quite nice, as such things go. But I've also found myself in dire straits in cities, with nothing truly public and the McDonalds/Starbucks all locked down. The most dangerous place I've been in the last several years was an MBTA restroom (I was desperate). So much for "walkable cities" I guess, but good luck finding a proponent who will engage with that aspect.
You're not really that far from either Faneuil Hall/Quincy Market or North Station there. Can't speak to how easy it is to find one in any of the local hotels. Of course, in the latter case it helps to look the part and not look too clueless.
> Of course, in the latter case it helps to look the part and not look too clueless.
This is not just applicable to using the restroom as a non-paying customer. You can pretty much go anywhere if you just don't look guilty of doing something your not meant to be doing. They also say carrying a clipboard and looking in a hurry increases your "getting away" with it, whatever "it" may be.
It would be really weird for McD's to require a purchase, at least for our use case. We often stop at McD's on a road trip (we have kids), and the first order of business is always the bio break, wash up, and then order food. It would be irritating to have to reverse that process and then leave our food to get cold while we sought relief.
It must vary a lot by location even in the US. When I used to bother asking, it was almost universally customer-only in urban and many suburban areas… and almost always got me strange looks for even bothering to ask in more remote areas (where they are often clustered next to a couple gas stations along a freeway exit).
I've never used a McDonald's bathroom where I was required to make a purchase. Sometimes the bathrooms are located around the corner from the counter, near a door, in such a fashion that the employees can't generally tell if someone comes in, uses the bathroom, and leaves. I suspect it varies based on location.
I've only ever seen a McDonald's bathroom that requires a purchase in NYC around 15 years ago. I doubt that's changed in the years since unless the city made customers only bathrooms illegal.
I went to a McDonald's in Seattle's SoDo in 2021 that had a bouncer at the door, and the bathroom had super annoying blue-lighting. It certainly looked like ordering before using the bathroom was the right thing to do.
90-95% of McDonalds are franchised, so the lofty ideals of a McDonalds executive are entirely detached from what restaurants actually do. I doubt they are sending secret shoppers just to check the bathroom availability.
I use McDonalds bathrooms in a pinch quite often. I don't ask or anything, I walk in, it's there, nobody cares. However, it depends very much on location, and I do this only in suburban areas. if you go into Manhattan, bathrooms that are easy to spot are very much locked down, if there is even one at all, so you have to try to find less obvious bathrooms that don't attract a lot of attention from street traffic.
Same in Spain. There's an access code printed on the receipts. At least in the ones in tourist areas. Though you can wait till someone comes out or ask another customer.
In some areas of Spain, restaurants and bars that occupy the public space with terraces are obliged by law to provide bathrooms to anyone asking if I recall correctly
I believe this. When I go downtown, the restrictions on facilities go up dramatically. Out in the 'burbs where we live, it's far more relaxed. But we don't have homeless people here (to speak of; we do, but it's on the order of a dozen for a city of 40K).
Even the ones where they lock the bathroom you don’t need to make a purchase. I just ask the worker to buzz me in and they let me. Its not making or breaking their paycheck to police the bathroom so they generally don’t care if you look like you won’t cause a mess in there.
I’ve been up and down this country and outside of the pandemic one certainty had been that if I need to piss and I see a McDonald’s I know I’m covered. This changed during the pandemic since many of their lobbies were closed. But in the last year I haven’t seen a McDonald’s that you couldn’t walk into and use the facilities. Now they’re not always the cleanest bathrooms, but they’ve always been there.
People talk a lot of shit about McDonald’s but there’s a lot to be said for a rock solid never changing option anywhere in the country.
This was when our reliance on McD's became much more obvious. During the pandemic they closed outright for a while, and then opened just the drive-thru, and it was months before they were fully open inside with bathrooms again. It made road tripping with the kids a bit more exciting. Fortunately one of my kids can pee on the side of the road easy enough in a pinch.
This may be regional, or a franchise vs corporate thing, but in the PNW I have never been to a McD's that had a purchase requirement to use the restrooms. But we very rarely go to an urban McD's, so that may be part of it.
A few years ago I visited three different McDonalds in Washington DC. All three were newly renovated in downtown.
All three restrooms were unlocked and disgusting. After notifying the staff I figured out some homeless would vent their rage by literally smearing their feces on the walls. When the staff clean it up, they would do it again.
The McDonalds in downtown Dallas, at least for a time, played classical music outside as well as inside. The theory was that the homeless wouldn't hang around as much. This was back in the 80s when my mom worked downtown, and it was common water cooler conversation. I'm sure as a manager, you're pretty much willing to try anything to avoid the situation you've described. Making it even harder, the location is one block away from the central Greyhound bus station.
That’s seriously disgusting. But even without mental illness, you still have people that seem like they don’t know bathroom etiquette. I worked at a retailer during college that had a public bathroom, seemingly normal people still did the most disgusting messes in the toilets that I was left to clean.
When I was a teenager, I worked as a janitor at McDonalds as my after-school job, and I cleaned the bathrooms. I walked the lobby all the time and could see who was going in and out, and I can assure you (at least back then) there is no correlation between socio-economic class and bathroom etiquette, or mental illness and bathroom etiquette. We had a feces-smearer who was a middle aged lady visiting the restaurant with her normal-looking middle class family. One other fun fact: The men's room was pretty uniformly (but medium) disgusting, but the women's room was where the variance was. I saw foulness in the women's restroom that haunts me to this day.
I did not make the story up. I talked to the workers at all three restaurants. They hemmed and hawed because there were families eating in the facility and didn't want to gross people out.
