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Where did all the public bathrooms go?
- maelito 23d agoDon't know where they went, but here they are : https://cartes.app/?cat=toilettes&perspective=non#14.58/48.86164/2.3488 https://cartes.app/?cat=toilettes&perspective=non#14.58/48.8...
- mring33621 23d ago"Closed due to COVID-19"
- readingnews 23d agoThis seems to be happening in public parks also. I visit two cities literally half way across the country from one another, and have visited them for decades. All of the public restrooms in the public city parks (which are quite popular with locals and tourists) are gone. First they closed them, then they tore down the buildings. Locals thought "oh, must be putting in new ones", but no, they were torn down and never replaced.
- mjhay 23d agoAround where I live, they first shut down during covid with the excuse of preventing transmission. Of course they just never opened up again. Ditto water fountains.
- Daviey 23d agoThey all look like lovely "cottages".
- zabzonk 23d agoHence one of the activities they are best known for - "cottaging".
- jonshariat 23d agoSomething else I've noticed, garbage cans are disappearing. I had some trash in my car I needed to get rid of: McDonalds? None outside, Tacobell? none outside, CVS? none outside OR inside, The entire rest of that shopping center? nope. Luckily gas stations still have them but its sad to see these community service type things disappear.
- hlynurd 23d agoYou would think it's in the interest of whoever is responsible for keeping those areas clean to offer garbage cans.
- xahrepap 23d agoI live by a park. These places don't care for the same reason the park doesn't care: the wind blows it all in my yard, not their problem anymore.
- ssl-3 23d agoIt would be, if the responsible parties were making rational decisions.
- jerlam 23d agoIt is unlikely the low-ranked employees responsible for cleaning up garbage are making decisions on whether to construct or retain garbage cans.
- ssl-3 23d agoAgreed. It was never my intent to suggest that they would be doing so. So move up the management ladder, if you will, until a party that is responsible for making this kind of decision is reached. That's the class of party of which I was speaking, and where I suggested that irrational decisions are being made. Someone -- at some point -- did make a decision to eliminate outdoor trash cans at these establishments. They used to be present and no longer are, and they didn't disappear on their own.
- polski-g 23d agoDownstream of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_to_End_Pay_Toilets_in_America https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_to_End_Pay_Toilets_i...
- tomjakubowski 23d agoFascinating stuff. And what a logo. > Starting a national crusade to cast away coin-operated commodes, Gessel told newsmen, "You can have a fifty-dollar bill, but if you don't have a dime, that metal box is between you and relief." I'm sympathetic to this argument. Carrying around loose change with US-style billfold wallets has never been convenient, and back in the day you'd often find yourself without change for a bus fare or a pay phone and so on in a critical moment. Today, though, almost everyone carries either a contactless credit card or a phone with an NFC wallet. I would pay $0.25 for access to a clean public toilet if I could swipe one of those instead of having to carry change. LA Metro has these restroom facilities at their rail stations, which are free for a 10 minute visit but require an access code on your phone or a standalone entry pass. I've never used one, but heard great things. https://thronelabs.co/ https://thronelabs.co/
- ipdashc 23d ago> Today, though, almost everyone carries either a contactless credit card or a phone with an NFC wallet. I would pay $0.25 for access to a clean public toilet if I could swipe one of those instead of having to carry change. This is one of those things that gets ruined by credit card transaction fees though, right? It is kinda depressing that after all these fintech companies and society's ~decade long scam-filled obsession with cryptocurrency, we still don't really have a good solution for microtransactions. Credit card companies still take that fixed fee everywhere, right?
- lotsofpulp 23d agoIt gets ruined by the government choosing to not operate an electronic money transfer system as infrastructure similar to cash.
- ModernMech 23d agoThis is why anyone from Eastern PA knows Wawa is considered essential public infrastructure.
- gib444 23d agoIn the UK, it's a big pub chain called Wetherspoons. City centres often have multiple of them too. I don't think any of the toilets need an access code, unlike a lot of other places. You can get a £2 pint of cider or ~£1.80 half-decent coffee while you're there too
- izzydata 23d agoI am going to start calling the reduction or removal of minor things that helped society "micro regressions".
- Avicebron 23d agoIs tragedy of the commons overused?
- jihadjihad 23d agoEnpissification?
- nashashmi 23d agoMicro-regressions will largely be in the realm of charity and hospitality as society has aggressively embodied capitalism's cost and benefit analysis.
