D.C.-area startup wants to solve the public bathroom problem
washingtonian.com
washingtonian.com
Personally, I consider bathroom facilities which track you personally, and can block you for any reason, not to actually be “public” bathrooms. They’re essentially proposing to put a large number of very tiny private clubs all over a city. I would argue that this is not actually solving the public bathroom problem.
The right way to solve the problem is not to harden the gatekeeping, but to improve society so that gatekeeping becomes unnecessary. But that’s hard, and has no obvious point where someone can extract money.
Will any of these work? I don’t know. But this is the way. Not stricter and stricter gatekeeping.
People who have nothing have no reason to care what others think; but people who have everything, and who never experience consequences for what they do, can be just as detached.
Also, if you think about it, this service is fundamentally not meant to serve (or rather, avoid serving) the sorts of people you're picturing. These washrooms likely aren't intended to be placed in low-economic-class areas of cities. Homeless/drug addicts/etc aren't the problem they're intending to filter out. (Why not? Because those groups of people are used to being cronically un-bathroomed, and so have become inured to just finding a corner outside to do their business. See: San Francisco. When things like open port-a-potties are placed in these areas, the homeless ignore those and continue to do what they do.)
Instead, I imagine that these bathrooms would be placed in generally bougie areas – the article cited public parks, but I imagine a major case would be "near food trucks in business districts." And the group they're trying to restrict access to, are "rich assholes who think society exists to serve them, and they owe nothing back."
Consider, after all, the premise: you scan a QR code on your smartphone in order to get access. Who even has a smartphone with an active data plan? Not homeless people. This service is designed to serve exactly the same target audience as e.g. e-bikes/e-scooter rental services.
You might be surprised.
Alternatively flip it around and the toilet scans your QR - this could even be a bit of paper. Ultra low tech.
I'm good with that. It seems easier, and more important, it would work, and you're just singing Kumbaya.
The very fact that we don’t all live in filth now, means that you have to pay a high premium to get someone to choose to be the person whose job constantly exposes them to it.
See also: the profitability of electronics recycling (i.e. picking through piles of scrap for base metal to melt) in the developing vs. developed world. When people live in areas with mounds of trash piled all around them, they’ll dig through that trash for Pennie’s, because they already do thing like shoveling it out of the way every day. When people live in a nice house in a clean city, though, you’ll have to pay them a lot more to touch a scrap heap.
(Or, to put that another way: it’s “but I might get tetanus!” vs. “My base risk of getting tetanus is so high that this job won’t increase my risk by much in relative terms… so sure, why not.”)
Does SF have only a few dozen "poop disasters" a day? The language in this thread suggests the number is higher and the nature is worse than your language would imply, but I wouldn't know as I've only been a tourist there.
Even if "lots" was enough, how much did you earn doing that job? I don't know American politics beyond Team Red vs. Team Blue, are American cities willing to pay for enough cleaners?
If a law is too expensive to enforce justly, maybe we need to reconsider that law.
The only thing stopping it in first world countries is an aversion of democratic oversight of corporations.
i’ve seen some public bathrooms are so mistreated that i don’t know how you pay anyone to clean them. i’d certainly feel awful asking a janitor to clean them without a hazmat suit, a pressure washer and a bag full of tergazyme.
If the problem of where everyone can go is hard, why not at least try to solve the problem of where people willing to pay a lot can go? Lots of empty storefronts in downtown SF right now. $5 or even $10 a go could be cheaper and quicker than buying something I didn’t really want in some restaurant just so I can use their restroom.
Relying on our schools will educate us out of the problem won’t work. We have too many narcissists and sociopaths in our society, and we spend too much time catering to and rewarding them.
300% public shaming. Japan is an example of this working, to an unbelievably ideal extent even.
Public restrooms in Japan are *clean*, they are spotless and sanitary no matter what time of day you visit one. You can probably eat off of those toilet seats, for all I know.
The reason for this is because individuals who do not clean up after themselves in public spaces are shamed and ridiculed by Japanese society at large with no holds barred. It's "just not how upstanding members of society operate" to make a mess, be it in a public restroom or anywhere else, in Japan.