> I've lived and spent my time in major cities most of my life. I've used many public urban bathrooms. Like many things in cities, they are used much more heavily and often are less clean. Some have been disgusting in places, but I've never seen what you imagine.
I'm not op. I've been in public restrooms smeared with faeces.
“There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
This is one of the most out of touch aggressive replies I've ever seen
As someone who worked in food service in a major city, we 100% had a homeless person who came in and destroyed the bathroom multiple times. Everyone who worked there knew him and felt bad for the guy, but we had to ask him to leave when we saw him come in because he would do things like what the other commenter described.
> Some have been disgusting in places, but I've never seen what you imagine.
Because someone cleaned it up before you saw it? I worked at Seattle’s 3rd and Pine McDonald’s back in the mid 90s (if you live in Seattle, you know the place). We had lots of unhoused neighbors coming in doing really horrible things to our bathrooms. When someone reportedly all we could do was put our bathroom out of order until someone (like me) could clean it up.
Unmonitored public bathrooms simply don’t exist in downtown Seattle because they can’t be maintained without someone to constantly clean them and lock them up if things get too bad.
Lots of other crazy things happened at that place. Seriously, anyone who doesn’t understand homelessness should try working at a fast food restaurant in the downtown of a big city. But it never got boring there, and the coworkers (mostly Filipino) were all cool to work with.
It’s easy to say that those things never happen from the suburbs or uptowns where they never happen. But downtown or in grungier parts of the city, you just know they happen and are actually common.
Again, maybe we can do better than attribute a difference of opinion or experience to the other person being ignorant. As I've said three times now, I'm not writing from the suburbs or 'uptown' (not what you think it is in many cities!); I've been in the areas you name daily for many years. (Have you?)
IME it's the reverse: if you aren't from those areas, it's easier to believe the negative hype. The people most terrified of cities don't live in them - the less contact they have, the more they believe these things. A very recent survey showed how Republicans, who are rare among urban residents, have by far the most concerns about cities. It was the NYC suburbs that voted Republican because of concern about crime - in the city where they don't live (and where people voted Democratic). It's easier to believe these crazy stories if you aren't there, about the 'other'.
Now I'm in cities that are, in places absurdly safe. Downtowns filled with people who are going about their days, not a care in the world. Yet I hear suburbanties say they are afraid to come downtown. It's laughable. And then I turn on cable TV or HN and read how dangerous it is, how crazy homeless people are - places I am and people I talk to daily.
It's like standing in the sunshine and hearing people insist that it's raining here. It's that absurd. I don't doubt others have different personal experiences, and I'm glad to read about them - the speculative, uninformed BS, not so much.
Wouldn't the burden of proof lie with whomever is making the claim of bias? And it would be easily countered with surveillance footage showing just one white male homeless guy getting turned away.
> At the end of the day, I would love for our governments to provide taxpayer funded facilities around the city and even on several of our major highways. We used to have a lot here but they closed almost all of them.
You are almost there. Now we should ask why this happened:
> but they closed almost all of them
There is no civic sense in large swathes of the population. Strict enforcement of basic rules will help us a lot here.
This is baselessly asserted: rich people consistently receive gentler treatment at the hands of the police for similar crimes[1]. Black Americans get dinged for this twice: not only are they poorer on average than Whites, but are also disproportionately likely to be brutalized or killed by law enforcement[2]. When Black people do die in custody, their deaths are more likely to be characterized with pseudomedical terms like “excited delirium[3].”
Per interaction they are more likely to experience violence per police office but per interaction black Americans are all about equally likely to die to law enforcement as the average.
yes. We truly must crack down on these crimes that so disrupt a safe and orderly society. That said, maybe we're being slightly hasty with bringing in the criminal justice system to deal with this injustice. I think we as a society underestimate the importance of our social safety nets in the crimes of the homeless.
When you stop and think about the bigger picture, clearly it's the food banks that are responsible. By letting the homeless scum of the earth get food twice a week, we give them the feces that will just be maliciously defecated upon streets and in our businesses. Clearly we should be closing them down to preserve a nice to live in society.
> When you stop and think about the bigger picture, clearly it's the food banks that are responsible. By letting the homeless scum of the earth get food twice a week, we give them the feces that will just be maliciously defecated upon streets and in our businesses. Clearly we should be closing them down to preserve a nice to live in society.
So are you opening up your home for a total stranger to relief themselves? Why not? You seem much kinder than us folks.
If enough people living in cities with this issue open up their homes to strangers in need, we won't have this issue in the first place.
I will be waiting for the eventual proof that you do so.
I disagree. Rich white people have "a long life ahead of them" which it would be a shame to ruin for "20 minutes of action", so they would be let off without charges or without jail time, while the poor would be sentenced to the maximum penalty allowed by the law.
FFS, if you have an open air drug market, it doesn't really matter if there are public restrooms. This is one major reason why BART boarded up their restrooms in downtown SF.
"This is one major reason why BART boarded up their restrooms in downtown SF."
We live in a society where we can't have public restrooms and progressives (including virtually half the commenters here!) think that we're being too mean to vagrants. Just incredible.
Why are Tokyo and Singapore nice cities? What would they do if someone was shooting up in the streets in front of children?
Remind me again - when is the last time progressives shut down the federal government? Conservatives threaten to do so every year and have succeeded many times in the last 15 years.
The federal government has very little to do with the quality of the day to day life of middle class people. Police, education, etc., are all state and local issues. If you get beat up by criminals in front of your kids, that’s the fault of the local government to enforce basic order in society: https://www.indiatoday.in/world/story/shivanthi-sathanandan-...
