With my iPhone I can do almost anything while traveling: look up maps, pay, take pictures, browse the web. But what I _can't_ do with my iPhone is the most basic thing ...
You are punning, but if a big tech would create a map of publicly available toilets that would be great for many demographics (any man 65+, those with bowel syndroms). It’s the little things that make life easier (or more affordable) that matter the most (in my opinion).
I know there is a debate in the group that needs “fast toilets” whether they should be free. Well that debate is moot when there are near zero options. A coffee brings what €1 of margin? A toilet could cost €1, and still help those in need. I hate paying for dirty toilets (German and Belgian gas stops grmbl, learn from France). But a clean toilet can be a lifesaver.
You want Apple to… start building a public toilet infrastructure? and judging them for not as not caring about their users? Seems a bit extreme of a stance!
Well you did literally reply to someone stating Apple Maps had pretty good restroom coverage, and I think Apple's a pretty good example of a company that listens to their users and solves their problems, being rewarded handsomely for it.
What do you think that given their mission / expertise they're missing out on? It wouldn't good for the world if every company worked on curing cancer, or another similarly impactful achievement for humanity, but it's great that many are. But I think Apple's giving back a lot too.
Personal anecdote: my grandfather passed away in a nursing home unexpectedly with just my mother, an aunt, and I. Yet with Facetime being so accessible to everyday people, at least a dozen members of my family that couldn't have physically made it in time were there with us and he recognized all of them.
It’s super weird for you to come up with that “example” - Apple’s one of the few companies that lag on megapixels and work on improving quality instead of numbers.
Open Street Maps, which Google and Apple happily take information from, seem to have all public toilets indexed. Unfortunately, the map is still almost empty when you try to look for them.
This just makes me think of America and the bizarrely huge gaps between the hinges and gaps at the bottom and top of the cubicles, even in very wealthy contexts, like at big tech companies. WHY? Such a strange example of embedded inertias of design in ostensibly innovative contexts.
I used to practice architecture. In general (1) there are not regulations/laws/codes requiring the practice. The gaps at the floor are to facilitate mopping and reduce the damage from overflow floods.
For first responder access, I have seen a hospital requirement for outswinging doors for one-holers with privacy locks. This allows the door to be opened when a person is collapsed against the door.
(1) “In general” because there are almost certainly niche regulations that require it. For example the construction standards of a state prison bureau, local board of education, etc.
It's simple: they don't want you to slack in the toilets, sitting there scrolling Twitter, in other words they don't want you to poop on your paid work time.
The feeling of being unsafe or exposed is the point.
It is far more important to prevent (through shame and surveillance) any unamerican toilet activities than it is to allow peaceful bowel movements. In the old world there there are floor-to-ceiling cubicle doors and toilet bowls that could barely drown a toddler. I need not explain how this is the first irreversible step towards authoritatian socialist anarchy.
There’s no nefarious reason. It’s because they are prefabricated kits that need to be installed precisely to be gap-free. The installers obviously don’t want to or can’t install them with the correct tolerances.
This is why a little bit of money spent on public order yields 10x - 100x ROI at least.
Safer streets, longer lives, a fair environment for the physically weak, longer-lasting infrastructure, a better business environment, and - more crucially than all of the above - more trust.
Probably the proliferation of opiates and, more likely, methamphetamine. Scientific progress that makes these highly addictive and debilitating substances easy to produce can't be undone.
I live in San Francisco, where it now costs over $100,000 per year to operate a single toilet, because without it being under constant guard, people start living in them.
A more efficient solution is to have a stainless steel bathroom which rinses itself with bleach every 20 minutes unless an emergency call button is activated. If it is occupied past 20 minutes a hydraulic press ejects the contents of the bathroom to the outside.
No offense but I think a lot of tech guys on this site have never dealt with the "other side" of life. The other side being the shitty, disgusting, repulsive aspect of humans that occasionally rises to the surface. The reason un-restricted public bathrooms are "challenged" (to use corporate speak) is because the second you have one available, either a homeless person will camp out in it for hours doing everything you can imagine, or someone will be a total anti-social asshole and take a crap ON THE WALLS. I've seen this occur dozens of times, without fail.
Yeah, it isn't as simple as "le humans are bad and mean mmkay." Like most things that remain unsolved, it is complicated.
Um, yes, kinda. Though in my experience (US/Michigan), "not public" toilets are very often accessible if one has a good subset of the following traits: Very polite, locally-majority-race, clean, appropriately dressed, discrete, elderly, frail, female, alone, heavily pregnant, with an infant or small child, familiar to the employees, not in an urban area.
Old geezer perspective: The withering availability of public toilets is just another symptom of the massive decline in social trust over the past half-century or so. I might suggest that the author talk to people on the "supply side" - especially long-time small business owners - about the expenses and miseries of being on their end of the stick...but the author seems so focused on the rights & well-being of the "user" population that I can't imagine him actually caring about "their sort".
Pretty much. In the US, outside of major tourist areas, my sense is that explicitly public toilets have always been pretty scarce but, if you blend in, you can pretty much always find one at a hotel or a shopping center. No, you won't find them in a more residential area but that's always been the case.
Years ago, when I worked at a hotel, we had to lock down the bathrooms because a specific taxi driver would come and absolutely ruin them. The housekeepers threatened to quit simply because of this 1 person, and we had no reasonably cheap way to stop him, other than removing access to the bathrooms for the public.
Tell him he’s banned from the establishment, and report him to the police for trespassing if he returns? Seems like you took the nuclear option right out of the gates.
That assumes police would respond quickly enough in this locale (they wouldn’t, you have to say someone is in danger for them to come quick), and that the taxi driver would care, since they might be betting (correctly) at worst, the police would ask them to leave the premises.
He was told not to come into the hotel anymore, but he did anyway. Any other solution would have taken too long to implement compared to just changing the locks on the doors and making the housekeepers happy, who you kind of need to operate the business.
And then depending on the person’s race, he sues you for racial discrimination. Or he resists the police when they try to remove him from your premise.
You have then opened yourself up to a bunch of risks.
I can guarantee you this won’t work. The police won’t arrive nearly fast enough and you don’t have a lot of ways to stop him short of hiring a police officer as a guard because private security often aren’t legally allowed touch people.
Some people won’t be deterred by anything short of someone who is able to intimidate or harm them. It’s a no-win situation because allowing employees to hit people with clubs isn’t a good idea. :(
It's not a business of a private business to provide public toilets. Local government must do it, just as they do roads, parks, buses, waste management etc.
I don't know how serious this article is. This is because even in Europe there's a huge disparity between countries and I don't think it can be generalised.
In London, it's socially acceptable to use the toilet of any venue like a pub. In Paris they have high tech public toilets that automatically clean themselves, in Turkey mosques usually operate public toilets for profit alongside with the facilities provided by the government, in Germany they have Sanifair which gives you voucher for your payment and you can use at any participating location to purchase stuff like coffee.
Anecdotal, but I got an uber in London recently (quite near the center) and the driver was complaining the whole trip about the fact that he needed to take a piss, and that there was a severe lack of public toilets.
I have no idea, probably it varies by location. If no paid public toilets are available and dispatch centres with toilets are not a thing they can always strike a deal with local businesses I guess.
