At least in print, my sense is that this topic is dominated by angry voices proclaiming that public bathroom are a disgracefully neglected human right. Especially for themselves. But with amazingly little to say about the practical realities on the supply side. Public restrooms don't come from Santa Claus, and they cost a lot both to build and maintain. Then there are the costs and miseries of security. Gratitude toward business providing restrooms seems nonexistent.
(Comparing to, for instance, people campaigning against hunger. Those folks seem keenly aware that food for the needy has to come from somewhere - whether donated or paid for - then be sorted and stored, possibly repackaged and transported, maybe prepared and cooked, then regularly distributed to those needing it. And if you botch even one step, then you have failed at feeding the poor.)
> public bathroom are a disgracefully neglected human right.
Well, they are. Just as drinking fountains.
> Public restrooms don't come from Santa Claus, and they cost a lot both to build and maintain. Then there are the costs and miseries of security. Gratitude toward business providing restrooms seems nonexistent.
s/restroom/park/g. Hey, it's still true! And explains why there are almost no public parks around.
I live near a park. I watch that drinking fountain. They bathe in there at times. They lift their dogs to drink from it despite. It breaks because they kick the button.
They are the losers, the educated affluent, the youthful of our society.
In Switzerland I did not see such issues with the drinking fountains which are everywhere.
It's certainly a different environment from a large American city, though we also have misbehaving youths and a few drug addicts that are perhaps homeless.
You pay taxes and taxes fund things which are good for society as a whole. It's not that hard. You don't beg for donations. This stuff isn't optional or the result of benevolent benefactors. If you live in society then you contribute to society.
You can't pay janitors enough to deal with degenerates who routinely deliberately destroy public bathrooms in western countries. It's a job for police and the courts, but those are dysfunctional in a way which "more money" doesn't fix.
So you can't pay a janitor enough to deal with vandals, but somehow the minimum wage bartender that already has to tend to a bar and cash register is able to keep their toilets clean no problem?
It's not that hard to make toilets that are nearly indestructible and can be very efficiently cleaned by a guy in a "hazmat" suit with a pressure washer. It probably wouldn't be that hard to largely automate this. But the market for this is small and mostly governments, so prices are high and innovation is low.
Do you realize how much money police arrests, courts, and jail cost? A janitor and occassional repairs are way cheaper any way I can look at it. There arent gangs of people walking around with grinders or hacksaws fucking up as much stuff as possible despite what you may want to believe.
If taxes are what matters, America would have the best public restrooms in the world because it's the richest country.
But what really matters is culture. If you have a small percentage of people who are bad actors and are not punished for it, they ruin it for everyone.
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Let me give you a small example of culture and enforcement. I live in a small city in Romania. I once traveled by plane to London. The airport in my city is very small. When boarding, despite the fact that the zigzag queue was 3 lines long, people lifted the cordon and went straight to the door. I was probably the only one who followed it.
When we arrived at Heathrow, people did the same thing. The zigzag queue at Heathrow is very long, so it feels slightly fairer to skip it if there's literally no one in front of you (it was 2 AM or something). But as soon as the first person skipped the line and a second person was going for it, a guard noticed him and ordered him to go back. He tried to "negotiate" but the guard only lifted a finger and told him to "go back".
No one tried to skip after those two.
When you have a culture with no enforcement, a small minority (maybe 2%) of people ruin it for everyone and you feel like an idiot still following the rules. This makes the majority imitate the bad actors because "I might as well too".
No amount of money in the world can fix bad culture.
Are you saying you think citizens should blindly follow even pointless rules in order to be a good culture? Because otherwise your example makes no sense to me. What is gained by people walking completely through a large empty queue?
Yes. I am one of those voices. And my argument isn't that they do not cost money. My argument is that we can afford it, but chose to instead give the money to people and companies who already have enough. And I know literally no one who claims public restrooms are free to maintain.
Toilets and water should be basic infrastructure (and in some places they are). Business with toilets are a really unreliable way to offer toilets, since they will all come up with their own rules.
And it is ridiculous to pretend they can't be afforded. Ever been to Japan? Every train station has toilets since the 80s, literally every other store has freely usable public toilets. They all use the same signage. They are clean and free to use.
What is the point of society if not creating an environment within which we all can thrive? Yes I know, some want it to maximize the thriving only for certain (rich) people. I call these egoists.
Exactly. If a business can't afford to provide a bathroom, it can't afford to run a business.
It's like saying child labor should be legalised because your business would go bankrupt without underpaid child workers: it just means your business model isn't viable!
Should we also be grateful for restaurants for having seats, or for stores having breathable air?