- bluefirebrand 23d agoDon't forget privacy Feels like tons of micro regressions around our expectations of privacy these days
- mingus88 23d agoI’m not sure it’s a regression really If you look at a graph of the world population it’s seems clear to me that freely available common resources are just going to continue to get overused and ruined as we continue to add people to the equation
- dayyan 23d ago[flagged]
- MrDrMcCoy 23d agoI want to know where the public water fountains went. Those are arguably a safety feature.
- redsocksfan45 23d ago[dead]
- nikole9696 23d agoAt least in my area, a lot of folks didn't trust the tap water, and more didn't trust the fountain to not be super germy, so fountains just didn't end up used. I noticed many shuttered during COVID then they never got turned back on, then eventually got removed. I have seen indoor fountains gradually being replaced with water bottle filler stations, but I personally wonder how often those filters get replaced.
- frompdx 23d agoIn Portland, OR there are 100 or so public fountains known as Benson Bubblers. If you drink from one there is a small chance it is one of the bubblers I machined back in the day. Unfortunately, there have been a number of instances of these bubblers being used as a bidet so you can imagine folks in the know are hesitant to use them. However, the Water Bureau says they are routinely cleaned. https://www.portland.gov/water/about-portlands-water-system/bubblers https://www.portland.gov/water/about-portlands-water-system/...
- Simon_O_Rourke 23d agoI think it stopped once public bathrooms became used for things other than taking a whizz
- expedition32 23d agoYeah you have to actually hire people to clean them and patrol for homeless weirdos. Which is why in my country they cost money. I never really understood the economics of public restrooms in America. Who pays for them?
- addaon 23d ago> Who pays for them? Americans. The same population as most of the beneficiaries.
- cnity 23d agoThe public pays for them via taxes.
- mosura 23d agoThe problem with homeless is also what do you do with them when you find them?
- nitwit005 23d agoSeveral bathrooms at the openings to hiking trails near me had been smeared with feces. The local newspaper reported someone was caught and taken to a homeless shelter. I remain suspicious that simply resulted in the shelter's bathroom meeting the same fate.
- selectodude 23d agoWe thought it was mean to homeless people to make them pay for bathrooms and made it illegal to charge. Then once bathrooms because a massive cost center, we closed all the public restrooms and made it a sex offense to piss outside. So now instead of making homeless people pay $1 for a toilet, we throw them in jail at a cost of $100k/yr. Thank these folks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_to_End_Pay_Toilets_in_America https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_to_End_Pay_Toilets_i... - the road to hell is paved with good intentions I suppose.
- baggy_trough 23d agoThey were lost due to the tender ministrations of the bottom quintile.
- itintheory 23d agoYou're blaming ... the poor?
- baggy_trough 23d agoNo, the antisocial.
- micromacrofoot 23d ago> Notably, they were only intended for use by men. this complicates public bathrooms quite a bit, and ADA requirements do too... once you've got a place to sit and doors on rooms you've got the vagrancy and drug use problem though China does ok with the model of a big room with holes in the ground and almost no dividers or affordances at all (everyone brings their own toilet paper, old people bring their own chairs)... they have public workers to hose them out
- mosura 23d agoSounds like the Romans had it better than your description of the Chinese, though I am sure in the modern world someone would be stealing the sponges for unfathomable reasons.
- cube00 23d agoStrange "For the Classroom" question. Men seeking same-sex encounters transformed the pissoir into something its planners never intended. Who ultimately determines the meaning of a public space: its designers, authorities, or the people who use it? The law determines that public space can't be used for any sexual activity. I'm not sure what constructive classroom discussion you can have when the example is based on the law being broken.
- smcg 23d agoThat didn't stop... a lot of people.
- xhevahir 23d agoThey're probably talking about the sociological functions of the facility, not the set of legally permissible uses of it. (There's a pretty famous book on this particular application, Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex In Public Places.)
- teraflop 23d agoSurely there are all kinds of interesting and constructive classroom discussions to be had about lawbreaking. Classrooms teach about reality (among other things) and there are many things in reality that don't involve obedience to the law, as it exists at a particular time and place. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_what_it_does https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
- throwawayk7h 23d agoSee also also: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/come-on-obviously-the-purpose-of https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/come-on-obviously-the-purpo...
- ludwik 23d agoIt sounds like, of the three options given, you are squarely in the “authorities” camp (although it seems to me that you interpret the question as asking what you believe should happen, whereas it appears to be asking what happens in practice). Wouldn’t it be interesting to hear the other points of view?