Also, they need to eat and the places they eat are probably also the places they use the WC.
In London places won't let you use their bathrooms unless you buy something.
The UK was by far the worst place I have visited for lack of public toilets. They also don't have many/any public fountains, which is insane around kids playgrounds that have no public facilities within walking distance.
I guess that's true in touristy places but in general there's nothing stopping anybody from using the WC, just walk in. Would be nice to buy something but asking politely will do too, I've never been turned down.
In Turkey they really like putting formal structure to that kind of stuff and venues at the high street sometimes have a lock with a password which is printed on the receipt with your purchase. One particular McDonald's was a pioneer in this, as their location was at the most crowded and central place where people used to meet before the proliferation of cellphones.
It's not like they have keycards on the toilets (least not the vast, vast majority). You can just walk in the use them. Wetherspoons reliably have clean bathrooms and there are a lot of them.
They're not required to let you, but I just ask politely if I can use their loo and have never been refused. There has indeed been a steady decline in the number of public toilets, though.
In the US it's because the homeless population in most cities is rising, and they have few places to use the toilet.
Business owners perceive the presence of homeless people as bad for business so they don't want to encourage homeless people to stick around. And they think homeless people will trash their bathrooms or use drugs inside which is dangerous for other customers and brings police presence.
So business owners lock up their bathrooms. Result: Even fewer places for homeless people to use the toilet.
> Business owners perceive the presence of homeless people as bad for business so they don't want to encourage homeless people to stick around. And they think homeless people will trash their bathrooms or use drugs inside which is dangerous for other customers and brings police presence.
These things aren’t just perceptions or thoughts. It’s a real problem that anyone who runs a business in a location with a homeless problem can attest to.
You’re totally right. And it’s important to distinguish between the many forms of homelessness. There’s visible homeless, they are what most people think of. There are also invisible homeless, they don’t “look” homeless. Often you don’t know they are homeless except for carrying around some belongings and brushing their teeth in public places.
Businesses care about the first type because of the associated problems and are completely fine with the later.
I once had to use a bathroom so stopped in a shop, they said customers only, so I bought the cheapest thing they had, a coke. Then, while I was in the bathroom another employee, who didn't see me purchase the drink started banging on the door yelling customers only. I looked like a tourist, this was in London near Hyde park, so maybe a bad area.
Pubs are different, especially the bigger chains. They're generally too busy to police it. Big posh hotels can be good too - ask the lobby for the bar, then ask the bar staff for the toilet if it's not obvious.
That German voucher thing system sux. You cant just buy something cheap with voucher, there is minimum buy attached to it. So, you pay 1e for toilet and if you want to use the voucher, you have to pay 5e minimum - usually in overpriced shop you want nothing from.
The end result is that woods next to stops smell horribly and you have to be super careful where to step. Because, too many people stop there to piss and shit.
Finland is the undisputed champion in this respect (as in many other quality of life respects), never had a problem to find a free nice public toilet there. Norway was the worst, not only the prices were outrageous, but only Norwegian issued card was accepted for payment. Netherlands has an inventive solution for males, but its smells not so nice.
This is one of my biggest frustrations with living in Germany. And btw, so much for "walkable cities". Especially for the elderly who get the need more frequently, but even I ended up in situations where I am an hour away from home and needed to pee badly.
Pretty much every mildly secluded corner in the city smells like piss as a result of this ...
You know for a country who thinks of itself as more socially minded, and not as hardcore capitalist, they do nickle-dime you for everything.
Public latrines are the most basic of public goods.
It might have.
But where I live in Berlin there is exactly one public toilet for the whole district.
And it’s a pissoir only so if you are female or need no.2 you are screwed.
I faced when I visited New York. I had to search Google Maps and it showed a public toilet in Rockefeller Center. I walked a few miles to reach but it was a real pain.
Having just spent the year in Manhattan, my experience was that most (every?) Starbucks there no longer have public bathrooms even with purchase. I was surprised to discover that the only free public bathrooms were at Sweet Green. It changed my perspective of them as a company- it’s a real commitment when the trend is going in the other direction and I want to support them financially as a result.
Yes, I figured out the Starbucks (or any other fast food chain) thing after staying there for a while. It's however really a sad scene where people deny visiting washrooms especially when you need it the most.
Plus it paints a wrong picture of a country because it's technically people asking you a few bucks for a basic necessity and the government has failed.
This is in stark contrast with developed countries like Singapore (where I visit a lot). Singapore makes sure a public toilet is available within a few hundred meters and boy are those clean!
Meanwhile you could probably have dropped into a Starbucks, bought something small, and used their bathroom. There have never been a lot of explicitly public bathrooms in cities like NYC.
No one is pissing themselves over this. They just go somewhere discrete like behind a dumpster where there aren't any karens and piss. Even women do this if sufficiently desperate, the old squat and shake.
You’re also getting the thing you bought too. Maybe it’s more expensive than you would have paid for it otherwise but that difference is the cost of the pee, not $5
I just read this article about vanishing bathrooms at Starbucks and other fast food restaurants which are pivoting to mobile pickup and drive-thru locations.
It doesn't look like the linked article mentions restaurant bathrooms but it can't be a coincidence. This all strikes me as a passive-aggressive reaction to FUD about homelessness and "out of control cities".
It could be passive aggressive, or it could be that frontline employees at these places are seeing things that you're not and headquarters is making changes to protect their employees and their property.
Not every instance of fear is FUD, sometimes the danger is real.
Take whatever monetary incentive you like, the point is that it's more likely that there are real risks that people who work in these places know about than that it's all FUD and OP's anecdotal sense that there is no real problem is reflective of the reality on the ground.
Presumably employees are more expensive than property here. Both paying them to take care off and loss incurred because they left to work somewhere else where the conditions are better.
> headquarters is making changes to protect their employees and their property.
Or to simply retain employees.
If you had your choice between two fast food jobs with similar pay but one of them requires employees to take rotations cleaning the public bathroom throughout the day, which one are you going to pick?
The issues with drug users are also very real depending on the city and location. Having to have cops or emergency medical people show up to your location a couple times for no other reason than you offered public restrooms is a quick way to make a company decide to no longer offer them.
Protect employees in order to retain them, yeah. You're welcome to impute for-profit motive here, but either way I fully agree that I wouldn't want to be responsible for maintaining a public restroom in a city center.
> This all strikes me as a passive-aggressive reaction to FUD about homelessness and "out of control cities".
No, it is just that very, very few people want to clean and repair bathrooms.
I would rather work at a restaurant that has no public bathrooms, so that I never have to clean them. Hence I am willing to work for less compared to a place with public bathrooms, hence my employer has lower labor costs.
Pretty sure that goes for all the keyboard warriors too. It’s pretty well known that almost any job where you have to deal with the general public is worse than a job where you don’t.
I worked as a McDonalds janitor when I was a teenager, and I specifically requested it instead of cooking hamburgers. It was actually pretty pleasant. You got to walk around, talk to customers, go outside (to empty the parking lot trash cans) and so on. Yes, the bathrooms were messy, but I cleaned them so often they didn’t really have time to get totally disgusting.