You might see Japanese people picking up trash and cleaning up after themselves when leaving a public venue like a stadium or theater, probably other peoples' refuse too while they are at it. Frankly bewildering acts from the perspective of most westerners, but it's literally that sort of social attitude to be upstanding individuals that leads to clean public restrooms.
Not being from Japan, I’m curious: how does this work in practice? If I were to go into a bathroom in Japan and smear my own shit all over the walls and leave, 1. how does anyone know I did it, 2. if somehow someone actually knew I did it, how exactly would I be shamed and ridiculed, and 3. how would that negatively affect me if I didn’t care about shame or was incapable of feeling shame.
Japanese are raised from the very beginning to be ashamed of making a mess and not cleaning up, to be ashamed of being irresponsible. Everyone is taught that "the Sun is watching you", that someone (or something!) somewhere is always watching you and judging you for your actions.
A westerner might shit up a public restroom, intentionally or otherwise, and say to himself "I don't care; cleaning this up is the janitor's job."
A Japanese person won't even dare, because they are taught to clean up regardless of a janitor.
It is a common tradition and mandate in Japanese schools for students to clean their classrooms (and every-so-often even restrooms!) themselves at the end of the school day. Yes, the schools have janitors, the students are told to clean up themselves anyway because that's just how good people behave.
This is all a facet of education and parenting, and the result of generations and millenia of such teachings. Their thought processes are fundamentally different from the west: A better society starts by being better individuals themselves first.
Public restrooms in the west being an absolute shit show (pun intended) are a reflection of failed education and parenting in western society. The west can, and should, do better.
Great, but this contradicts your other post that seemed to be claiming that bathroom shaming specifically was the solution the bathroom problem, which the parent was rightly incredulous of as how it actually works in Japan.
This also works for obesity, and I've seen it in action in many nations apart from just Japan. Social pressure works. We've known it works for millennia. I'm not sure why we suddenly started believing that social pressure to not litter and eat less was ineffective and even immoral.
Ultimately the difference is that American society is one in which individualism is prized over all. The greatest evils are those that would in any way infringe on something that could be considered a personal liberty. And it’s only gotten worse in the last 50 years. I can’t imagine modern American society rising to meet any major challenge of the last 100 years the way we have in the past.
You can suppress it though. Public shaming, forced fines, get violent with them... All these things work to certain degree and will get you through the day. But again - you're not solving the problem, you're just suppressing. Stupidity is ultimately unsolvable, because nature; and that is why all those utopic dreams always fail with impressive death counts.
I am glad to see a company trying to do something about this issue. I'm not thrilled with their solution but even if they fail, perhaps it at least gets people to stop accepting that nothing can be done about it.
If the offenders thought that the locals might punish them, they would behave better.
Retributive justice is not really effective when the offender’s world view internally justifies their actions.
It’s a common theme that criminals are victims of circumstance to such a degree that the enforcing entity is seen as another arm of the system that caused their criminal behavior in the first place.
Imagine being in a car crash, having difficult pains, getting prescribed oxy- or hydrocodone, and after the script runs out, asking for a refill gets you a stamped as a drug seeker, never to receive another prescription ever again.
But the pain and the withdrawals are still there. This has created an incredible numbed of convicted criminals and homeless people. A Venn diagram of these two populations overlaps with people who spend nights in public toilets.
This is just denying the offenders all agency. If they literally cannot help but commit crime, the response from the society should then be to lock them up, as unfit to live in the society.
I do not in fact believe that to be the case. Criminals have agency, and, as can be readily observed, respond to incentives too.
I understand the sentiment but I ultimately find such a stance unhelpful and counterproductive because it is essentially saying the problems we face would go away if we only just created a utopia. Like, what's stopping us?
Trying to create better public restrooms with a new system seems far more achievable than implementing a new socioeconomic system where no one feels like trashing public bathrooms and common areas.
Apartheid regimes or extreme poverty lead to gated compounds for the rich with depressing predictability.
Toilets that exclude the poor are great for ensuring the rich have access to nice private toilets. Doesn't help those who can't afford the subscription fee.