- bethekidyouwant 23d agoJust switch to porta-potties.
- strbean 23d agoI was in France recently and used a public restroom. It had an attendant, and a fee of €0.50. Charging for the restroom is unfortunate, but this setup is certainly better than eliminating public restrooms entirely.
- kazinator 23d agoThat practically ensures that some people who have to go really badly, and for whom €0.50 is a big deal, will just drop their business on the sidewalk.
- seszett 23d agoThe only place in France I have seen this happen was Paris and public toilets are free there. I haven't seen paid toilets at all in France for a long time, actually. Maybe in train stations though.
- strbean 23d agoThis was a year ago in Nice for reference.
- seszett 23d agoOh I don't doubt you, I was just reflecting that I think that paid toilets have largely been made free in the last 10 years or so. But I'm sure there still exist quite a few, and I wouldn't be surprised if they were especially found in right-wing cities like Nice.
- kazinator 23d agoThe modern toilet should let you pay with your personal info: Toilet: "Sign up (learn more) or proceed with Google Account ..." Google: "pissoir.fr wants access to your pissing history ...(Y/n)" Toilet: By pissing here, you consent to the collection and analysis of urine samples .. :)
- farceSpherule 23d ago[dead]
- beardyw 23d agoYes, where are you going to take a bath, in public. It's interesting that this subject is awash with euphemisms. At least pissoir is properly descriptive.
- testing22321 23d agoFriends were just in Australia and were immensely impressed by not only the ubiquitous public bathrooms, but also how well maintained and clean they are. Tons of free to use BBQs too.
- kazinator 23d agoA pissoir is of little comfort when you badly need a shittoir.
- wmchen 23d ago[dead]
- forinti 23d agoI used one these things in Portugal a few years ago. They are definitely not thought for women.
- forinti 23d agoBut I have to say that if you have a very cheap solution for 25% of your use cases you should definitely use it. What you can't do is neglect the other 75%.
- shermantanktop 23d agoI had to stop and think, but I follow your mathematical reasoning. Although 1:1 is not a realistic number; i'd think more like 4:1 or more? and if men over 60 are around, it's going higher for sure.
- vondur 23d agoHere in the SoCal area the homeless were taking over bathrooms to live in.
- curtisblaine 23d agoFun that this article concentrates on gay sex restrictions and pressure by temperance advocates - two "enemies" that conveniently serve a certain social agenda - while public toilets, at least in Europe, died because of heroin users in the 70s and 80s (they used bathrooms to inject, often leaving their syringes behind, and that became a real problem and society-wide panic during the AIDS boom) and because of the increasing number of homeless people later - who used to clean themselves in public toilets with a sink and more often than not left them in terrible conditions.
- paulpauper 23d agodrug users ruin everything. it's why we cant have nice things anymore
- jmclnx 23d agoSame place free trash pickup went, gov do not want the expense of public bathrooms. Here in the US, where I am all public restrooms were gone by the late 80s.
- MengerSponge 23d agohttps://www.npr.org/transcripts/1248664709 https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1248664709 Well-meaning activists lobbied to make toilets free, but they didn't build a base to support the continued use and maintenance of those now-free toilets.
- jeffnash 23d ago> Who ultimately determines the meaning of a public space: its designers, authorities, or the people who use it? Restrooms are unique in that they are available to the public but, due to their inherently private nature, are a place where it is difficult to enforce social norms. Because of this, within the confines of the restroom itself, the authorities are all but irrelevant. I was scrolling through the addictive and easy to stumble into YouTube reels feature and came upon a livestream of a gentleman having some sort of 'public restroom party' in a stall. By this, I mean he had collected every roll of toilet paper available, shredded them into confetti, and was throwing the confetti up into the air while blasting music at full volume out of his bluetooth speaker. He had a few thousand viewers and people appeared to be donating money for supercomments. I didn't stay to watch the end of the livestream, but I don't imagine he cleaned up. By the time the private-but-livestreamed confetti party is over, the damage is done. You can try to anticipate every single unwanted activity in a restroom and try to prevent it beforehand (e.g. tinted lights to prevent IV drug use), but someone, somewhere will find a way to creatively make the owners decide a few frustrated customers who are told "no public restroom" is a small price to pay for the alternative.
- markdown 23d agoYou just charge for it. A dollar per entry should be enough for someone to come by and clean it twice a day, such that it doesn't matter what shenanigans antisocial people get up to in there. No mess will last longer than a few hours.