Of course nowadays, I bet it’s not a dedicated job, and they make the single person working alone in the store do everything…
> This all strikes me as a passive-aggressive reaction to FUD about homelessness and "out of control cities".
Anyone who has ever worked in retail or food service could tell you that nobody wants to have to deal with the public restrooms. They need to be cleaned frequently and it’s not a fun job.
It’s not just homeless people or FUD. It’s because the general public has enough outliers who cause problems that when 100 people use your bathroom every day, you’re guaranteed to get a couple who create some sort of mess.
Surely this is an erosion in public trust, but if you’ve ever been in a busy public toilet that smells horrendous, you know from experience that maintaining these public toilets is no easy feat. At the same time, I agree with the thrust of the article that they are a civic good & necessity.
I live in the UK. I use the “Radar Key Scheme” for both my son and myself. The Radar Key opens handicapped toilets around the country that are otherwise locked. I asked my GP about a referral for this and they knew nothing about it. In the end I just bought one online. Bizarre. I have a disability that’s not visible, I’m otherwise healthy and relatively privileged, but being unable to find a toilet to use when my bladder feels like it is going to explode makes me feel like a wild animal - unable to fulfill the most base need in a culturally acceptable way - terrible feeling.
> The Radar Key opens handicapped toilets around the country that are otherwise locked.
I’ve never heard of this type of thing in the USA. Handicap stalls, if available, are just next to the rest of the stalls in any given location. They’re usually a bit bigger to accommodate a wheel chair, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a special entry mechanism.
It's just a physical key. Like the keys for operating train equipment or fire safety they're not intended to prevent malicious access, they're a social signal - this is for people who need it. You're not clever for figuring out how to abuse it, you're just a bad person.
The bad person is the one who decided to lock and downsize public toilets. All the arguments about taxes are about money for public good that market can't solve, well where is it?
Living in a country where it's the norm, the concept of (any) locked bathrooms is wild. When travelling I always always find restricted access (either by key, or payment) public facilities extremely jarring.
A lot of newer toilets in the USA are single occupancy rooms for families and disabled. Of course, this also makes them easier to use for drugs and camping, so locking them down in urban areas is pretty important.
This isn't being prepared. This is sloshing around urine and feces in your vehicle and having to dispose of it yourself. Its a half step removed from the sanitary practices of the middle ages. Prepared in this case is going to the bathroom before you hit the road and making appropriate stops as needed from there.
Huh, that's a weird take. My personal provisions are cleaner than the public facilities I have access to, which are admittedly very much like the middle ages. And I don't need to hold it or search around. I have medical grade liners for the containers so disposal is easy. But huh, I guess you keep enjoying your take.
Rent-a-Potties, paired with some kind of mobile app, make good business sense to me. Especially if you can get some kind of network effect / critical density mass going in a given area.
A person is out and about town, and suddenly has to go, bad. They pull out the app and find their closest Rent-a-Potty. It appears on their map with a green dot - that means the last person to use it considered it reasonably clean, a good sign. (Everyone knows that people whose usage of the Rent-a-Potty is, ahem, strongly correlated with the state transition to an orange or red dot face price hikes, or possibly even expulsion from the app as a whole, so there's good reason to leave it at least as good as you found it.)
They tap the dot, hit "Reserve", and the timer begins. A 4 digit PIN code appears on the screen, your secret incantation to the hall of the porcelain throne. These things are not cheap - $1 per minute for the first 10 minutes of reservation, $2 past that. But they're emptied every night, the sink always has hot water, and the soap is always refilled.
Some people have tried to game the system by {your deviancy here}; the company has responded with {countermeasures you're smart enough to think of here}. Some enterprising souls could theoretically {countercountermeasure}, but honestly, implementing {countercountercountermeasure} isn't a huge concern for Rent-a-Potty's C-suite, compared to the recent competition from new market entrants like Loolurker, AirPnP, and Pouber.
There’s a substantial difference between governments trying to provide a service (which they are generally terrible at) and paying for a service on behalf of those who cannot afford it (which they tend to be reasonably competent at).
EBT is a pretty good program. Government grocery stores would almost certainly be an abomination (just ask your local public school cafeteria or military base mess hall).
Edit: adgjlsfhk1 is correct that “generally terrible” is overstated and simplistic. Hopefully better take downthread.
> Military bases run PXs and commissaries and these stores have reasonable (mid to high mid) quality goods.
The PXs are pretty good but are priced comparably or higher than free-market stores off-base, and even still are subsidized by base funds. The Class Six is very well done and potentially profitable, though that's just a guess.
The commissaries are much more expensive than off-base stores and likewise are subsidized by base funds. For the most part only the officer's and senior NCO's families can afford to shop at the Commissary.
Disclaimer: I left active duty in the late 00s so things might have changed since then
the idea that the government is inherently bad at providing services is just very silly. roads, postal service, and national parks are all really great services that the government provides. the idea that the government only does things well by paying private companies to do them just doesn't have basis in reality.
I take back “generally terrible”. How about “often spotty and rarely held accountable in practice”?
It’s not that governments literally cannot provide good services — it’s that when government appoints itself as a monopolist, outcomes and accountability become effectively disconnected, unless the service is so high-stakes and the quality is so abysmal that it rises to “vote the bastards out” territory.
Agreed that the government isn't inherently bad at providing services, but I do think it's important to define how we measure "bad." For example, does "bad" mean the UX is bad? If so, then government isn't inherently bad at it (though can be, see next paragraph). If we define "bad" as "less economical (i.e. more expensive/wasteful of resources) then it does have a general tendency toward bad.
It largely comes down to who is running the thing, and do they care? With private sector, they are forced to care because otherwise it will affect revenue and brand value, which will get the leader fired. The consumer is empowered with ability to spend their $ elsewhere, which rewards the better service and punishes the worse (note that this is becoming much less true in the age of giant corps, especially big tech). With government services, (particularly in monopolistic situations like the DMV), the consumer is largely powerless. They have no choice but to use the system given, and if they aren't happy they can complain but that complaint won't have any teeth (unless they happen to be politically connected of course).
tldr: I most agree, but it depends on how you define "bad"
Yes, completely agree here. But that’s not mutually exclusive with the rent a potty idea. Public bathrooms in parks and such are often, by necessity, quite spartan. They have no toilet stall doors, don’t have the soap filled as often as necessary, have those weird metal mirrors rather than more useful mirrors.
I would honestly pay for rent a potty even if public toilets were (and they should be!) available and convenient.
I'm not very well traveled, but I think I've used a pay toilet in every country I've been to other than the US (and the little bit of Canada I've seen) They're illegal in many US cities (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_to_End_Pay_Toilets...), and American taxpayers don't like footing the bill. So we end up with Starbucks and Dunkin as de facto pay toilets, where you have to buy a pastry or drink to take a pee.
I don't really understand why it should be illegal to pay someone for a vital human need
A public good is a commodity or service that is non-excludable (no one can be effectively excluded from using it) and non-rivalrous (one person's use of the good does not reduce its availability to others)
Examples include clean air, national defense, and public parks.
This isn't to say they shouldn't be provided by the government, but they're definitely not a public good
Is there no room for grocery stores and restaurants too, since all humans need food?