The problem is that people are using these labels for countries like America, which clearly do not have Apartheid or extreme poverty. When one is so extreme in their beliefs and hyperbole, they are effectively asking for total social restructure. Ignoring the fact that such unhinged people should be nowhere near any such responsibility, the user above is correct: this will never happen. While these extremists wait for the glorious revolution, people in need today are missing out on good but not perfect solutions.
I don't think leaving toilets in a usable state after using them has anything to do with being rich or poor. It's not something that requires money.
This is pure fantasy. Society will always need prisons. Sure, there is much that society can and ought to do in order to reduce what may be judged as tragic or unnecessary incarcerations, but the incarceration rate will never be literally zero. Having prisons doesn't make society a "dictatorship".
Not every society has needed prisons, especially smaller, tribal ones. Maybe our complex, global one currently does but I don't think it is a hard requirement.
Prisons are an improvement over that.
Hell, I've seen a university professor walk out of a public bathroom without washing his hands after taking a shit.
To be completely blunt people are fucking animals and many of them do these kinds of disgusting things in private bathrooms because they can do it with impunity. They don't care about other people and they revel in knowing that their disgusting behaviour is detrimental to the rest of us.
Suggesting that we need to raise society up to some post-scarcity Star Trek utopia where all people are paragons of humanity before we can have clean public bathrooms is absurd.
Some people are influenced by propaganda and the historical connotations associated with the word "dictatorship."
There's nothing inherently bad about the word, it's just the association. If you look at dictatorships objectively there are many successful examples. Here are a few modern ones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benevolent_dictatorship
That's just a couple. Your first reaction would be to say that the examples represent a minority. The problem is, though, if you look at ancient history, the most successful civilizations that prospered and succeeded were basically all empires with central rule. It shows that if you were intellectually unbiased, you would not simply dismiss "dictatorship" in a single sentence.
Democracy is a recent phenomenon when viewed in terms of human history and, if anything, still experimental (there are many examples of complete failures of democratic governments).
That being said, to swing it around to your statement. There is no definitive "right" way to solve a problem. Gatekeeping could work, and it could fail. Simply "improving society" can also lead to complete and utter failure. The inputs and various factors influencing the outcomes are so complex we cannot point to one way that works.
So I say give gatekeeping a try. It's not like the government is doing this either... It's a business.
It’s been tried. Many times. Throughout human history. It is littered with stratified societies, where every man had his lessers and betters to kick and cower before, respectively. This did not lead to any good outcomes. I say let equality and mutual respect have a chance.
I'm saying try it with restrooms. Because this hasn't been tried yet at all.
It's of course ideal when everyone is so nice and civilized that you don't need to lock your door. The problem is that such a society is a great hunting ground for a rare breaker, because it does not have a mechanism to resist breaking the rules. Such a breaker can inflict disproportionate damage and ruin things for everyone.
Improving mores and living conditions should go hand in hand with protecting these improved mores and conditions from those who try to push the society back to the savage state for a minor benefit for themselves.
There will always be a small amount of people who don’t obey the social niceties. Some are psychopaths, or have some other mental problems. Some may have extenuating circumstances. But I believe that society can be improved such that these people are rare and far between, and society can invest in picking up the remaining slack.
> Improving mores and living conditions should go hand in hand with protecting these improved mores and conditions from those who try to push the society back to the savage state for a minor benefit for themselves.
Sounds great, except whenever such things are actually implemented, it tends to be a lot of steadily increasing punishment; any improvements, whatever they were initially, will eventually be cut from the budget since they do not give immediate visible results, whereas harsh punishment get great ratings. People love a good public flogging.
This is a problem perpetuating itself. People don’t believe in the public spirit and goodwill of others, so they don’t want to invest in actually improving it, since they think it can’t be done. And so it goes.
There is no way to provide things in a way that people cannot ruin them. And as long as people continue to ruin them (ie, we haven't yet "fixed society" as someone suggested above), we can either prevent those people from ruining them, or not provide them in the first place. I, for one, believe that "don't provide them in the first place" is not the right solution.
This is, of course, only papering over the problem in the short run. Which is why the real solution must be to improve society.
Ostracizing people who behave badly will only make society worse.