- 0x696C6961 23d agoNot sure why you're getting downvoted. This approach has been shown to work. The money isn't for funding the maintenance though, it's strictly to keep the riff-raff out.
- markdown 23d agoWell hopefully not, because you don't want them pissing and shitting in alleys.
- 22d ago
- xyzelement 23d agoLack of bathrooms has been called tragedy of the commons in this thread, but it's not the "commons" that are the problem. The worst 10% of society determine what we can and can't have. The "commons" aren't having public sex, shooting up drugs, or destroying the bathrooms with lack of... etiquette. The commons are victimized when these things happen and then there's eventually no choice but to shut them down unless there's willingness to crack down on the explicit problematic behavior.
- jiscariot 23d agoAnd people with means, move from common to private spaces. Others will not have the same choice and things become more stratified, because a subset of society decided to cede public spaces.
- 8f2ab37a-ed6c 23d agoI tried to find a good term for this trend and the best I could do is "defining deviancy down" defined as "the tendency of societies to respond to destructive behaviors by lowering standards for what is permissible." It's like a behavioral Overton window that grows downwards.
- gdevenyi 23d agohttps://www.jstor.org/stable/41212064 https://www.jstor.org/stable/41212064
- 8f2ab37a-ed6c 23d agoExactly. Just need to find time to properly read this.
- arjie 23d agoYou're right about who is causing the damage etc. but the 'commons' does not refer to the people; it refers to the shared resource. So a public park is the commons. And when it gets polluted with plastic rubbish etc. because externalities are not internalized that's a tragedy of the commons.
- bradgranath 23d agoJim Crow
- lurkerforawhile 23d agothere's a market for a gig-economy app where someone brings a toilet to you.
- morninglight 23d agoOne advanced civilization has tens of thousand of free public toilets. https://lazyholidayplanner.com/essential-tools/japan-toilet-finder-find/ https://lazyholidayplanner.com/essential-tools/japan-toilet-... https://www.cnn.com/travel/gallery/japanese-public-toilet-photos/ https://www.cnn.com/travel/gallery/japanese-public-toilet-ph... https://www.toilet-map-jp.com/en https://www.toilet-map-jp.com/en https://toiletrix.org/toilets/japan https://toiletrix.org/toilets/japan https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Public_toilets_in_Japan https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Public_toilets_i...
- yboris 23d agoPlus, virtually every convenience store in Japan has a clean and ready-to-use bathroom. And there is a very high density of convenience stores. Bathrooms everywhere!
- mstaoru 23d agoThis really hits home. As a person with IBS I basically cannot peacefully go outside in EU. I lived for many years in China and Thailand, and toilets are free, clean, and plentiful there, and you can easily ask any place to use their toilet - there's no stigma. I even had to run into a police station in rural China once. They were 100% chill about it, though they had to unlock a gate for me. Xi Jinping really will be remembered as the Toilet King, he did issue a few decrees early on, and now in every Tier-88 rural Chinese village road you can find a modern toilet (yes, squat), clean, with water. Paper is hit and miss still though. Cross to Hong Kong and it's the same, but paper is reliable. Hong Kong is definitely richer. Then take any shopping mall in Bangkok, that's an absolutely next level experience, clean, smells good, relaxing music. Mmm... And EU is a freaking horror show. In many public toilets there's a used syringe compartment as well. Truly a 5-star service.
- deepsun 23d agoWhat's wrong about syringe disposal? A significant portion of population has diabetes. And even if a drug addict uses it, still better than throwing to the trash, similar to how cigarette disposals are mandatory in typical airplanes.
- xienze 23d ago> What's wrong about syringe disposal? A significant portion of population has diabetes. Ask yourself if that's truly what motivated those being installed... > And even if a drug addict uses it, still better than throwing to the trash The problem is they still throw their needles all over the ground. As is typical, the intentions are noble, but what ends up happening is people who can't even be bothered to not shoot up their gutter heroin in public are given society's tacit approval to do what they're doing, thus accelerating the societal rot.
- deepsun 23d agooook, so if according to your message, the disposals are mostly used by diabetics, then again, what's wrong with them?
- 1970-01-01 23d agoFunny how the answer is yet again more tech: bathroomaccess.com - add one when you find it.
