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Comment by dawnerd | Hacker News Reader

This is already a thing in Europe and it’s awful. Paying a euro or two just to go sucks.

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.

My experience in Italy was that the paid toilets were worse maintained than basically every free toilet in Australia.

One of the toilets I paid for didn’t even have a seat.

That's just normal in Italy. The seats are often missing. People are used to it.

I’m imagining a student flat in Rome with a toilet seat mounted next to a stolen stop sign.

Spending the money doesn't suck. Having to wrangle the payment system when you're in a hurry, that does suck.

The last time I went I just had to blip my credit/debit card. Very convenient. (Stockholm Central Station, Sweden).

Now try using a toilet in Germany without having coins on you.

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.

You collect tax to pay for the necessities and then don’t charge a per-use fee.

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

> It's a negligible amount of money for the person using the toilet

Spoken with the voice of privilege.

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.

Yikes, begging to use a restroom? You'd think using the bathroom would be within the realm of a human right.

By the time someone gives me money I am covered in poo. :P

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.

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.

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.

The ones I used in Paris recently were no better, one worse, than any other free public toilet. IMO tourist taxes should be the thing paying for it.

I'm in Europe, and I think it's great. :)

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.

Better than not being able to go. That's the beauty of capitalism

“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.

The current solution in many cities is no bathroom. I would rather pay for a bathroom than shit myself

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