Cities should not be incompatible with basic human existence. I can bring a bagged lunch and eat it on-the-go. Would people be as open to me taking a shit in a bag on the sidewalk?
You're absolutely correct, but the sense of entitlement from the typical HN commenter is boundless.
Many of the people who downvoted you may want nice things, but would never contribute back. They're exactly the people who would immediately ruin it. Sometimes the grass really is greener, and it's usually because there's a system at work to keep it that way.
Everyone who downvoted contributes back. They are the people who would not ruin it.
You on the other hand would definitely not want to contribute, and if any were built you'd go out of your way to ruin it, though indirectly (e.g. by working to reduce/remove funding for maintenance)
This is just a question of resource allocation and priorities. If a society can afford the displaced costs of unregulated production and extraction, or fleets of aircraft carriers and upkeep for however many thousand nuclear weapons it possesses, or oligarchs (how many is it now?) diverting wealth into superyachts, it can also afford sufficient spaces for people to piss in and janitors to clean them.
But - my experience - it's just another day of the week when advocates for hunger relief do everything from spending money on mass-market advertising, to showing up en masse at city gov't meetings to argue for the laws|zoning|city support|whatever they need, to personally mopping the floor at the soup kitchen after the meal has been served.
Vs., as a generality, "support" for public restrooms seems to consists of complaining about the status quo either privately or on the web, then going back to suffering.
Based on how involved various churches seem to be in hunger relief stuff, I'd bet most of those groups' organizational advantage comes straight from pulpits and pews. Say whatever you will about the Bad Things that religions have done all through history, or about their deities and beliefs being BS - but organized religion is organized, and understands how to make stuff happen.
Vs. - at least in private comments I hear, and the occasional essays I recall seeing on HN about this - there have been essentially zero suggestions of ever lifting a finger to address the problem. Send an unhappy email the Mayor? Nope. Google search for what a city council candidate might have said on the subject before you vote? Never. Even being tidy in the restroom of a non-restaurant business, and showing some hint of gratitude to the clerk? It is a point in favor of this particular article that it doesn't advocate an entitled and thankless attitude.
Japan blew my mind. You're never more than 5 minutes walk away from a free public restroom in any city or town I visited. They were always clean and supplied.
They show up on Maps apps and have reviews. I remember walking a few minutes more once, in Osaka, to try one that had excellent reviews (it was a fun and original design).
In some more rural areas these became squat potties with no toilet paper, so carry a pack of tissues with you.
What's savage is what Japan does to drug users and dealers. If the west did the same, we'd be a lot cleaner, too, since washrooms wouldn't be open door fentanyl naptime rooms. But at what cost?
For what it's worth I think a middle ground leaning closer to the west is the best approach. Save injection sites like the one in Vancouver have been a disaster, however
This happens in Europe, too. In Finland, in several towns it is not unusual for (the most nondiscriminating) public restrooms to be used for heroin injection, with the needle then disposed of in the toilet bowl, preventing the next visitor from using it and making the cleaner's job even more unpleasant.
I don't claim to know drugs well, but if it is being injected and causing a problem for public toilet operators, security, and cleaning staff, I just assume "heroin" because that is what people know. If you are more informed about substances, inform us here, too.
I also was pleasantly surprised of the availability when I visited. But I would recommend bringing your own soap. A lot of the restrooms in the more rural areas, and even some places in the cities, don't have any soap. Hand Sanitizer won't kill norovirus, which usually spreads in restrooms.
Turns out when you're an ethnically homogenous, hyper-racist, low immigration country that brutally enforces social norms and anti-drug policy, you can achieve enough compliance to have nice public things even in urban environments.
You cannot have high birth rates, high growth, high immigration or much innovation however.
There is no perfect design, only different trade-offs.
Singapore is a melting pot of many different ethnicities, it’s not xenophobic, and more than 40% of people living in Singapore are immigrants. And it has extremely low crime.
This lauding of ethnic homogeneity and xenophobia just seems to be a dog whistle from the American right because they want to say “See? If we kicked out all the non-whites it would fix our problems!” it’s not true; It’s just a very, very, very old racist playbook.
Singapore is just further evidence of my statements being true.
They also brutally enforce social norms and anti-drug policy, and in 2025 they had a total of 35K people granted permanent residency (in a country of 6M people).
In Singapore you're confusing temporary foreign workers with true immigration. In fact Singapore is an extremely low immigration country.
None of these foreign workers qualify for Singapore's public housing or healthcare for example.
I'm pro immigration and left-leaning, but I don't disagree with the right wingers that ethnic homogeneity leads to higher social trust (many studies have demonstrated this). I prefer having immigration though.