- ButlerianJihad 23d agoOne of the first lessons I learned as a homeless person is that restroom access is one of the most vital things for survival and staying out of jail. I am not sure of the real-world risk, but to hear Internet commenters, if you are a man and you urinate in public, you may be on a fast path to being a registered sex-offender for no other reason. That is an obviously sad consequence that no homeless guy wants to be burdened with. The first time I needed to go and I was out on the streets, I veered into the nearest resort hotel downtown, figuring I'd just be lost in the crowd of tourists there. It was night but not particularly late. As soon as I got inside the men's room and in front of a urinal, a security guard was on my case. He said restrooms were for hotel guests only. I was very apologetic, but at least he let me finish and let me get away peacefully. For all y'all complaining how the public libraries and other facilities are infested with smelly homeless, those are the ones who try to live honestly and stay near sanitation facilities. The libraries saved my bacon when I was on the streets. They were a quiet refuge during the day. I didn't make trouble; I just needed to stay in the A/C and stay clean and have a bathroom nearby. People complain about poo in the streets of major cities, but the reality is, if a person cannot afford a restaurant, a coffeehouse, a motel, or whatever else, they will not have access to restroom facilities, and we all poop sometime. So the lack of those public restroom facilities in urban centers is just one more inhumane, hostile environment that tells us to pay up or GTFO of polite society.
- aeternum 23d agoIMO each city should have space dedicated for homeless camping with 24h running water and easy to clean stainless steel bathroom facilities. Do any cities do this, especially cities where weather is mild? Would homeless actually use it in favor of streets if available? Also why didn't you use shelter facilities, were they too crowded, unsafe, or had onerous rules?
- ButlerianJihad 23d ago> Also why didn't you use shelter facilities, were they too crowded, unsafe, or had onerous rules? Yes, thank you for asking! Before arriving in the Phoenix area, I had been homeless in San Diego. Most of that time I lived in Father Joe's Villages. That was a very well-run, clean and strict shelter. They had wraparound services, with a cafeteria, job-search space, etc. They did turn us out on the streets during the daylight hours. I must say that I almost enjoyed my stay there, and in fact I made friends, and I felt very safe under their roof. Contrast with Tempe, Arizona: Tempe, in 2000, did not allow any homeless shelters within the city limits. They also prohibited "soup kitchens" or any church or facility from feeding hungry people. However, Tempe has a larger population of drifters and street people, due to the college-town, party atmosphere, especially downtown. In contrast, Phoenix has a very large St. Vincent de Paul facility, which doles out supplies and serves meals, and which is several miles south of downtown, in an industrial zone. The main homeless shelter campus provides a SVdP cafeteria, job services, and all that, but when I arrived there in 2000, it was very scary, bad neighborhood, very bad experience, and I basically could not stay there in good conscience. I did not feel safe inside, nor walking around the environs. Therefore I split the difference, and stayed on the streets of Tempe. It was libraries during the day, and 24-hour diners at night, as much as possible. I napped on benches that were not in parks. (The city park facilities closed at midnight at the latest; they had Park Rangers serious about sweeping them out; the sprinklers would drench you if you were anywhere near the grass parts!) Being that I was in "The System" and confidently on a waiting list for housing, it was not difficult to slip through the shadows for a couple of years until that housing promise became reality.
- ath3nd 23d ago[dead]
- trgn 23d agoseeing the commons get worse in your lifetime, span of 10-15 years, if we're really precise about it, really is quite a trip.
- TheAlchemist 23d agoInteresting. And quite sad - we definitely should invest in things that make people lives better all around. There are countries were public bathrooms are everywhere - New Zealand is a good example. As a tourist, you're never too far from one. Which is good, since quite often that may be the only human made thing, surrounded by beautiful nature.
- polemic 23d agoNot just in remote locations. We just got a new public toilet in my suburb's town center. But the lack of public facilities is certainly noticeable when traveling.
- markdown 23d agoI visited Hollywood Boulevard once. That was nuts. No public toilets anywhere, in one of the most famous tourist attractions in the country. Worse, food establishments won't let you use the restroom, claiming they have none or that it was out of order. Thankfully I found one in a cinema.
- djeastm 23d agoOh, there's definitely a well-used star-shaped public toilet off the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Highland Avenue.
- nekusar 23d agoWhen there's no public bathrooms, everything is a "public bathroom'. Just 2 weeks ago, saw people pissing/shitting at a pull-over in Iceland. Laws explicitly forbid that... But when you gotta go, you go. And Iceland also hits people with NO public restrooms at all, and pay restrooms to boot. I saw upwards of $1.50 for bathroom usage. And in the USA, bathrooms are free, but almost always exclusively corporate funded, and usually "customers only". And in my local city, there's a few real city public restrooms. They naturally lock themselves after 11pm. Yeah, it's anti-homeless shit.