Even if you don't have users who pee all over the ring and floor the bathroom will look like a mess after 100 visits.
We clean the bathrooms every two weeks and it’s far from “a mess” when it comes time to clean it, so much so that we need to have a calendar reminder to do it.
I think there’s something about “the public” that’s underlying that difference.
Don't give someone a roof and a toilet and they may just find any old place to go!
If people shall care about collective goods, there needs to be an actual collective spirit first. Places where this type of public infrastructure actually works are also places where people realized that you can't create a good society by letting the rich hoard their wealth and build walls while the homeless are beaten instead of helped.
SF is a truly dystopian place in a certain sense.
From people actively soiling the facilities, to people not giving a fuck about leaving a mess (making a 'seat cover' out of tp, then leaving it on the floor; not cleaning after themselfes), to people with a 'not my job' egocentrical attitude. Those are studied engineers with good salaries, workplace stability. In Europe. The facilities are nice, bright and clean. Until those people leave them...
From these lifelong experiences, I would guess there is a certain, not so small amount of people that are secretly incapable of altruistic behavior. For numerous reasons. Those ruin it for the rest of us.
For this reason, as brutal and as it seems at first glance, I would really like to see such people identified and punished harshly for their parasitic selfishness.
A nation needs a unified direction with unified values. Eating different food is fine. Disagreeing about core tenets of society like free speech, equal rights, and law and justice, is not.
You can get all moral about it with his opinion or her opinion or whatever and I get that happiness != money and all that jazz. But in general the one quantitative metric closest to the concept of "winning" is money.
Those 2 cannot be true if the blame is on capitalism.
These economies lean towards socialism more then capitalism. In fact you can even call them socialist governments.
Homeless people are coddled and taken care of. Free syringes so they don't get HIV. Homeless people aren't beaten. If you're homeless SF is paradise.
People who pretend that SF having drug addicts with open sores assaulting each other and the rest of the citizenry is a housing crisis disgust me. It's a policy which actively aids and abets human misery.
The implication being that without policies that are friendly to struggling/addicted/ill/homeless folks there would somehow be less of them?
Where can someone on a bartenders wage buy a house and work where they work? Where can they even buy land?
Yet there are vast swaths of land unused. Countless gigantic homes take up enormous spaces. And all the policy protects the people with those homes and property instead of the majority of people.
We don’t have a homeless crisis. We have a resource allocation crisis.
we have similar system already in place. It is called "no-fly list". Interesting that most of the people on this site is against it while seem to support the proposed "no-bathroom list". I wonder why so. May be it is because the people here allow for non-zero possibility that they may be subjected to the former while they are sure that the latter would never apply to them.
Not equivalent.
Sticky and stinky urine, in combination with frequent needs are three major symptoms for a plethora of problems. Protein, from blood and mucus in either stool or urine are also both a big flag and they are very sticky to surfaces. Really sticky, and really stinky.
Of course there is other reasons like drugs and alcohol. The restroom could detect those too and put it on the users permanent record.
If anyone here is an Terry Pratchett fan, there is this scene with Cohen the Barbarian. The quote goes: the three best things in life are hot water, good dentishtry and shoft lavatory paper. Its a joke with a bit of truth to it. Good teeth and good bowel movements are luxury objects that people tend to only notice when they lost them.
However I also think the system requires something kinda like forgiveness, or maybe better yet, redemption. If, once you have been kicked out there is nothing you can do to be let back in then nothing incentivises you to better your actions.
Maybe you could be let back in again by paying a cleaning fee, and having to provide pictures after you used the toilet for the next 40 times.
Accountability is super important, but if you don't also have redemption then you end up with the US criminal system.
(With apologies to John Donne)
You need more budget put into these things.
The best question ever "Which VC would invest in WC ?"
Forcing the banned people to use some street or park for their relief would be better? They obviously don't care where the literal shit piles up as long as it doesn't diminish their profits.
Wheelchair accessibility triples the size and price of the units. Here's what JCDEaux installs in countries that don't require it.[1]
San Francisco has an attended 24 hour portable restroom operation in poor parts of the city, called "Pit Stop". Total operating costs are around $30 per flush.[2]
The most workable low-end solution currently seems to be the Portland Loo.[3] "The sleek and modern kiosk discourages crime with graffiti-proof wall panels and open grating that allows you to see if and how many people are inside." It's not self-cleaning like the expensive JCDeaux units, but it can be hosed down or if necessary pressure-washed.