One of the major founding ethnicities of Singapore was overseas Chinese, who filled the same role anthropologists have long documented as Jews in Europe or Lebanese in Africa. It is unusual for subpopulations fulfilling that economic role to engage in petty crime (organized crime can be another story). And as the other poster mentions, the distinction between citizens and outsiders is about as severe as in GCC countries. So, the diversity of Singapore is somewhat less unrestrained than outsiders often depict.
Japan is great, because they realized that if you stop giving a fuck about public debt you can make a great country happen.
Meanwhile here everyone is close to tears if you propose anything for the public, because that might lead to lowering the tax break for some huge multi national that then would not get the well-deserved pay-off for their lobbying work.
And to be fair who wants to live under a regime that is the worst kind of communism, treating people who want need pee, but don't pay with respect, like Japan? (sarcasm)
> Japan is great, because they realized that if you stop giving a fuck about public debt you can make a great country happen.
I don’t know if that’s a key contributor but with those economic policies you also it seems wind up with low economic growth and in a time when you might end to raise interest rates doing so is catastrophic - leaves little room for flexibility.
> Japan is great, because they realized that if you stop giving a fuck about public debt you can make a great country happen.
Japan can largely ignore its public debt because its mostly owned by the Japanese themselves, and thus contained within the nation & erodible via inflation.
Most other countries are restricted from doing this due to the massive foreign ownership of national debt, & ending up in hands/firms/governments outside of their nation.
Yes, most people have to use a toilet occasionally?
I can personally attest that having mild gi issues can make most of Europe a bit of a hellscape, with their expensive and simultaneously gross toilets. As an Australian I never appreciated clean public toilets before going there.
Congratulations on being in the top (guess) 5% of humans in this potentially very embarrassing regard. But please maintain a discretely charitable attitude toward the many who are less fortunate than you.
Three competing gas station/ convenience stores were built in my area the past few years. All have at least 20 fuel pumps and sell hot carry out food. All have public restrooms that I assume met building codes, but one has a cramped men's room with one stall and one urinal. The other two have much larger restrooms with diaper changing stations. The other two also offer free tire inflation pumps available without purchase.
I'll go out of my way to support companies that do the right thing.
59 comments
[ 1.4 ms ] story [ 16.9 ms ] thread(Comparing to, for instance, people campaigning against hunger. Those folks seem keenly aware that food for the needy has to come from somewhere - whether donated or paid for - then be sorted and stored, possibly repackaged and transported, maybe prepared and cooked, then regularly distributed to those needing it. And if you botch even one step, then you have failed at feeding the poor.)
Well, they are. Just as drinking fountains.
> Public restrooms don't come from Santa Claus, and they cost a lot both to build and maintain. Then there are the costs and miseries of security. Gratitude toward business providing restrooms seems nonexistent.
s/restroom/park/g. Hey, it's still true! And explains why there are almost no public parks around.
They are the losers, the educated affluent, the youthful of our society.
They are the problem. What is the solution?
It's certainly a different environment from a large American city, though we also have misbehaving youths and a few drug addicts that are perhaps homeless.
It's not that hard to make toilets that are nearly indestructible and can be very efficiently cleaned by a guy in a "hazmat" suit with a pressure washer. It probably wouldn't be that hard to largely automate this. But the market for this is small and mostly governments, so prices are high and innovation is low.
https://parisjetaime.com/eng/article/public-toilets-a696
If taxes are what matters, America would have the best public restrooms in the world because it's the richest country.
But what really matters is culture. If you have a small percentage of people who are bad actors and are not punished for it, they ruin it for everyone.
---
Let me give you a small example of culture and enforcement. I live in a small city in Romania. I once traveled by plane to London. The airport in my city is very small. When boarding, despite the fact that the zigzag queue was 3 lines long, people lifted the cordon and went straight to the door. I was probably the only one who followed it.
When we arrived at Heathrow, people did the same thing. The zigzag queue at Heathrow is very long, so it feels slightly fairer to skip it if there's literally no one in front of you (it was 2 AM or something). But as soon as the first person skipped the line and a second person was going for it, a guard noticed him and ordered him to go back. He tried to "negotiate" but the guard only lifted a finger and told him to "go back".
No one tried to skip after those two.
When you have a culture with no enforcement, a small minority (maybe 2%) of people ruin it for everyone and you feel like an idiot still following the rules. This makes the majority imitate the bad actors because "I might as well too".
No amount of money in the world can fix bad culture.
Toilets and water should be basic infrastructure (and in some places they are). Business with toilets are a really unreliable way to offer toilets, since they will all come up with their own rules.
And it is ridiculous to pretend they can't be afforded. Ever been to Japan? Every train station has toilets since the 80s, literally every other store has freely usable public toilets. They all use the same signage. They are clean and free to use.