- llsf 23d agoSan Francisco has few (French JC Decaux) public toilets (pit stop, etc.), but some are inside other public properties that are not open 24/7 (e.g. rec centers). https://data.sfgov.org/City-Infrastructure/Map-of-Public-Bathrooms/sxtt-wsyn https://data.sfgov.org/City-Infrastructure/Map-of-Public-Bat... Similarly, free public bath/shower disappeared in SF. Some wealthy person (forgot his name) built some free public showers in the 1900, but they eventually got all closed. Paris still have about ~20 free public bath/shower running. Wondering if we should also bring those back. This is a basic human need (after restrooms and food).
- qurren 23d agoYeah. Once in SF I was rejected by 5 businesses in a row to use their restrooms. The nearest public park had its restroom locked. I, a non-homeless person, was forced by nature to pee behind a building in a parking lot. I had no choice. The businesses had a choice. The parks manager had a choice. And now I understand why SF stinks.
- aliasxneo 23d agoSF is still the only place I worked where I walked out to my car parked on the street and a homeless person was openly peeing on my tire as people walked by.
- deleted 23d ago[deleted]
- j1elo 23d agoUseful app to have installed for those couple times a year you need one and cannot remember what was the name of that thing you saw 6 months ago... LavSeeker - shows toilets listed in OpenStreetMap. https://f-droid.org/packages/org.woheller69.lavatories/ https://f-droid.org/packages/org.woheller69.lavatories/
- freetime2 23d agoPublic toilets are one thing that I really appreciate about living in Japan. It seems like you're never too far away from a toilet - whether it be in a neighborhood park, a roadside parking area, train station, convenience store, etc. And they tend to be pretty clean (at least as far as public restooms go), not something that I dread using like I do many public restrooms in the US. Japan seems to be just about a best-case scenario, due to the ubiquity of convenience stores, the government's seemingly high prioritization of building and maintaining public toilets, and a culture which places a high value on cleanliness. It seems like it would be hard to replicate in countries that lack clean and plentiful public toilets without changing the culture first. But reading another comment it sounds like China has made great strides in improving the state of their public toilets due to a strong push from leadership. So it is possible, but again it would start with actually wanting to improve things.
- spike021 23d agoI've just about never had an issue finding a toilet, like you said. Parking/service areas are great and nothing like rest stops in, say, California There are _some_ neighborhoods, especially in Tokyo, where sometimes it can be difficult. Like certain parts of Koenji you can walk into random conbini that have locked bathrooms and signs saying no public use. Fortunately it's not all too common. Only thing about public toilets in places like parks or neighborhoods is they almost never have soap.
- freetime2 23d agoYeah there are two convenience stores that I know of within about an hour of me that are a bit defensive of their toilets. One is near a popular fishing spot, and probably got tired of people coming in smelling like dead fish, using the toilet, and not buying anything. They have a big sign saying the toilets are for customers only, and a map with directions to nearby public toilets. They don't actually lock the doors, though. The other one I'm not really sure what their reasoning is, but the owner installed a button behind the counter to remotely unlock the bathroom door, and you have to ask the guy behind the counter to use the toilet. There are a ton of 1-star reviews on Google mentioning the toilet situation. But other than those two I don't think I've ever had an issue using a toilet at a convenience store. Also on a side note - it's pretty hilarious reading reviews of convenience stores in Japan. Lots of 1 star reviews because someone was cut in line, the worker didn't say thank you on the way out, the manner in which the worker placed items in the bag, an item was not microwaved enough, etc.
- psadauskas 23d agoWe'll spend a trillion dollars bombing people halfway around the world that never meant us any harm, but paying a custodian to clean a public toilet (and providing help for those that might misuse it) is a bridge too far.
- paulpauper 23d agoAnd then we'll brand anyone who dares to go to the bathroom a sex offender or other huge penalties. That is the paradox of a country that is so wealthy yet low trust. Public infrastructure is the first to go unless legally mandated( sufficient public bathrooms does not fall under this apparently).
- black6 23d ago[flagged]
- left-struck 23d ago> And then we'll brand anyone who dares to go to the bathroom a sex offender >anyone What? I’ve never heard of this, what part of the world do you live in?
- baud147258 23d ago> We'll spend a trillion dollars bombing people halfway around the world that never meant us any harm While I'm sure the US has bombed a significant number of such people, I wouldn't call Iran as 'never meant us any harm' (though I'll still say the current war is a stupid mistake).