If you’re looking for a role for government here, I could see budgeting in some tax breaks for local businesses that make their restrooms publicly accessible. The infrastructure is already there, no need for a complicated business model.
> I could see budgeting in some tax breaks for local businesses that make their restrooms publicly accessible.
People significantly underestimate the cost of maintaining clean public restrooms in urban areas.
When restrooms are used properly, maintenance costs are reasonable and predictable. But that is not what happens.
Restrooms contain private areas, and that reality invites other uses, like drug use, prostitution, and sleeping. And those uses come at a steep cost.
Separately, in my experience, many businesses do make their restrooms available to people who look presentable and who ask politely. They just don’t advertise it, and they may even advertise the opposite.
This. Absolutely spot on. The profitisation common services is absolutely disgusting. It is literally the reason we have governments to build and make available for the people.
That might be ideal, but we don't live in an ideal world. The public government isn't providing this in nearly any large US city. A few that have tried have ended their attempts due to the cost. CTA provided restrooms at the stations till the 1970s, but ended access to those due to the costs and safety concerns. Having pay restrooms would be an alternative to have no option at all.
Alternate take - the toilets in Europe, while a euro or two, are actually nice and relatively well maintained. And relatively common.
So while you do have to keep a few coins on you, unlike cities like NYC or SF you can actually go to the toilet when you want and it isn’t a stress inducing nightmare wondering what sort of hell you are going to run across if you do actually find a toilet.
Places with ‘free water’ almost always have terrible water availability and quality. Same problem.
If that got me a reasonably clean and reasonably available location, that's money well spent.
Cleaning and maintaining a restroom isn't free, and something needs to pay for it. Highway rest stops are usually pretty clean, but they are paid for with tolls/very high gas taxes.
This is anecdotal but in my experience the restrooms still suck and are poorly maintained (This was my experience in Hamburg and Amsterdam in 2023). What is even worse is that there seems to be a little recourse to correct it in the short term. There isn't a "Free market" of toilet companies because the same firm seems to capture all the toilets in a given area. So you have the worst of all worlds, you have to pay to use a poorly maintained restroom and there is little you can do about it...at least as a traveler not familiar with the local customs. Maybe locals can enact some improvement.
Tragedy of the Commons Ruins Everything Around Me.
When it comes to restrooms, some people can not help not help themselves and leave it in a significantly worse state, or use it for other purposes (like drug use). Maintaining restrooms is, on average, thankless responsibility, even though people would be thankful to find one.
Thats fine but if you are paying to have the restrooms maintained then the expectation should be different. Don't excuse a private company charging money to patrons and then providing poor service. If I want bad restrooms, I can have the government maintain it like in many places in the US.
Germany has very high taxes and seems yet unable to maintain clean free restrooms. I can relate for countries with income taxes around 10%, but for taxes much higher than that free restrooms should be affordable. I currently visit Australia and it seems to be no problem here almost as good as Japan.
Why does it suck? It's a negligible amount of money for the person using the toilet, but the revenue is enough to pay for people to maintain and clean the toilets regularly. Being able to use a clean toilet for what is essentially a rounding error in your budget at the end of the month seems like a worthwhile tradeoff.
Back in school when my allowance was 5 euros a week, even 50 cents was prohibitively expensive for me to go to the toilet. Even today I refuse to use the two euro toilets and I'm not the only person walking up, seeing the price, and turning around.
This stuff is not priced to be a reasonable convenience, but to be a better alternative to soiling yourself in public. The most insulting part is paying 2 euros to pee into a smelly urinal and getting a 50 cent discount code for the nearby fast food stand as a courtesy, because I haven't spent enough apparently.
I remember as a poor student, having to pay the equivalent of 50 cents felt like robbery. Today with a steady income I’m happy to pay a dollar, or even two, to be able to use a clean restroom.
I think the general problem is interesting: how do we price necessities when our ability to pay is so different?
The ideal answer is, of course, that we shouldn’t put prices on most necessities, and the primary reason that we do is to threaten people into demeaning jobs.
Out of curiosity, where is it a full €2? I visited various places with pay toilets in 2022, and while it was more than I'd prefer, it was still only something like 1 or 1.25
Well, we're talking about Western Europe here. You either live there, or you're a tourist. Even if you don't have an Euro, you can just ask a random person and chances are they'll give one to you.
It sucks when your credit card isn't accepted and the machine won't read your coins correctly or missed one and you are thus just 10 cents short of being allowed to use the washroom and now the three people waiting behind you are just like "wtaf is taking so long".
Experienced this a while back in a shopping mall in France. Like, a mall has to be one of the most profitable places in a modern city, pretty sure they can afford to staff a couple washroom staff during business hours while everyone is pouring money into all the mall vendors.
“Let’s take something people will have to do, and make it so the most desperate among them will pay us to do it.” is a distillation of capitalism, but I wouldn’t use the word beauty to describe it.
In Germany I can choose between two kinds of public toilets. Piss everywhere and paying some money, while I don't like the later, it is clearly the price to pay for not having the former.
This is so disgusting. The idea of milking maximum profit from such a basic human function really highlights the way extreme capitalism trends toward evil.
I agree very much in principle, but pragamatically (i.e. in the real world) this strikes me as utopian and impossible, at least until human nature changes.
Toilets are a scarce resource (economically speaking), and thus there must be some rationing method in place. If it's not monetary, it will be something else. In a perfect world there would be plentiful bathrooms and everyone would diligently clean up after themselves and take the trash out when full, so operating costs would be minimal (power and water bill and occassional maintenance). In the real world though, people don't do that, meaning you have to hire people to clean. Some people will also vandalize, which gets expensive in a hurry. Public (government-run) restrooms tend to be even worse because they aren't actively monitored, and for whatever reason people like to trash them.
It's a proposed alternative to having no option at all. Restrooms are too expensive to maintain and prone to misuse to justify maintaining free options, which is why public restrooms have become virtually non-existent in US cities, following the eradication of pay restrooms. It is a much more moral option than giving the public no option at all, other than to become a customer at a business in order to be granted access to the business's restrooms, which would typically be far more expensive.
In some places, like Phoenix, the situation is currently so bad that even paying customers cannot use the restroom in some smaller shops, due to the large homeless population. Having any option at all, whatever the cost, would be a far better alternative.
Maybe the "prone to misuse" bit is the problem, and we need to address the underlying issues there. In most of rural and suburban America, all public businesses have bathrooms freely available for the public (i.e., no asking for a key or whatever), and free, clean government-run public bathrooms exist in public spaces like parks or "downtown" areas. I see this slowly shifting, but obviously the problem is changing behaviors and not some feature of human nature.
I agree that it is largely an urban issue, but it is a serious issue, which likely exists in large part due to the greater density of urban homeless populations and drug related crime. Solving these problems is arguably far less trivial than re-establishing pay restrooms in the urban US.
My wallet feels as essential as my keys when leaving my home. Are you just making the point for people who forget their wallet, or do you think there is good reason to intentionally not carry your wallet?
I can exist without carrying things. Practically, if I'm walking around a city, I probably want to have ID and some way of paying for things (and to get back into my home which is presumably locked). If I just take a stroll on the river path from my house I often don't carry anything but mostly I do.