Your reply is a complete and utter non-sequitur. Conservatives are not why homeless drug addicts are given free reign to camp out and harass every day, hard working tax payers in San Francisco. That's entirely due to a single veto point (a progressive judge who doesn't even live in the city), despite there finally being some local government push against such activities.
Then you would know the federal government has zero to do with things like public restrooms. It is like local govts which are almost all progressive in high density cities where restrooms are an issue.
There is no way to get half of America to wear a 1-ply cotton cloth for their countrymen during a pandemic, and much of the other half is too fucking stupid to pull that cloth up over their noses even after two years of practice. I think the idea of pleasant bathrooms is a lost cause.
I don’t think the data supports this assertion. I think the perception that this is true is likely due to news click bait designed to generate revenue based on fostering outrage. Here is an excerpt from USC public health article.
Overall, since late March 2020, between 80% and 90% of U.S. adults consistently have viewed wearing a mask or face covering as an effective way to stay safe from the coronavirus, according to the Understanding Coronavirus in America Tracking Survey, an ongoing nationally representative internet-based panel survey of more than 6,000 people aged 18 and older (see Data Source).
Similarly, about 90% reported wearing a mask in the previous seven days to keep safe from the virus, although there are significant differences by locale, age, gender, race, income, education, and other sociodemographic factors. Generally, people who live in rural areas, are younger, are male, are white, have lower incomes, and have less education are less likely to report wearing masks, the survey found (Figure 1).
Those "1-ply cotton cloths" do little more than prevent police from IDing ANTIFA protesters burning, robbing and generally raise hell in, e.g., Portland, Oregon (even though police will likely never do anything about it).
Clean restrooms are something we can do - it only requires will, acceptance, skill and persistence: the will to maintain certain hygeine standards, the acceptance that some tasks are unpleasant yet worthwhile, the cleaning skill (most young'uns don't know how to properly sweep a floor, much less swing a mop) and the persistence to, well, persist!
> There is no civic sense in large swathes of the population. Strict enforcement of basic rules will help us a lot here.
It won't solve the problem, and that is a ton of mentally ill people with barely to no access to adequate treatment. Locking them up in jails may help for a few days or weeks but is horribly expensive to taxpayers while still not solving the problem (or make it even worse, given how conditions behind bars tend to be).
But it would be funny to find that review written about the worst toilet in Scotland. Like rick rolling yelpers, and think about it happening to yelpers, I'm here for it
If you don't already, you should strongly consider improving the data on Open Street Map. Many apps use that data. I frequently use OsmAnd to find public bathrooms.
> AFAIK, Starbucks had a similar policy for a long time.
>It was interesting to see how some locations featured immediately locked down their washrooms.
If you can just walk in (no passcode or any) then it is open to me as far as Im concerned.
The staff doesnt give a shit. The only point at which theyd care is if you’re exploiting it or causing problems. If you just walk in off the street, do your business, and leave then no one has a problem.
Thanks for bringing this oversight to my attention and for your patience while it is fixed. I threw a couple of attributes on the site before I left for work an hour ago and will make sure the attribute meets the requirements once I get home this evening.
Have you considered merging efforts with Where Is Public Toilet? Service has existed for many years and seems to have a decent amount of locations in Winnipeg
A local park has the bathrooms in the rec center that has separate hours from the rest of the park. So by 5pm when everyone gets off work to play pickup basketball on the courts the only place to piss is this discrete bush that absolutely reeks as a result.
It wasn't long ago that the enlightened people writing news stories were informing us that public toilets encouraged homelessness and crime. Business that allowed the public to use their toilets were "gently encouraged" not to do so anymore.
Perhaps we could go back and see who wanted to make public toilets unavailable, and make sure they're not still influencing public policy?
In the UK we mostly get that excuse from the councils/government because they want to cut costs, and I think people just parrot that excuse.
Nobody seems to take 2 seconds to even ask how much vandalism existed only because there were no attendants (because they were fired) and therefore there was no surveillance.
All the good public toilets I’ve seen have constant cleaning during the day with a strong staff presence. Funny that!
As if the only thing stopping me from trying homelessness as a lifestyle is the lack of public restrooms. "No restrooms? Damn! Guess I'll have to sleep at home then."
A show called 'How to With John Wilson' did an episode on exactly this topic recently, and as a non-American it was truly bizarre to see what the situation is like in New York. Not sure how embellished it was, but I was shocked.
As someone who lives in New York and has seen the episode you’re referring to, it is not embellished at all. New York might be the hardest city to find a public restroom that I have ever been in. Sometimes buying something isn’t even sufficient grounds for using a bathroom - a business might only have an “Employees Only” bathroom in the back.
Public restrooms are hard to find in America but even harder in most other countries.
Yes this is a problem we should solve but it's kind of ridiculous to imply it's an issue only in America. In the vast majority of countries on earth, you must either pay or purchase something to use the restroom.
"Spend a penny" is a common euphemism in the UK for using a toilet precisely because that used to be a typical fee on a public one; well before my day though (and I'm middle-aged).
Free public ones do exist but they're not common (and the ones with a charge are a lot more than a penny).
The rounded ones in GP's link are free to use, yes.
There are some public restrooms which aren't, mainly around tourist areas, but there's usually a sign and an attendant. The ones in GP's post are fully automated.
Pay toilets used to be common in the US, they were banned in many US states after lawsuits alleging sexism and lobbying by the "Committee to End Pay Toilets in America", not making this up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_to_End_Pay_Toilets_i...