- mathisfun123 23d agoBrother Iran isn't the US's first rodeo in the middle east https://www.brown.edu/news/2021-09-01/costsofwar https://www.brown.edu/news/2021-09-01/costsofwar The actual number is 8 trillion
- psadauskas 23d agoThe clerics and politicians in Iran use the US as a great big boogeyman to drum up political support, but until recently most of the regular people just didn't care about the regular people in the US. Same with the people in Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Syria, or Yemen, or Somalia, or Pakistan, or ... If they do have an opinion about the US, its probably that they mostly wish we'd stop bombing their homes and just leave them alone. But, it makes the defense industry a whole lot a money, and its good for getting Republicans elected. But helping US citizens, some of which might have gasp brown skin, that doesn't make any defense contractors any money at all! /s
- obelos 23d agoPeople don't want to “abuse” commons like public restrooms, parks, buses, and so on. They do so because they have no choice, having been displaced out of having a private place to do the things they're now forced to do in public places. This is all just an outcropping of the housing crisis, which is itself an outcropping of the billionaire crisis. End billionaires, and we have the resources to de-gild this age.
- zer0x4d 23d agoI disagree. A lot of people do not care about public facilities. They do not believe in leaving things better than they found them. You've seen these people around, you know who they are. These are the same people that don't rerack weights at the gym or don't put the cart back at the supermarket. That attitude has nothing to do with income, housing, race, or activity they are interested in. It's simply a result of narcissism. The only way is stopping excuses and enforcing the public etiquette. The world will be much better off.
- obelos 23d agoSure, and thankfully there aren't nearly as many of them out and about abusing more things if they have a private place always available to spend their time. Conscientiousness is one of the handful of measurable personality traits, and there's a scale to it because some people have more of it than others. That's not going to change. What we can change is the degree to which less conscientious people are forced to lean on the conscientiousness of others around them in order to live every moment of their lives. The collapse of social safety net—pilfered in order to pay for mega yachts and renting entire cities for a wedding receiption—in the West and particularly the US pushes those less conscientious people out into the world all the time.
- zer0x4d 23d agoI've personally never paid for a yacht or someone else's wedding, I'm not sure what you're talking about...
- SpecialistK 23d ago
- deleted 23d ago[deleted]
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 23d agoSperry Rand building, 14th floor, Morgan Apparel. Mention my name- they'll give you the key.
- rotringlvr 23d ago"Almost immediately, they became the favored meeting spot for men seeking rendezvous with one another. They were relatively private, secluded, and perfect for communicating anonymously with graffiti—the ideal release valve for a population that was prohibited from meeting publicly." What are they eluding to? Homosexuality was legalized in France in 1791, so what other trysts are these that involve men?
- adolph 23d agoThe article claims that "Meanwhile, as Prohibition played out, the project of constructing public bathrooms slowed to a trickle, and the few that had been built began to fall into disrepair." If that were the story, why was there a lobby in the 1970s to remove pay toilets? The Committee to End Pay Toilets in America, or CEPTIA, was a 1970s grass-roots political organization which was one of the main forces behind the elimination of pay toilets in many American cities and states. According to The Wall Street Journal, there were, in 1974, at least 50,000 pay toilets in America, mostly made by the Nik-O-Lok Company. Despite this flourishing commerce, CEPTIA was successful over the next few years in obtaining bans in New York, New Jersey, Minnesota, California, Florida, and Ohio. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_to_End_Pay_Toilets_in_America https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_to_End_Pay_Toilets_i...
- Waterluvian 23d agoOdd. I’ve been noticing lately that there are far more public bathrooms in southern Ontario than when I was a kid. A lot of parks have them now and if not, at least have portable ones.
- diogenescynic 23d agoThe same people complaining about this are the ones who supported decriminalizing drug possession and use in public and public camping then they wonder gee why did all the local businesses go out of business and make their bathrooms private? It's because laws are no longer enforced and having a public bathroom makes you attract the worst of the worst of society--proof go check out any Starbucks or McDonalds bathroom in any major city.
- yboris 23d agoThey're all in Tokyo ;) My all-time-favorite film is Perfect Days depicting days in the life of a sanitation worker overseeing toilets around Tokyo. A must-watch film! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_Days https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_Days
- throwaway314155 22d ago> They're all in Tokyo ;) Yeah and effectively any store outside urban America.