Some people these days just carry a couple cards with their phone but that's still functionally a wallet. And a lot of things are headed towards contactless payment with phones or smart watches though I'd have trouble wanting to depend on that.
I don't ever carry my wallet or keys when I go for a walk, which is usually once a week when it's nice out. I do carry my phone, for podcasts. My door has a keypad to get in.
Many do take credit cards. In The Netherlands and Belgium, the pay toilets in train stations allow tap to pay with a NFC card or your phone. Toilets in the airports are always free, though.
It’s also a tragedy of the commons thing: you offer free toilets but don’t fund maintaining them every half hour so they are only usable by a few before they become completely thrashed and unusable. Or they are used as drug/prostitution dens and are never available anyways except for whoever got lucky to grab and squat them. A free resources that isn’t available isn’t very useful when you need to go.
King county just pulled the plug on a pilot for public restrooms at a couple of transit stations because with maintenance and, more significantly, security the cost was $77/use [1], we simply can’t afford that. Seattle famously bought five multi million dollar self cleaning toilets that only lasted a few years [2].
I was wondering how far I would have to go to see King County come up. Not very far!
We simply can't have nice things here. At least not in the Seattle city core. Everyone says "just have free bathrooms bro" but no one saying that actually has had to pay for and maintain a free bathroom in downtown Seattle. Discussing exactly why this is the case tends cause a flamewar, but the fact that we can't be honest about the cause means we'll never have the nice things.
I’ve lived in lots of cities, I don’t think the dynamics are very different. Yes, crappy people mean we can’t have nice things, but that is as true in Lausanne. The problem is the way Seattle/King county mis identify or lie about the problem and then give a fake shocked pikachu face when their fixes for the wrong problem don’t work.
This was the argument that let NYC to ban coin based toilets in decades past, with the assumption that people should not need to pay and businesses/govt should provide restrooms for free. But no replacement was ever provided.
Come to NYC, walk around busy areas for a while you will not infrequently see less fortunate people urinating in the subway stations, on the sidewalk, on walls and buildings, by trash cans, and sometimes (if the mood strikes them) right in the middle of the street.
Some place in Switzerland offered two classes of bathroom. Paid clean ones that are maintained and a very simple free one with squats, not maintained hourly and only sprayed down a few times a day. Still much cleaner than I expected.
It's not uncommon to give subsidies for folks that can't afford modern conveniences (free phones, food, housing). I could imagine one could give out tokens, or pay cards that are only usable for bathrooms to those who can't afford to pay for it themselves.
Not to mention a lot of us "pay it forward". I used to pay for the people behind me when crossing the Bay Bridge, or for the next person that was buying a coffee.
I was thinking, Uber of toilets. You can order mobile toilet driven to you and then you are charged reasonable rate for distance and travel time it did. Plus ofc, standard fee. And time you spend inside.
I've wondered if it would make sense for hotel/motel chains to offer a paid toilet service. Their locations already have a bunch of toilets (one in each guest room plus ones for the lobby and for meeting rooms) and already have cleaning people there to keep those clean.
Sell day passes that give you 24 hours access. If I were, say, going to drive from Seattle to Los Angeles I'd pay $20 to buy a pass that would let me pull into any Motel 6 along the way to use a clean bathroom.
95%+ of hotels/motels do not have 24 hour cleaning staff, and the guest service agents working the computer are not going to be wanting to clean bathrooms.
All those branded 80 to 120 room hotel/motels are trying to reduce the staffing outside of 7AM to 4PM, even to the point of having check in kiosks that video call you to someone in South Asia/Phillipines/South America.
Someone who can afford to pay $20/day for a bathroom pass is probably presentable enough that they can walk in and get permission to use the bathroom for free.
That use case is already covered by costco membership. Costco locations are nicely distributed near freeway exits across the nation. Plenty of parking, decent bathrooms, and you can get food of you need it.
> Everyone knows that people whose usage of the Rent-a-Potty is, ahem, strongly correlated with the state transition to an orange or red dot face price hikes, or possibly even expulsion from the app as a whole, so there's good reason to leave it at least as good as you found it.
This seems very susceptible to abuse. You (not you personally, but someone malicious) go into the restroom, mark it in a poor state, do whatever awful thing people do to get restrooms in the state in which they're so often found, and leave. Now it's the last person, who left it in a perfectly good state, who gets the blame.
you could have customer profile rating like uber does, manual or algorithmic ones (based on what happened after you went). Then, if you get framed by a weirdo like that once or twice, it will be compensated for by the majority of your good behavior.
this is so dumb lol likely will just continue with starbucks and gas stations
The kind of person who would do that once would probably be the kind of person who would do that many times, thinking it's a clever way to bypass the system. However, being the operation who marks every toilet they see as red 100% of the time is just as if not more suspicious as the person who other people mark red after the fact 100% of the time.
If we really want to take it up a notch, we have ways to do so. Deviancy, countermeasure, arms race all over again - but few such arms races are actually worth the hassle.
I live in South Australia and I feel like public toilets are ubiquitous and still increasing in number. Mostly they are either accessible or have a separate accessible toilet. The only exception to this is in areas where they have public social issues. My mum is a little bit financial about toilets so she always struggles when overseas. We even have small self cleaning toilets at the small playgrounds in the suburbs. It would be interesting to understand why we ended up like this.
The article has one good point: there’s diseases and conditions that cause people to need the bathroom, and even if you don’t have this upset stomachs are common enough that at some point it’ll impact you. Parents with young kids realize it too. So this is everyone’s problem.
However the article misses the point with statements like this.
Quite simply, Lowe was right: there is often no place to go.
There are often many places to go, it just might not be a public toilet. There’s restaurants and coffee shop, gas stations, stores. Don’t confuse no public places to go with no places to go.
Public toilets are one of those things where all it takes is one person to mess up a good situation for everyone else.
There’s no incentive for people to treat them nicely. There’s an asymmetry, people want to use public toilets but who wants to clean public toilets? It’s always “someone else job.”
I see no problem having a little friction as a way to help control it. A small charge to use the bathroom or social capital of asking can be enough to remedy the problems of misuse.
Some people literally don’t have money for a small charge and they shouldn’t be denied using a public bathroom because of that. You’re right about everything else though.
I have been recently in a trip through Japan and I have been very impressed by the abundance and the quality of the public toilets.
On the other hand, in Japan there are extremely few places with public trash cans. Those few that exist are typically associated with vending machines for beverages.
> On the other hand, in Japan there are extremely few places with public trash cans. Those few that exist are typically associated with vending machines for beverages.
IIRC they removed them after a terrorist attack in the 90s.
Because the bomb was placed in a trash can. It’s like having to remove your shoes to board an airplane in the US: firmly securing the exact door the horse has bolted through, and not paying any attention to other holes in the wall.
The nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subway in 1995 [1] was quite traumatic for those of us living in Japan then. There was a very real fear of follow-up attacks. Security was tight for a long time in public places, and facilities like trash cans and lockers that could be used to plant bombs or poisons were removed. It took years for the tensions to ease, and it seems that even today the people in charge of public places hesitate to reinstate trash cans.
>people in charge of public places hesitate to reinstate trash cans.