When I was a kid, pay toilets used to cost 10 cents. My mom would put one dime in and have my sisters and me hold the door so she wouldn't have to pay again.
It won’t be for everyone but there’s a show on HBO called “How To With John Wilson” where he picks a theme for the week and deep dives down multiple threads around the chosen topic.
A few weeks ago he did one called “How to find a public restroom” and it was shocking to me how unavailable such a necessity is in even major cities with high population density. I get that in general public restrooms end up in disarray but I also think that represents more that we just aren’t willing to fund the required maintenance to keep them in better shape.
Side note: the funniest part from the episode was when he tricked one of the self cleaning bathrooms in New York to run a cleaning cycle while he was inside filming, was hilarious.
>in even major cities with high population density
I'd say that was typically where the issue is. I wouldn't expect to find a bathroom in the middle of random forest of course but pretty much anywhere in suburbia/exurbia has grocery stores, Walmarts, McDonalds, gas stations, with restrooms you can use. Worst case, make a small purchase.
In that case it would be really hard to believe a worker would hold you up. Ask for the code and they will give it to you if they need it. No one is so rigid about these things especially when you are a shift worker paid minimum wage.
When your kid is actively pooping their pants, the last thing you want to do is waste time asking for the code, but yes, most people are pretty understanding.
We had one accident like this when our twins were 3 and immediately bought a portable potty. It uses heavy plastic bags, which sucks, but I'm not going through that again. It goes everywhere with us.
Yeah we have one too, which is great when you're near the car... We don't usually carry it with us though. I suppose we could, never really considered it.
I've had a Zojirushi travel bidet for years and years now. Battery operated. The thing is a champ. I keep it in the downstairs bathroom (both upstairs bathrooms have bidets installed) but take it with us if we travel anywhere by car.
I'll double check when I'm home a little later. You may be right, but I could swear it's a Zojirushi. I bought it in Tokyo on a trip to Japan almost a decade ago.
They’re both top notch Japanese brands that make high quality household goods, that’s why I thought you might have confused the two in the first place.
I was actually hoping to be wrong and there was some Zojirushi bidet I had never seen before.
Oh, I’m so glad you brought up “How to with John Wilson”. I didn’t know there were new episodes and now I’ve got to watch these! I was floored by the first season, especially ending on Covid, so my hopes are high!
So sad that John Wilson is over now. One of the weirdest best shows ever. The S1 E2 episode How to put up scaffolding about all the scaffolding in NYC was one of my favorites. Never has a show loved and showcased a city so authentically, except maybe the Wire with Baltimore.
If you’ve watched the final episode (absolutely riveting in typical Wilson fashion) the conversation with “Mike” is just shocking. But in some ways it makes sense the show had to end. Similar to the Ali G show back in the day, once you achieve some fame, ironically strangers will know who you are and be less likely to tell their true stories and opinions. And at that point the show would be dead anyway.
I feel like restrooms are much easier to find in America than anywhere else. Restaurants and hotels usually offer them for free. It’s weird to have to pay for them in Europe
In most of the US, my experience has been that every gas station and every restaurant has a public restroom that's unlocked at all times. They're sometimes nasty, but always available, and even the ones that are nominally for customers only aren't regulated at all.
There are some places I've been that keep the restroom locked, but where I've been that's a sign that you're in a particularly sketchy neighborhood, not a regular thing. The first time I had a major problem finding a restroom at all was driving through Las Vegas a few years ago. I've only become aware that there are other places like that through articles like this on HN.
Right, I guess maybe high crime areas have this problem? I drove from Kansas to South Florida last year and there were public restrooms literally everywhere we stopped.
I’m pretty sure that homeless folks are the main reason some areas (generally urban) have few public restrooms. If someone decides they’d rather hang out or sleep in your restroom than on the street, the headache associated with offering a public restroom rises dramatically.
In the Southwest, I would say 95% of the places I visit have plenty of public restrooms if you count businesses that have unlocked bathrooms. Fast food, coffee shops, grocery stores, gas stations, restaurants… nearly every public business.
When my wife and I visited Scotland, we were flabbergasted at how difficult it could be to find a restroom when we were driving the countryside. Even when we would find signs of civilization, it was hard to find open businesses with restrooms.
It's all about homelessness and drugs. If an area has issues with homelessness and drugs, public restrooms are very rare; if they do exist, they are often out of order.
This is really only a problem in densely urban areas and even then not across all of them. To say public restrooms are hard to find in America is I think a mischaracterization. It would be more fair to say public restrooms are hard to find in American cities, but then Id wager all urban areas around the globe have struggled with this problem in one way or another.
Anecdotally, in my hometown in Florida I’ve never had an issue finding a bathroom, not even in larger cities like Orlando and Tampa. But my experience finding bathrooms in Seattle, Washington was quite horrendous.
It's a problem in some cities, but not in most of the country. Stories like this are weird to me because it feels like the author has never gone out into the majority of the US.
The author probably hasn't been to London or continental Europe.
Good luck finding a trash receptacle in Victoria station. (Yes, the historical reasons.) Meanwhile, the US has millions of potential shrapnel trash cans everywhere. After some psycho terrorists goes after them, then it would change. A hoop with a clear bag is far safer for everyone.
How about we put the few human-animals back in their cages, so the rest of us can live in a civilization that doesn't need to have clear bags full of trash on display.
California effectively outlawed mental health care for paranoid schizophrenics back in the 1980’s. (You can’t even get future-you committed in the event of a psychotic break)
Public, no, but in general every Walmart / Starbucks / ... (except Subway) have a restroom available.