What is the point of society if not creating an environment within which we all can thrive? Yes I know, some want it to maximize the thriving only for certain (rich) people. I call these egoists.
It's like saying child labor should be legalised because your business would go bankrupt without underpaid child workers: it just means your business model isn't viable!
But that's all the more reason to get and keep the infrastructure working.
Cities should not be incompatible with basic human existence. I can bring a bagged lunch and eat it on-the-go. Would people be as open to me taking a shit in a bag on the sidewalk?
Many of the people who downvoted you may want nice things, but would never contribute back. They're exactly the people who would immediately ruin it. Sometimes the grass really is greener, and it's usually because there's a system at work to keep it that way.
You on the other hand would definitely not want to contribute, and if any were built you'd go out of your way to ruin it, though indirectly (e.g. by working to reduce/remove funding for maintenance)
But - my experience - it's just another day of the week when advocates for hunger relief do everything from spending money on mass-market advertising, to showing up en masse at city gov't meetings to argue for the laws|zoning|city support|whatever they need, to personally mopping the floor at the soup kitchen after the meal has been served.
Vs., as a generality, "support" for public restrooms seems to consists of complaining about the status quo either privately or on the web, then going back to suffering.
Based on how involved various churches seem to be in hunger relief stuff, I'd bet most of those groups' organizational advantage comes straight from pulpits and pews. Say whatever you will about the Bad Things that religions have done all through history, or about their deities and beliefs being BS - but organized religion is organized, and understands how to make stuff happen.
Vs. - at least in private comments I hear, and the occasional essays I recall seeing on HN about this - there have been essentially zero suggestions of ever lifting a finger to address the problem. Send an unhappy email the Mayor? Nope. Google search for what a city council candidate might have said on the subject before you vote? Never. Even being tidy in the restroom of a non-restaurant business, and showing some hint of gratitude to the clerk? It is a point in favor of this particular article that it doesn't advocate an entitled and thankless attitude.
They show up on Maps apps and have reviews. I remember walking a few minutes more once, in Osaka, to try one that had excellent reviews (it was a fun and original design).
In some more rural areas these became squat potties with no toilet paper, so carry a pack of tissues with you.
When I first went to Japan I felt like we in the west live like fucking savages.
Since there are no trash cans, you have to carry garbage with you until you're back home, or maybe find another store where you can dispose of it.
The toilet paper and tissues in Japan are extremely thin and in my view quite inconvenient.
For what it's worth I think a middle ground leaning closer to the west is the best approach. Save injection sites like the one in Vancouver have been a disaster, however
You cannot have high birth rates, high growth, high immigration or much innovation however.
There is no perfect design, only different trade-offs.
This lauding of ethnic homogeneity and xenophobia just seems to be a dog whistle from the American right because they want to say “See? If we kicked out all the non-whites it would fix our problems!” it’s not true; It’s just a very, very, very old racist playbook.
They also brutally enforce social norms and anti-drug policy, and in 2025 they had a total of 35K people granted permanent residency (in a country of 6M people).
In Singapore you're confusing temporary foreign workers with true immigration. In fact Singapore is an extremely low immigration country.
None of these foreign workers qualify for Singapore's public housing or healthcare for example.
I'm pro immigration and left-leaning, but I don't disagree with the right wingers that ethnic homogeneity leads to higher social trust (many studies have demonstrated this). I prefer having immigration though.
Meanwhile here everyone is close to tears if you propose anything for the public, because that might lead to lowering the tax break for some huge multi national that then would not get the well-deserved pay-off for their lobbying work.
And to be fair who wants to live under a regime that is the worst kind of communism, treating people who want need pee, but don't pay with respect, like Japan? (sarcasm)
I don’t know if that’s a key contributor but with those economic policies you also it seems wind up with low economic growth and in a time when you might end to raise interest rates doing so is catastrophic - leaves little room for flexibility.
Japan can largely ignore its public debt because its mostly owned by the Japanese themselves, and thus contained within the nation & erodible via inflation.
Most other countries are restricted from doing this due to the massive foreign ownership of national debt, & ending up in hands/firms/governments outside of their nation.
Is this really such a common occurrence for people? Because I feel like toilets are being discussed way too much.
I can personally attest that having mild gi issues can make most of Europe a bit of a hellscape, with their expensive and simultaneously gross toilets. As an Australian I never appreciated clean public toilets before going there.
I'll go out of my way to support companies that do the right thing.
Japan: Public restrooms but the playgrounds are lacking.
Australia: Kid sized toilets next to a fancy safety mesh clad playgrounds and even long drop facilities at trail heads 50km up a dirt track.