[1] https://www.jcdecaux.lt/en/news/modern-public-toilet-klaiped...
[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/san-francisco-public-pit-sto...
At this price, isn't it cheaper to operate traditional restroom with full time janitor instead?
Some people like to carry bidets they can fill to clean themselves, some people like to wet toilet papers they use for cleaning, some people feel safety and more secure being able to clean themselves and make ablution in an enclosed bathroom environment.
Certainly hope the project fails.
This is some questionable math. They took the costs of the units and staff and divided by the number of late night usages to arrive at ~$30 per usage.
But if they were used twice as much that rate would be halved, etc.
In any case the fixed costs are the same regardless of usage metrics.
It's very misleading to take a highly fixed cost and label it like a usage-based cost.
I live in Hong Kong and am still a little amazed at the ubiquitous, free, clean public restrooms. They're not luxurious usually, but they're available and never a disaster. As far as I can tell, the city employs a pretty large staff to check and clean them throughout the day. But then there's also no massive homeless and drug problem like there is in the US.
Well that's the key. Go somewhere without that problem in the US, and every amenity is easy to find. In some places, you can visit a stranger's house and ask to use the toilet, which I've seen before.
McDonald's and Starbucks etc. will have no problem figuring out how to qualify for the tax break and jump through the hoops to get it. Then the city gets hundreds of new public bathrooms that they don't have to maintain for minimal cost.
A small mom and pop bodega or flower shop or whatever that barely makes a profit might decide it's not worth it. If it's a requirement, that business just ceases to exist and the city is deprived of it. If it's optional, they can still operate, and the city doesn't end up a homogeneous wasteland of corporate brands. They just don't get a tax break, but if they're not making much money, they probably aren't paying much tax anyway.
In Italy all the public business like coffee shops ("bars") have to let free access to the toilet by law, even if you don't buy anything.
Um, solve the public restrooms problem for whom? Granted I’ve been living far from DC for 20 years, but I spent a large chunk of this summer there. Access to public restrooms was the same as it is here in Seattle: only a problem if you’re a street critter. People who can scan QR codes already have plenty of access to restrooms, they just need to at least suggest they’ll buy something. Homeless people and people barely making ends meet need to be able to use a restroom, and they shouldn’t need a smartphone to do that.
HN is the garden spot of Ceti Alpha Six.
The general plan seems to be that the mental patients can't be misstreated if they get no treatment.
I blame the "One flew over the coconest"-mentality.
Agreed that everyone should have access to functional bathrooms and scanning QR codes to do so is silly.
The Marble Bar is a 3m walk, Century Bar is 5m, Ryan's Bar is 9m, Burrow Bar is 5m, and Papa Gede's is 3m. All of this excludes the mass of pubs and clubs that shutdown due to lockout. I definitely feel out of place with what you've shown me!
The European model is normally coin operated which is still a little annoying but at least if you know and carry a few coins you can get in quickly.
We meet friends at my place or yours. We don't have a lot of pubs. Etc.
In parts of the Bay Area, sometimes you can't find a restroom no matter who you are. The UC Berkeley campus during school breaks is one such place. The campus has 0, and the businesses in the surrounding city have very few restrooms, even for paying customers. The subway has restrooms, but they're nearly always closed. You pretty much have to go to a sit-down restaurant (good luck if it's after 9pm). In 2020-1, this was 10X worse with everything being closed.
Paid high tech street toilets are a logical conclusion of a culture with little shared public good. The human rights and priority of the individual is respected and maintained.
Public toilets will go away as the public goes away.
What's this startups' business model?
Perhaps they'll do some 'regulatory arbitrage' like Uber? Ie just operate in what's at best a legal grey area, and then use lobbying and lawyers to legitimise your business model?
>Currently, businesses and other public entities can rent a Throne on a monthly basis, which includes cleaning and servicing. But Heinzelman said the company is also exploring an option to purchase a Throne or to rent a larger volume at once. So far, the startup has raised seed funding primarily from angel investors and will be looking to raise a Series A in mid-2023.