Try finding a place in Belgium... if you find one, you have to pay, even if you area already a paying customer (e.g. Kinepolis, a large theater chain) or when you're in a park there's a restroom with a friggin' card reader to charge you half a Euro to take a piss. I found a tree close-by.
And grocery chains aren't even legally required to have a restroom available to customers.
Having just gone through Belgium and the Netherlands, it’s a huge relief to know that public restrooms are definitely around if you’re willing to part with some change.
Probably most of EU, too. And the extra coins it takes means it is at least moderately clean. But just in case, always good to carry a few Euro coins around for the attendants.
The card readers are all over the UK's largest parks, too.
(A nasty issue I encountered in Iceland was that my debit card did not support Icelandic vendors, and as a result, could not be used to purchase anything which the strip reader. I jumped many turnstiles, sorry Iceland...)
Definitely not true in most of the Netherlands. Once you leave the touristy city centres you are down to very limited or no options. It's even worse for women because most urinals in the city centre of Amsterdam are for men only.
Thankfully there are "adapters". Essentially just suitably shaped funnels, and thankfully there are materials that shed the droplets so one won't need to clean much before stowing.
Agreed. I’ve never once not been able to easily find a restroom in the US. Europe is much worse, where you often have to buy toilet paper or something silly to keep people from using the restroom.
I've personally never had trouble going to a restaurant or other place with restrooms for customers, but I'm sure things are very different in places known for people who are homeless, drug-addicted, mentally ill, or criminals.
If people use few consumables and keep the restroom clean, it's probably more likely to remain open to the public. But I'd imagine the staff doesn't want to clean up a biohazard or deal with dirty needles.
If I own a business with a bathroom it costs me every time someone uses the bathroom. Bathroom use is never free, someone is paying for maintenance and consumables.
Okay it'll cost a lot more if someone pisses on your floor or the outside wall which will happen after a certain amount of severe poverty strikes. Just look at India where people shit in the street.
I was a bit shocked when in some Canada's Horton's there was a disposable needle trash for the junkies, so I get why WiFi might be free for all but restrooms not so much
Pretty much the only times I'll go into a Tim Hortons is when taking a break on a long drive. There's a lot of highway out there where Timmy Ho's will be your only option, especially at night, so it's not surprising to see the drop boxes. Proper rest stops have them too.
It's literally that, a FAR more expensive permanent structure, or shit and piss on the streets. End of list. If you've ever lived in a Western US city I think you'd be really, really inclined towards option #1.
539 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 375 ms ] threadDo you believe medicine has the answer for every chronic condition? Doctors are often unable to help you.
Nothing that starts with the claim "100%" is ever true, you can be 100% certain of that.
Seriously though, you speak as if your digestive system has never betrayed you, and therefore you're unfamiliar with these matters.
Trust me: there are some things your doctor cannot help you with, at least, not to the point you can walk in a city without public restrooms. Some things are not even medical conditions -- and IBS is "idiopathic" in many cases, meaning doctors don't have a clue -- and some conditions that you would consider anomalous actually fall within the normal human spectrum.
You'll feel the urge to contradict me: don't. You probably don't know about this, but both me and the other commenter you're arguing with do. Realize that your experience is not everybody else's.
Having regular bowel movements is actually a really healthy thing.
It's only really a problem when there's no public restrooms available.
It's very difficult to have a discussion with someone who prefers their own opinions over science.
You probably need to take a class on improving your poor reasoning skills and as another poster said: seek mental health care.
Several people are telling you to chill out/back off not because it’s acceptable to shit on the street, but because it’s not acceptable to insist on the health status of someone without first establishing either rapport or appropriate relevant knowledge that justifies breaking a social boundary. You have no justification, so your suggest was a little nosey, and your insistence is flagrantly rude.
You probably need to take a class on improving your poor reasoning skills and as another poster said: seek mental health care.
>Coffee affects me strongly. What can I say. I get a cleanse every morning for 3 bucks. Cleansing your digestive tract is actually really good for you. People pay big bucks for cleanses.
sounds like OP
1. knows that he gets uncontrollable diarrhea from coffee.
2. enjoys it. why else do it every morning?
It's not a shame to feel the sudden urge to take a shit. What's a shame is blaming people for feeling the urge.
> There is no world in which a healthy person must shit on the street.
Healthy people are not the only ones a city must be designed for. From Wikipedia: "About 10–15% of people in the developed world are believed to be affected by IBS."
And note IBS is not the only reason to feel the sudden urge to take a dump.
It's actually really healthy as it keeps your digestive system and colon cleansed.
It's only an issue if there's no public restrooms.
I hope you learned something today.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2338272/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2...
There's still people who believe the world is flat despite all evidence to the contrary.
It's very difficult to have a discussion with someone who prefers their own opinions over science.
It's not a medical symptom.
It's a symptom of poor access to restrooms.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-ind...
This whole comment chain is just a bunch of dead posts of yours.
I even vouched for you on all of them but numerous people kept flagging them.
You should really look into taking a class on improving reasoning skills.
You probably need to take a class on improving your poor reasoning skills and as another poster said: seek mental health care.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Worth considering why I'm consistently able to gather top 5% of points per day though, if I'm so objectionable.
What's objectionable is not determined by points.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
Coffee almost always makes me "move my bowels" pretty fast. I solve this by making sure I never have coffee unless a restroom is available.
A corollary to this is that long flights are a nightmare to me. I mostly avoid having in-flight meals, if I can.
Although I would imagine New York City might be the same, never been there.
I think it's a very healthy effect to be honest.