I'd assume that these days the lack of desire is mostly a matter of funding. Possibly also something about reducing the number of crows/rats digging through trash.
Japan also has a rather strict trash sorting system, and not having public trash cans might serve as a forcing function to sort things properly (since if you get it wrong things will be attributed to you). Similarly it's possible that under some circumstances, under-serviced public trash cans could end up increasing the amount of litter on streets: people may be more likely to stuff things into an overflowing trash can (or dump stuff next to it) rather than carrying it with them.
What a friend from Japan explained to me (Sam), was that in order to deter the crows and rats, Japanese authorities developed the perfect, slickest surface known to humanity. And it worked! Rats could not climb the sides of the cans, and crows would slip and fall when they landed.
It was a good time for Japan, but unfortunately there was a horrible side effect.
No one could get a hold of the cans, to empty them.
Soon trash overflowed the cans, just as you said! Admitting defeat, the cans were eventually blown to pieces. This explains why Japan has trash on the streets, and why Japan had overflowing trash cans.
But this is all fixed now. As you know, Japan has no litter, and no one would ever stoop so low as to liter on purpose.
Here in Japan there are many public toilets (department stores, train stations, 7-11s, etc.). However, not all public toilets here are clean or anywhere I would advise people to use. A lot of train station toilets are just plain stinky (you'll pass out bad), I live off the beaten path so take that into perspective. On the other side of things, I have been out in the middle of no-where and the toilet at the only store in town was as clean as I have ever seen one.
As for trash cans, many train stations I use have bins located near the entry/exit gate where you can put it in the correct slot (burnable, plastic, bottle, etc).
I’m a runner and public water fountains seem to be as well. Is there some sort of website that maps public water fountains in your city? I run pretty far and I don’t want to carry water.
When I was in high school (ages ago) the boy’s bathrooms didn’t have doors. I guess it was to deter kids smoking, graffiti, and other bad things that happen. We were a middle class suburb so I don’t know how often this happened anyways. I was fortunate to never need to go but I always remember it.
Neither had toiler paper and toilet seats. Instead of weeding out bad kids who smoked and vandalized, all kids were punished. Negatively impacted nutrition and hydration habits during the following decades of my life.
The government should simply mandate that all restaurants, supermarkets, event venues, etc. above a certain size should be required to have at least a certain number of free public toilets.
Otherwise, the more stores that withdraw from offering free public toilets, the more burden it places on everyone else.
If it causes a slight increase in labor cost, at least it the cost will be borne equally by all, and benefit will be borne most by the most vulnerable.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 262 ms ] threadWith my iPhone I can do almost anything while traveling: look up maps, pay, take pictures, browse the web. But what I _can't_ do with my iPhone is the most basic thing ...
I know there is a debate in the group that needs “fast toilets” whether they should be free. Well that debate is moot when there are near zero options. A coffee brings what €1 of margin? A toilet could cost €1, and still help those in need. I hate paying for dirty toilets (German and Belgian gas stops grmbl, learn from France). But a clean toilet can be a lifesaver.
If Apple cared about users they would work on problems that really mattered instead of giving us a 100MP camera where 50MP is already just fine.
What do you think that given their mission / expertise they're missing out on? It wouldn't good for the world if every company worked on curing cancer, or another similarly impactful achievement for humanity, but it's great that many are. But I think Apple's giving back a lot too.
Personal anecdote: my grandfather passed away in a nursing home unexpectedly with just my mother, an aunt, and I. Yet with Facetime being so accessible to everyday people, at least a dozen members of my family that couldn't have physically made it in time were there with us and he recognized all of them.
You don't need big tech for this: OpenStreetMap [1], a map (actually, a database) that works like Wikipedia, is there for all of us :-)
It has information about public restrooms, whether they are accessible, gratis, and toilets are only a very small part of OSM.
The more people contribute, the more awesome it becomes.
A sibling mentioned Organic Maps, it's one of the many apps out there to conveniently use OSM (and contribute).
[1] https://www.openstreetmap.org/
This just makes me think of America and the bizarrely huge gaps between the hinges and gaps at the bottom and top of the cubicles, even in very wealthy contexts, like at big tech companies. WHY? Such a strange example of embedded inertias of design in ostensibly innovative contexts.
Yes, it sounds stupid as an European, where somehow we survive without this.
For first responder access, I have seen a hospital requirement for outswinging doors for one-holers with privacy locks. This allows the door to be opened when a person is collapsed against the door.
(1) “In general” because there are almost certainly niche regulations that require it. For example the construction standards of a state prison bureau, local board of education, etc.
This was invented after having a foreman check that you pissed or shat in the toilet like they did on a ford assembly line was deemed to expensive.
I find it funny when people see conspiracies in such mundane things.
Those prefabricated kits are cheap and used in many bathrooms. The gaps at the bottom are there for easy cleaning.
That is why the government doesn’t provide them. If the government can’t be bothered to pick up that burden, no one else should be expected to.
Safer streets, longer lives, a fair environment for the physically weak, longer-lasting infrastructure, a better business environment, and - more crucially than all of the above - more trust.
You can’t have public bathrooms in a society filled with criminals and homeless drug addicts.
I live in San Francisco, where it now costs over $100,000 per year to operate a single toilet, because without it being under constant guard, people start living in them.
Yeah, it isn't as simple as "le humans are bad and mean mmkay." Like most things that remain unsolved, it is complicated.
Old geezer perspective: The withering availability of public toilets is just another symptom of the massive decline in social trust over the past half-century or so. I might suggest that the author talk to people on the "supply side" - especially long-time small business owners - about the expenses and miseries of being on their end of the stick...but the author seems so focused on the rights & well-being of the "user" population that I can't imagine him actually caring about "their sort".
He was told not to come into the hotel anymore, but he did anyway. Any other solution would have taken too long to implement compared to just changing the locks on the doors and making the housekeepers happy, who you kind of need to operate the business.
You have then opened yourself up to a bunch of risks.
Much less risky to shut down access for everyone.
Some people won’t be deterred by anything short of someone who is able to intimidate or harm them. It’s a no-win situation because allowing employees to hit people with clubs isn’t a good idea. :(
In London, it's socially acceptable to use the toilet of any venue like a pub. In Paris they have high tech public toilets that automatically clean themselves, in Turkey mosques usually operate public toilets for profit alongside with the facilities provided by the government, in Germany they have Sanifair which gives you voucher for your payment and you can use at any participating location to purchase stuff like coffee.
Also, they need to eat and the places they eat are probably also the places they use the WC.
As things are - other companies can make national headlines by caring about human needs of drivers:
https://www.today.com/food/news/chick-fil-a-break-room-rcna7...
In Turkey they really like putting formal structure to that kind of stuff and venues at the high street sometimes have a lock with a password which is printed on the receipt with your purchase. One particular McDonald's was a pioneer in this, as their location was at the most crowded and central place where people used to meet before the proliferation of cellphones.
The same idea exists in the US, and often bathrooms have a PIN code to enter or a special key only the shop owner has.
I’ve never been turned down when asking politely. Most people are rather sympathetic when someone needs to use the bathroom for legitimate purposes.
Business owners perceive the presence of homeless people as bad for business so they don't want to encourage homeless people to stick around. And they think homeless people will trash their bathrooms or use drugs inside which is dangerous for other customers and brings police presence.