Thanks to that Series-A comment, my pessimistic take is that these will be "public" and "free" for now, and eventually we'll see them implementing monthly fees/subscriptions and/or microtransactions or whathaveyou.
Edit: Seems I'm ignorant in this area and that paid public toilets are against the law in many areas. Still can't help but be pessimistic, though.
[1]https://agadir-group.com/dc-startup-throne-is-bringing-tech-...
To expand on this, they were specifically coin operated _bathroom stalls_ - they didn't charge for _urinals_, and this put a disproportionate burden on women were charged for number one and number two.
Here's a Lockpicking Lawyer where he picks & demonstrates the coin operated lock: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0foSHWP7rc
The Port Authority bus terminal bathrooms recently had a full renovation. It was nice enough for a little while, but it didn't take long for it to become a shithole. The money spent to clean it up and renovate it turned to shit.
When I worked in a gas station we cleaned on the hour and signed for it and this was in a place where people were generally decent about not making a mess.
More than the $500,000 the Downtown Seattle Association spent last year alone on hosing out one alley?
I have my doubts. However, were it the case I'd still say it is the right thing to do. Jury trials cost a lot of money, death penalty appeals are whoppingly expensive, eminent domain is costing Sound Transit a fortune for its light rail network. As it turns out, living in a free society is expensive.
Frequent arguments against public accommodation is that it is gross or unsanitary it requires expensive maintenance.
To me, there is no question. A free society should have to go very far to accommodate people so that it avoids taking their freedom over something biologically necessary.
As someone with IBS and a few other related things this sounds like it has the potential to be incredibly annoying and frustrating.
Hey American cities! Charge $1 to use a toilet like they do in Europe.
I mean, maybe paying for it makes people be more careful because of some psychological reasons... possibly.
I sincerely hope not.
The big difference ? I usually had to pay a nominal amount - 1 euro, to use it. Totally worth it IMO.
Although I found it odd they sometimes had a person with a white lab coat outside. Why the lab coat ?
Edit: we had a cart full of food doing proper grocery shopping, we weren't there to just to use the bathroom.
It’s like trash, give people a trashcan and they will use it. Provide public restrooms and people will use them instead of letting it go on the street
See eg https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-19/why-the-u...
For example, people experiencing persistent mental health issues would literally be locked up "for the common good".
I think what we are seeing is people trying to use technology to replace earlier (primarily social) technologies of control like shaming, religious instruction, tighter communities, aggressive policing etc.
It's not the amenities themselves being reinvented, it's new techniques of social control to uphold good behaviour and care for shared resources.
I don’t know that we’re doing much better now. Is it so great that now the same people spend a few decades self-medicating and living like rats on the streets because they can’t escape their inner demons without extremely intense intervention?
Do people really look at a person having a violent psychotic breakdown for the 10th time this year in the street and pat society on the back that at least he’s not in a mental institution..
I’d much rather see brainpower being spent on thinking about innovation in cleanliness than on the next “open source DataDog clone”. Let’s encourage people to go after hard but important problems (but not shy away from valid criticism, of course).
I'm fairly empathetic to the notion, but city councils are aggressive on this, it's an impossible continuum of BS.
There is a staircase in Vancouver where the 'ramp' actually criss-crosses the steps in a zig zag down the hill and people are screaming that the wheelchair people wouldn't be able to handle 'the traffic' of people going up and down the stairs in front of them. Which is insanely and bizarrely ridiculous of course, because they'd nary cross paths with anyone else, and if they did, it'd be the same as navigating the regular sidewalk.
The lack of public bathrooms is a social and organizational problem. Our city councils are insane, we can't get along, we can't be reasonable, we try to accommodate everyone and everything.
All of that said - an Uber/AirBnB type thing, if it were to be accepted, might be nice.
I wonder if Starbucks and McDonald's and gas stations could be 'required' to have such 3rd party 'pay bathrooms' on premise as per city reg or something.
Ideally they'd be run by the city but I have little faith in our operational capacity otherwise.