It cleanses our digestive system.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2338272/
It's probably still a holdover from when San Francisco wasn't as crowded and had adequate access to public restrooms.
It's not really an issue in most of the country because there's at least adequate public restroom access.
You just say whatever you think with no supporting evidence.
Viewing ones unsupported opinions as more accurate than science (especially in a medical context) is considered delusional thinking by the psychiatric community and it's definitely indicative for a referral to a psychiatrist.
Also youre flame baiting which is a clear violation of HN policy. @dang
You probably need to take a class on improving your poor reasoning skills and as another poster said: seek mental health care.
Because of all your flagged dead posts. It's literally impossible to navigate this thread.
Takes more than one person to flag a post to a dead status also.
Best of luck to you!
Also youre flame baiting which is a clear violation of HN policy. @dang
You probably need to take a class on improving your poor reasoning skills and as another poster said: seek mental health care.
It doesnt matter what we think only what the mods think friend.
you really need to take a class to improve your poor reasoning skills.
You probably need to take a class on improving your poor reasoning skills and as another poster said: seek mental health care.
OP suggests the built environment is insufficient. You baselessly assume OP must have a serious medical issue as, apparently, you can't imagine that the built environment is really the appropriate villain to finger in this case.
Before anyone jumps up to accuse me of nefarious intent and of being secretly on the side of "America's built environment could stand to be improved" I'll just openly admit that's exactly where I stand and save you a bit of furious typing.
You're clearly not educated on this.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-ind...
You might even be posting from inside a mental institution for all I know.
Well good luck to you.
Hope you get the mental health care you need.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If you watch videos on street shifting in India it's clearly not just a necessity or poverty, it's something they actively seek out and prefer
Emergencies are Emergencies, like explosive vomiting or something, but as a rule it should be an extreme exception.
Does not bode well for your future.
Do you also think doctors are a scam?
Also youre flame baiting which is a clear violation of HN policy. @dang
You probably need to take a class on improving your poor reasoning skills and as another poster said: seek mental health care.
One of the Boulder Colorado Starbucks has a biohazard needle disposal box. Either that's for people with diabetes or there a high population of IV drug users.
I do remember if you were on the west side the Santa Monica boardwalk and the beaches all having public restrooms which was a lifesaver numerous times for me!
But that was around 2015ish not sure how it is now.
Id bet probably the same IP addy as the other troll on this thread
Citizens do not trust that the government will maintain and police them properly, and I think the homeless and sanitary situation in San Francisco is a perfect example.
Sanitation is one of the main things we need a government for; failure here is unacceptable.
Would they rather have toilets that cost a dollar to use or no toilets?
It's probably complicated at this point in that I assume most people in the US don't carry change today and tap to pay small amounts is fairly nascent.
This is the problem not NIMBYs, It is the correct assessment that the bathrooms will not be policed or maintained. If they were policed and maintained, no one would even notice them.
In contrast when I lived in London I always felt access to public toilets was pretty good. There were lots of places like McDonald's, Starbucks etc that always let the public use their toilets for free. Then there are free toilets on many large rail stations past the barriers as well as paid toilets before the barriers. Finally there are free standing paid toilets dotted around the city. Back then one had to put a coin to open them.
Personally I think London is one of the better European cities in this regard.
It went viral last summer and had a flurry of activity with community contributions (locations, updates). Winter came, traffic levelled off, and it didn't spike again this summer (though it has remained stable).
I tried to track whether it was OK to use the washroom without a purchase, wheelchair accessibility, size. When I worked at McDonald's, an executive told me they wanted their customers to know there was always a bathroom they could use anywhere in the world even if they weren't making a purchase this visit.
AFAIK, Starbucks had a similar policy for a long time.
It was interesting to see how some locations featured immediately locked down their washrooms.
I had a Tim Hortons franchise owner email me and freak out, so we marked her location as "purchase required."
It's been pretty brutal here with the meth crisis, though, so I also get it.
At the end of the day, I would love for our governments to provide taxpayer funded facilities around the city and even on several of our major highways. We used to have a lot here but they closed almost all of them.
You can check it out: https://www.winnipee.com
This is not just applicable to using the restroom as a non-paying customer. You can pretty much go anywhere if you just don't look guilty of doing something your not meant to be doing. They also say carrying a clipboard and looking in a hurry increases your "getting away" with it, whatever "it" may be.
I haven’t been to a McDonald’s in a large city (like downtown Seattle), so perhaps it’s different there.
But so much of the world exists outside of cities :)
There was a ton of street camping around there.
I saw people come in, use the bathroom, and leave, so I asked the executive what I was supposed to do.
We were a corporate store and usually a test site for new products and procedures.
LOL, yep, I'm officially old!
A counter-balance act
If you’re in an area with homeless restrooms can’t be found.
If you’re not, they’re plentiful and free.
People talk a lot of shit about McDonald’s but there’s a lot to be said for a rock solid never changing option anywhere in the country.
One time I availed myself of a 24 hour porn shop at 3am. The bathroom was spotless.
This was when our reliance on McD's became much more obvious. During the pandemic they closed outright for a while, and then opened just the drive-thru, and it was months before they were fully open inside with bathrooms again. It made road tripping with the kids a bit more exciting. Fortunately one of my kids can pee on the side of the road easy enough in a pinch.
All three restrooms were unlocked and disgusting. After notifying the staff I figured out some homeless would vent their rage by literally smearing their feces on the walls. When the staff clean it up, they would do it again.
I'm not op. I've been in public restrooms smeared with faeces.
“There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
It's not philosophy - I did no philosophizing. I am describing many years of experience.