So business owners lock up their bathrooms. Result: Even fewer places for homeless people to use the toilet.
These things aren’t just perceptions or thoughts. It’s a real problem that anyone who runs a business in a location with a homeless problem can attest to.
Businesses care about the first type because of the associated problems and are completely fine with the later.
A 8-table local run cafe? I wouldn't dare ask
If it’s a chain then you probably don’t have to buy anything.
If it’s a large establishment such as a supermarket then you don’t have to buy anything, nobody is keeping track.
And obviously toilets in public places like train stations are free for all nowadays.
The end result is that woods next to stops smell horribly and you have to be super careful where to step. Because, too many people stop there to piss and shit.
Public latrines are the most basic of public goods.
IMO it’s more about drugs and sex than capitalism but yea I agree the state of public toilet availability is a disgrace in Germany
Might be different in another neighbourhood here.
(Yes you might need to buy something but seems like a small effort for it)
Plus it paints a wrong picture of a country because it's technically people asking you a few bucks for a basic necessity and the government has failed.
This is in stark contrast with developed countries like Singapore (where I visit a lot). Singapore makes sure a public toilet is available within a few hundred meters and boy are those clean!
No, it's not like you wanted it. You just wanted to pee, not a 500 kcal cookie.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/19/business/starbucks-mobile-ord...
It doesn't look like the linked article mentions restaurant bathrooms but it can't be a coincidence. This all strikes me as a passive-aggressive reaction to FUD about homelessness and "out of control cities".
Not every instance of fear is FUD, sometimes the danger is real.
Or to simply retain employees.
If you had your choice between two fast food jobs with similar pay but one of them requires employees to take rotations cleaning the public bathroom throughout the day, which one are you going to pick?
The issues with drug users are also very real depending on the city and location. Having to have cops or emergency medical people show up to your location a couple times for no other reason than you offered public restrooms is a quick way to make a company decide to no longer offer them.
Protect employees in order to retain them, yeah. You're welcome to impute for-profit motive here, but either way I fully agree that I wouldn't want to be responsible for maintaining a public restroom in a city center.
No, it is just that very, very few people want to clean and repair bathrooms.
I would rather work at a restaurant that has no public bathrooms, so that I never have to clean them. Hence I am willing to work for less compared to a place with public bathrooms, hence my employer has lower labor costs.
Pretty sure that goes for all the keyboard warriors too. It’s pretty well known that almost any job where you have to deal with the general public is worse than a job where you don’t.
Of course nowadays, I bet it’s not a dedicated job, and they make the single person working alone in the store do everything…
Anyone who has ever worked in retail or food service could tell you that nobody wants to have to deal with the public restrooms. They need to be cleaned frequently and it’s not a fun job.
It’s not just homeless people or FUD. It’s because the general public has enough outliers who cause problems that when 100 people use your bathroom every day, you’re guaranteed to get a couple who create some sort of mess.
I live in the UK. I use the “Radar Key Scheme” for both my son and myself. The Radar Key opens handicapped toilets around the country that are otherwise locked. I asked my GP about a referral for this and they knew nothing about it. In the end I just bought one online. Bizarre. I have a disability that’s not visible, I’m otherwise healthy and relatively privileged, but being unable to find a toilet to use when my bladder feels like it is going to explode makes me feel like a wild animal - unable to fulfill the most base need in a culturally acceptable way - terrible feeling.
I’ve never heard of this type of thing in the USA. Handicap stalls, if available, are just next to the rest of the stalls in any given location. They’re usually a bit bigger to accommodate a wheel chair, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a special entry mechanism.
Is the UK version a physical key or some RF tag?
Living in a country where it's the norm, the concept of (any) locked bathrooms is wild. When travelling I always always find restricted access (either by key, or payment) public facilities extremely jarring.
A person is out and about town, and suddenly has to go, bad. They pull out the app and find their closest Rent-a-Potty. It appears on their map with a green dot - that means the last person to use it considered it reasonably clean, a good sign. (Everyone knows that people whose usage of the Rent-a-Potty is, ahem, strongly correlated with the state transition to an orange or red dot face price hikes, or possibly even expulsion from the app as a whole, so there's good reason to leave it at least as good as you found it.)
They tap the dot, hit "Reserve", and the timer begins. A 4 digit PIN code appears on the screen, your secret incantation to the hall of the porcelain throne. These things are not cheap - $1 per minute for the first 10 minutes of reservation, $2 past that. But they're emptied every night, the sink always has hot water, and the soap is always refilled.
Some people have tried to game the system by {your deviancy here}; the company has responded with {countermeasures you're smart enough to think of here}. Some enterprising souls could theoretically {countercountermeasure}, but honestly, implementing {countercountercountermeasure} isn't a huge concern for Rent-a-Potty's C-suite, compared to the recent competition from new market entrants like Loolurker, AirPnP, and Pouber.
There is no place for “business”.
It’s the literal definition of a public good and such the role of the government.
EBT is a pretty good program. Government grocery stores would almost certainly be an abomination (just ask your local public school cafeteria or military base mess hall).
Edit: adgjlsfhk1 is correct that “generally terrible” is overstated and simplistic. Hopefully better take downthread.
Military bases run PXs and commissaries and these stores have reasonable (mid to high mid) quality goods.
The PXs are pretty good but are priced comparably or higher than free-market stores off-base, and even still are subsidized by base funds. The Class Six is very well done and potentially profitable, though that's just a guess.
The commissaries are much more expensive than off-base stores and likewise are subsidized by base funds. For the most part only the officer's and senior NCO's families can afford to shop at the Commissary.
Disclaimer: I left active duty in the late 00s so things might have changed since then
It’s not that governments literally cannot provide good services — it’s that when government appoints itself as a monopolist, outcomes and accountability become effectively disconnected, unless the service is so high-stakes and the quality is so abysmal that it rises to “vote the bastards out” territory.
It largely comes down to who is running the thing, and do they care? With private sector, they are forced to care because otherwise it will affect revenue and brand value, which will get the leader fired. The consumer is empowered with ability to spend their $ elsewhere, which rewards the better service and punishes the worse (note that this is becoming much less true in the age of giant corps, especially big tech). With government services, (particularly in monopolistic situations like the DMV), the consumer is largely powerless. They have no choice but to use the system given, and if they aren't happy they can complain but that complaint won't have any teeth (unless they happen to be politically connected of course).
tldr: I most agree, but it depends on how you define "bad"
They are only as good as the people in a jurisdiction let them be. Also, the governments you have experienced are far from generally representative.
I would honestly pay for rent a potty even if public toilets were (and they should be!) available and convenient.
I don't really understand why it should be illegal to pay someone for a vital human need
Second order effects? Please. Those aren’t on the ballot, and are hard to stuff into a sound bite.
Voting against pay toilets makes you a foolish and counterproductive person that thinks you're a good person.
Examples include clean air, national defense, and public parks.
This isn't to say they shouldn't be provided by the government, but they're definitely not a public good
If you’re looking for a role for government here, I could see budgeting in some tax breaks for local businesses that make their restrooms publicly accessible. The infrastructure is already there, no need for a complicated business model.