In my area there is a simple map layer that shows all of the available public bathrooms. Other than being a convenience for the public, it's partly an essential service for people with crohn's syndrome, IBS or other medical issues that lead to urgent toileting requirements.
This seems like an inexpensive way of better utilising what is already there - this is something that should be done in addition to any new toilet-services.
Someone: It's time to get shwifty in here...
Being upset that people dirty public restrooms, shoot up in them or over occupy them is not a justification for creating a situation which takes people's freedom away.
This and several other laws create a situation in America where it is a crime to be destitute.
The destitute do also patronize businesses as well from time to time. You do nobody any favors by infantilizing them. Grown adults can find a place to relieve themselves without fouling the public space. If not, perhaps they need to be placed in a facility where they can receive the care and supervision they need.
I'm all for the government providing and maintaining public restrooms as well (or subsidizing businesses that do, per my other comment), but that needs to be coupled with enforcement against people who would abuse them, as well as a general societal will to not let people rot in the street in the name of respecting their life choices.
Train/Bus stations don't have bathrooms.
Homeless shelters and the churches which do provide services make you leave during the day and do not let people back in under any circumstances until around 5 PM.
Fast food restaurants, gas stations and hotel lobbies all lock their bathrooms and allow access to patrons only.
Which leaves shopping malls and libraries. In a huge city, that's a pretty low toilet density.
> but that needs to be coupled with enforcement against people who would abuse them,
I have no problem with this. Vandalizing public utilities should be a crime which is enforced. Having to answer the call of nature should not be.
Even places with locks on the bathrooms will usually let people use them if they ask. It is not unreasonable to imagine someone, no matter how destitute, getting something off the dollar menu at McDonald’s. Many do. Many certainly have no trouble finding enough money for drugs or alcohol so it’s not unreasonable to expect they can get a fast food meal and use the bathroom.
In the absolute worst case scenario, find a secluded place in a park and dig a hole, or get a plastic bag and throw it away. There’s no excuse for leaving feces on the sidewalk.
Sorry, but “don’t shit in the common area” has been table stakes for participating in human society since the beginning of time. Even in a hunter gatherer society someone taking a dump next to the campfire would be rightly ostracized.
Less than you think. I ride the bus all around the Seattle area and I can't think of a bus station here that has a bathroom.
> Even places with locks on the bathrooms will usually let people use them if they ask.
Not here.
> It is not unreasonable to imagine someone, no matter how destitute, getting something off the dollar menu at McDonald’s.
You're talking about a couple bucks a day for people subsisting on $200 of snap benefits a month.
> any certainly have no trouble finding enough money for drugs or alcohol
It's almost as if people suffering from substance abuse disorder make poor financial choices
> In the absolute worst case scenario, find a secluded place in a park and dig a hole, or get a plastic bag and throw it away.
Just to be clear, that is still illegal.
> There’s no excuse for leaving feces on the sidewalk.
I agree. People shitting right on the sidewalk are probably in need of medical attention.
> Sorry, but “don’t shit in the common area” has been table stakes for participating in human society since the beginning of time.
You know that people used to empty their chamber pots on the street right? You know India is undergoing a campaign right now to decrease ubiquitous public defecation and that involves building a million plus toilets?
> Even in a hunter gatherer society someone taking a dump next to the campfire would be rightly ostracized.
Probably. I don't think they'd lock you in a cage for it though.
Then when you find someone breaking that law, stop them. If they’re addicted to drugs, send them to rehab, whether they want to go or not. If they’re mentally ill, send them to an institution. If they’ve just decided they’d rather live that way, then jail, because it’s simply not allowed.
Yet when we try to make and enforce laws like that, people get told they’re “criminalizing poverty” and we end up with the situation we have now.
Yes, you can reasonably expect adults to function and take care of themselves, including finding shelter, food and appropriate restroom facilities, without a government agent holding their hand every step of the way. Indeed, the vast majority of people do and we depend on it.
You can make all the rules you want and enforce it in whatever draconian manner you choose and there will still be tent cities etc as long as America keeps underbuilding adequate levels of the right kind of housing.
And in case you didn't know, America gutted public mental health over the past 50 odd years.