You should look up the meaning of that quote.
As someone who worked in food service in a major city, we 100% had a homeless person who came in and destroyed the bathroom multiple times. Everyone who worked there knew him and felt bad for the guy, but we had to ask him to leave when we saw him come in because he would do things like what the other commenter described.
Do you see the irony?
Because someone cleaned it up before you saw it? I worked at Seattle’s 3rd and Pine McDonald’s back in the mid 90s (if you live in Seattle, you know the place). We had lots of unhoused neighbors coming in doing really horrible things to our bathrooms. When someone reportedly all we could do was put our bathroom out of order until someone (like me) could clean it up.
Unmonitored public bathrooms simply don’t exist in downtown Seattle because they can’t be maintained without someone to constantly clean them and lock them up if things get too bad.
Lots of other crazy things happened at that place. Seriously, anyone who doesn’t understand homelessness should try working at a fast food restaurant in the downtown of a big city. But it never got boring there, and the coworkers (mostly Filipino) were all cool to work with.
> anyone who doesn’t understand homelessness
Perhaps we just have different experiences, and we both 'don't understand' some things?
IME it's the reverse: if you aren't from those areas, it's easier to believe the negative hype. The people most terrified of cities don't live in them - the less contact they have, the more they believe these things. A very recent survey showed how Republicans, who are rare among urban residents, have by far the most concerns about cities. It was the NYC suburbs that voted Republican because of concern about crime - in the city where they don't live (and where people voted Democratic). It's easier to believe these crazy stories if you aren't there, about the 'other'.
Now I'm in cities that are, in places absurdly safe. Downtowns filled with people who are going about their days, not a care in the world. Yet I hear suburbanties say they are afraid to come downtown. It's laughable. And then I turn on cable TV or HN and read how dangerous it is, how crazy homeless people are - places I am and people I talk to daily.
It's like standing in the sunshine and hearing people insist that it's raining here. It's that absurd. I don't doubt others have different personal experiences, and I'm glad to read about them - the speculative, uninformed BS, not so much.
You are almost there. Now we should ask why this happened:
> but they closed almost all of them
There is no civic sense in large swathes of the population. Strict enforcement of basic rules will help us a lot here.
Strict enforcement of basic rules against a subset of the population while letting off other groups is a major contributor to the lack of civic sense.
[1]: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdf/10.1086/696355
[2]: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2022/12/22/policing_survey...
[3]: https://www.psychiatry.org/File%20Library/About-APA/Organiza...
Hi woodruffw - what group is disproportionaly likely to kill or brutalize law enforcement? What happens when you correct for that?
When you stop and think about the bigger picture, clearly it's the food banks that are responsible. By letting the homeless scum of the earth get food twice a week, we give them the feces that will just be maliciously defecated upon streets and in our businesses. Clearly we should be closing them down to preserve a nice to live in society.
So are you opening up your home for a total stranger to relief themselves? Why not? You seem much kinder than us folks. If enough people living in cities with this issue open up their homes to strangers in need, we won't have this issue in the first place.
I will be waiting for the eventual proof that you do so.
Hyperbole requires hyperbole ;)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People_v._Turner
By basic civic laws, I mean things like not allowing open air drug markets in downtown:
Very recent video
https://v.redd.it/x87v0nws5anb1
FFS, if you have an open air drug market, it doesn't really matter if there are public restrooms. This is one major reason why BART boarded up their restrooms in downtown SF.
We live in a society where we can't have public restrooms and progressives (including virtually half the commenters here!) think that we're being too mean to vagrants. Just incredible.
Why are Tokyo and Singapore nice cities? What would they do if someone was shooting up in the streets in front of children?
Then you would know the federal government has zero to do with things like public restrooms. It is like local govts which are almost all progressive in high density cities where restrooms are an issue.
Overall, since late March 2020, between 80% and 90% of U.S. adults consistently have viewed wearing a mask or face covering as an effective way to stay safe from the coronavirus, according to the Understanding Coronavirus in America Tracking Survey, an ongoing nationally representative internet-based panel survey of more than 6,000 people aged 18 and older (see Data Source).
Similarly, about 90% reported wearing a mask in the previous seven days to keep safe from the virus, although there are significant differences by locale, age, gender, race, income, education, and other sociodemographic factors. Generally, people who live in rural areas, are younger, are male, are white, have lower incomes, and have less education are less likely to report wearing masks, the survey found (Figure 1).
Source article: https://healthpolicy.usc.edu/evidence-base/most-u-s-adults-w...
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/21/opinion/do-mask-mandates-...
Those "1-ply cotton cloths" do little more than prevent police from IDing ANTIFA protesters burning, robbing and generally raise hell in, e.g., Portland, Oregon (even though police will likely never do anything about it).
Clean restrooms are something we can do - it only requires will, acceptance, skill and persistence: the will to maintain certain hygeine standards, the acceptance that some tasks are unpleasant yet worthwhile, the cleaning skill (most young'uns don't know how to properly sweep a floor, much less swing a mop) and the persistence to, well, persist!
But thanks for the pat on the back and FWIW feel free to shit anywhere you want!8-)) [in CA that is]
It won't solve the problem, and that is a ton of mentally ill people with barely to no access to adequate treatment. Locking them up in jails may help for a few days or weeks but is horribly expensive to taxpayers while still not solving the problem (or make it even worse, given how conditions behind bars tend to be).
I'd always assumed an app like this already existed, like Yelp for public restrooms. I never actually looked, though.
Edit: example data query http://overpass-turbo.eu/s/1A2I
>It was interesting to see how some locations featured immediately locked down their washrooms.