People significantly underestimate the cost of maintaining clean public restrooms in urban areas.
When restrooms are used properly, maintenance costs are reasonable and predictable. But that is not what happens.
Restrooms contain private areas, and that reality invites other uses, like drug use, prostitution, and sleeping. And those uses come at a steep cost.
Separately, in my experience, many businesses do make their restrooms available to people who look presentable and who ask politely. They just don’t advertise it, and they may even advertise the opposite.
So while you do have to keep a few coins on you, unlike cities like NYC or SF you can actually go to the toilet when you want and it isn’t a stress inducing nightmare wondering what sort of hell you are going to run across if you do actually find a toilet.
Places with ‘free water’ almost always have terrible water availability and quality. Same problem.
Cleaning and maintaining a restroom isn't free, and something needs to pay for it. Highway rest stops are usually pretty clean, but they are paid for with tolls/very high gas taxes.
When it comes to restrooms, some people can not help not help themselves and leave it in a significantly worse state, or use it for other purposes (like drug use). Maintaining restrooms is, on average, thankless responsibility, even though people would be thankful to find one.
One of the toilets I paid for didn’t even have a seat.
This stuff is not priced to be a reasonable convenience, but to be a better alternative to soiling yourself in public. The most insulting part is paying 2 euros to pee into a smelly urinal and getting a 50 cent discount code for the nearby fast food stand as a courtesy, because I haven't spent enough apparently.
I think the general problem is interesting: how do we price necessities when our ability to pay is so different?
Spoken with the voice of privilege.
Experienced this a while back in a shopping mall in France. Like, a mall has to be one of the most profitable places in a modern city, pretty sure they can afford to staff a couple washroom staff during business hours while everyone is pouring money into all the mall vendors.
Explain what's evil, please.
Toilets are a scarce resource (economically speaking), and thus there must be some rationing method in place. If it's not monetary, it will be something else. In a perfect world there would be plentiful bathrooms and everyone would diligently clean up after themselves and take the trash out when full, so operating costs would be minimal (power and water bill and occassional maintenance). In the real world though, people don't do that, meaning you have to hire people to clean. Some people will also vandalize, which gets expensive in a hurry. Public (government-run) restrooms tend to be even worse because they aren't actively monitored, and for whatever reason people like to trash them.
In some places, like Phoenix, the situation is currently so bad that even paying customers cannot use the restroom in some smaller shops, due to the large homeless population. Having any option at all, whatever the cost, would be a far better alternative.
Maybe "Quid Poo Quo"?
King county just pulled the plug on a pilot for public restrooms at a couple of transit stations because with maintenance and, more significantly, security the cost was $77/use [1], we simply can’t afford that. Seattle famously bought five multi million dollar self cleaning toilets that only lasted a few years [2].
[1] https://www.theurbanist.org/2024/07/17/king-county-to-close-...
[2] https://portlandloo.com/seattles-failed-experiment-with-sub-...
We simply can't have nice things here. At least not in the Seattle city core. Everyone says "just have free bathrooms bro" but no one saying that actually has had to pay for and maintain a free bathroom in downtown Seattle. Discussing exactly why this is the case tends cause a flamewar, but the fact that we can't be honest about the cause means we'll never have the nice things.
Come to NYC, walk around busy areas for a while you will not infrequently see less fortunate people urinating in the subway stations, on the sidewalk, on walls and buildings, by trash cans, and sometimes (if the mood strikes them) right in the middle of the street.
Although it pains me to sat this .. maybe there's a need for a disposable potty, with sanatary wipes, that can go in the trash.
Maybe these should be given free to street sleepers?
Not to mention a lot of us "pay it forward". I used to pay for the people behind me when crossing the Bay Bridge, or for the next person that was buying a coffee.
Sell day passes that give you 24 hours access. If I were, say, going to drive from Seattle to Los Angeles I'd pay $20 to buy a pass that would let me pull into any Motel 6 along the way to use a clean bathroom.
All those branded 80 to 120 room hotel/motels are trying to reduce the staffing outside of 7AM to 4PM, even to the point of having check in kiosks that video call you to someone in South Asia/Phillipines/South America.
Top off your tank if it makes you feel better, but realistically no one there is getting paid enough to cross reference gas buyers with poopers.
https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/05/this-app-lets-cafes-and-co....
Just take quarters and give poor people some cash so they can shit too. Please please please
But it finds things like mall bathrooms and park bathrooms but not gas station bathrooms, at least the first time I tried it.
The real problem is when you're in an unfamiliar area and don't know the local secrets about where restrooms can be found.
This seems very susceptible to abuse. You (not you personally, but someone malicious) go into the restroom, mark it in a poor state, do whatever awful thing people do to get restrooms in the state in which they're so often found, and leave. Now it's the last person, who left it in a perfectly good state, who gets the blame.
this is so dumb lol likely will just continue with starbucks and gas stations
If we really want to take it up a notch, we have ways to do so. Deviancy, countermeasure, arms race all over again - but few such arms races are actually worth the hassle.
However the article misses the point with statements like this.
There are often many places to go, it just might not be a public toilet. There’s restaurants and coffee shop, gas stations, stores. Don’t confuse no public places to go with no places to go.Public toilets are one of those things where all it takes is one person to mess up a good situation for everyone else.
There’s no incentive for people to treat them nicely. There’s an asymmetry, people want to use public toilets but who wants to clean public toilets? It’s always “someone else job.”
I see no problem having a little friction as a way to help control it. A small charge to use the bathroom or social capital of asking can be enough to remedy the problems of misuse.
On the other hand, in Japan there are extremely few places with public trash cans. Those few that exist are typically associated with vending machines for beverages.
IIRC they removed them after a terrorist attack in the 90s.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo_subway_sarin_attack
I'd assume that these days the lack of desire is mostly a matter of funding. Possibly also something about reducing the number of crows/rats digging through trash.
Japan also has a rather strict trash sorting system, and not having public trash cans might serve as a forcing function to sort things properly (since if you get it wrong things will be attributed to you). Similarly it's possible that under some circumstances, under-serviced public trash cans could end up increasing the amount of litter on streets: people may be more likely to stuff things into an overflowing trash can (or dump stuff next to it) rather than carrying it with them.
It was a good time for Japan, but unfortunately there was a horrible side effect.
No one could get a hold of the cans, to empty them.
Soon trash overflowed the cans, just as you said! Admitting defeat, the cans were eventually blown to pieces. This explains why Japan has trash on the streets, and why Japan had overflowing trash cans.
But this is all fixed now. As you know, Japan has no litter, and no one would ever stoop so low as to liter on purpose.
As for trash cans, many train stations I use have bins located near the entry/exit gate where you can put it in the correct slot (burnable, plastic, bottle, etc).
https://support.strava.com/hc/en-us/articles/6525900339725-S...
You can search for „drinking“ to find mapped fountains/drinking water: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:amenity%3Ddrinking_w...
Otherwise, the more stores that withdraw from offering free public toilets, the more burden it places on everyone else.
If it causes a slight increase in labor cost, at least it the cost will be borne equally by all, and benefit will be borne most by the most vulnerable.
The few fast food places that do not let me go without complaint get a complaint to corporate and they lose my business for a few months.