If you can just walk in (no passcode or any) then it is open to me as far as Im concerned.
The staff doesnt give a shit. The only point at which theyd care is if you’re exploiting it or causing problems. If you just walk in off the street, do your business, and leave then no one has a problem.
[1]: https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Licence/Attribution_Remi...
Perhaps we could go back and see who wanted to make public toilets unavailable, and make sure they're not still influencing public policy?
Link?
Nobody seems to take 2 seconds to even ask how much vandalism existed only because there were no attendants (because they were fired) and therefore there was no surveillance.
All the good public toilets I’ve seen have constant cleaning during the day with a strong staff presence. Funny that!
As if the only thing stopping me from trying homelessness as a lifestyle is the lack of public restrooms. "No restrooms? Damn! Guess I'll have to sleep at home then."
Yes this is a problem we should solve but it's kind of ridiculous to imply it's an issue only in America. In the vast majority of countries on earth, you must either pay or purchase something to use the restroom.
Free public ones do exist but they're not common (and the ones with a charge are a lot more than a penny).
It was especially annoying at railway stations and shopping centres, both places which usually have free conveniences in the UK.
Literally the worst example. There are +400 automated self-cleaning toilets (accessible to people with disabilities)
https://capgeo.maps.arcgis.com/apps/Media/index.html?appid=5...
https://www.paris.fr/pages/les-sanisettes-2396
There are some public restrooms which aren't, mainly around tourist areas, but there's usually a sign and an attendant. The ones in GP's post are fully automated.
the third graphic in this article refutes this directly.
See also https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/11/ma...
A few weeks ago he did one called “How to find a public restroom” and it was shocking to me how unavailable such a necessity is in even major cities with high population density. I get that in general public restrooms end up in disarray but I also think that represents more that we just aren’t willing to fund the required maintenance to keep them in better shape.
Side note: the funniest part from the episode was when he tricked one of the self cleaning bathrooms in New York to run a cleaning cycle while he was inside filming, was hilarious.
I'd say that was typically where the issue is. I wouldn't expect to find a bathroom in the middle of random forest of course but pretty much anywhere in suburbia/exurbia has grocery stores, Walmarts, McDonalds, gas stations, with restrooms you can use. Worst case, make a small purchase.
Anyone with kids understands this plight well.
Around here there are any number of 24 hour gas stations with easily accessible restrooms with no locks or anything.
I was actually hoping to be wrong and there was some Zojirushi bidet I had never seen before.
It's a 3D printed urinal with a captive lid that attaches to a standard plastic bottle.
Hell even India seemed to have piblic bathrooms within reach when I visited
If you’ve watched the final episode (absolutely riveting in typical Wilson fashion) the conversation with “Mike” is just shocking. But in some ways it makes sense the show had to end. Similar to the Ali G show back in the day, once you achieve some fame, ironically strangers will know who you are and be less likely to tell their true stories and opinions. And at that point the show would be dead anyway.
In most of the US, my experience has been that every gas station and every restaurant has a public restroom that's unlocked at all times. They're sometimes nasty, but always available, and even the ones that are nominally for customers only aren't regulated at all.
There are some places I've been that keep the restroom locked, but where I've been that's a sign that you're in a particularly sketchy neighborhood, not a regular thing. The first time I had a major problem finding a restroom at all was driving through Las Vegas a few years ago. I've only become aware that there are other places like that through articles like this on HN.
In the Southwest, I would say 95% of the places I visit have plenty of public restrooms if you count businesses that have unlocked bathrooms. Fast food, coffee shops, grocery stores, gas stations, restaurants… nearly every public business.
When my wife and I visited Scotland, we were flabbergasted at how difficult it could be to find a restroom when we were driving the countryside. Even when we would find signs of civilization, it was hard to find open businesses with restrooms.
Anecdotally, in my hometown in Florida I’ve never had an issue finding a bathroom, not even in larger cities like Orlando and Tampa. But my experience finding bathrooms in Seattle, Washington was quite horrendous.
When travelling in the US I've just done the same thing I do anywhere. Enter a fast food place, coffee shop etc and ask to use the loo. Job done.
I very rarely use truly public toilets in the UK either.
Well played.
Good luck finding a trash receptacle in Victoria station. (Yes, the historical reasons.) Meanwhile, the US has millions of potential shrapnel trash cans everywhere. After some psycho terrorists goes after them, then it would change. A hoop with a clear bag is far safer for everyone.
They're referring to the IRA.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terrorist_incidents_...
Try finding a place in Belgium... if you find one, you have to pay, even if you area already a paying customer (e.g. Kinepolis, a large theater chain) or when you're in a park there's a restroom with a friggin' card reader to charge you half a Euro to take a piss. I found a tree close-by.
And grocery chains aren't even legally required to have a restroom available to customers.
The card readers are all over the UK's largest parks, too.
(A nasty issue I encountered in Iceland was that my debit card did not support Icelandic vendors, and as a result, could not be used to purchase anything which the strip reader. I jumped many turnstiles, sorry Iceland...)
Which country are you talking about where you have to buy toilet paper?
In the UK I can think of a couple pay toilets at some of the big London train stations but other than that I can't remember seeing one.
Free toilets are everywhere.
If people use few consumables and keep the restroom clean, it's probably more likely to remain open to the public. But I'd imagine the staff doesn't want to clean up a biohazard or deal with dirty needles.
I suspect that many ditches got “irrigated” that year.
You can't last hours without pissing
https://portlandloo.com/
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-10-20/san-fran...