- Otterly99 22d agoI also was thinking of this film, however I found it really dull. What did you like about it? I'm not trying to diss you, I usually like contemplative movies but this one was just too repetitive for my taste.
- yboris 22d agoI resonated with what seemed to be a portrayal of appreciation of daily life and work (even if it isn't glamorous or cushiony). The daily pause the main character makes as he leaves for work -- looking up at the sky, to be present and notice. I loved the concept depicted in several scenes of the main character interacting with someone unknown through a tic-tac-toe game: finding a whimsical connection rather than throwing out the piece of paper. The depiction of tender relationships between people. It's a quiet film, comparatively, almost nothing happens. I found it very beautiful. I was thrilled to learn the word komorebi - sunlight leaking through trees.
- sbinnee 23d agoWhile living in France, I finally learned how to hold my bladder for half a day like an adult
- the_af 23d agoSome adults cannot. Also, consider there are lots of people with conditions that deviate slightly from the normal (some medical, some merely "not standard"). They too are legitimate users of public bathrooms.
- throwatdem12311 23d agoThey take them away when there’s too many drug addicts wandering around being a nuissance. No public washrooms -> societal decay.
- conductr 23d agoI live in a part of the US where ample free relatively clean restrooms are available and actually quite large. I can drive hundreds of miles in any direction and generally a restroom can be found with minimal advanced planning. All to say, traveling out of my comfort zone I know how restrictive and difficult finding a toilet can be and it actually gives me a bit of anxiety when going on any trip. Even other parts of the US can be significantly less convenient.
- Madmallard 23d agoI never understood this: 1.) restrooms for paying customers only 2.) defecating/urinating in public illegal How can both be true at the same time? I really hate how adversarial our society has become.
- 9x39 23d agoCall it an informal institution to push homeless away but without worry about way to define them, like you'd deny on a sign - a word for homeless doesn't do it, it's not a single flag that marks someone as an undesirable. [1] is apparently how society converges on an assumption you're engaged in business as a customer, employee, or entrepreneur, then everything is accessible to you. [2] is the check to make sure people excluded in [1] are punished for using the commons instead of a sanitary location.
- gkanai 23d agoAlmost every convenience store in Japan has a public toilet. Yes, it is polite to purchase something but it's not required. Some even have bidet function.
- phendrenad2 23d agoNot for long.
- cadamsdotcom 23d agoThese structures got old and weren't replaced. This is plain old urban decay. Some places let their old stuff decay and get vandalized. Others tear down their old stuff and don't replace it. But some cities - not all - tear down their ugly old stuff then - gasp - rebuild something else there. If they make that a habit, it's just expected. In such cities you look around and everything is either too beautiful to tear down, or too new to be run down. Come to Sydney some time, it's beautiful :)
- protocolture 23d agoAlan Jones ruined them for everyone.
- grogenaut 23d agomany of the comments below talk about the death of society, respect, mental illness, etc... but I mean some of this is just high use. most port-a-potties are a shit show (literally). go to a festival, it's people waiting in line and having doing the drunk peepee dance and trying not to explode when they get in there. I can name a few port-a-potties that were nice, there's one in the park by my suburban house. it gets like no use (looking at the chart), it's pretty clean. but also a ton of these things are getting a cleaning every 2 weeks min. like do you want to pick up that piece of toilet paper you dropped on the ground in that thing with nothing to clean your hands other than sanitizer? funny enough, I find many public campground vault toilets to be pretty clean, because the camp hosts clean them daily. theworste one I've ever seen is the first bathroom into yosemite from sf. it's not because the homeless are coming from SF to shit there. It's because a) that's the first place you can panic dump, b) there's a line, c) that's where the tourists go. it's also the most graffitied one by far. if you don't give people a way to clean up easily... then you're dependent on the official service interval. shits gonna happen.
- shirro 23d agoThis is how you do it. Australian public toilets: https://toiletmap.gov.au/ https://toiletmap.gov.au/ Creative commons dataset: https://data.gov.au/data/dataset/national-public-toilet-map https://data.gov.au/data/dataset/national-public-toilet-map
- 999900000999 23d agoFor everyone blaming homeless people, I had a highly educated white professor who explained how he became homeless for a bit. Divorce. The wife can just say she doesn’t feel comfortable with you in the house. Now you can’t find another place to live because the divorce has ruined your credit while still stuck paying the mortgage. Most of us are much closer to living in a porta potty than we’d like to think
- ilikehurdles 23d agoWe're all just one or two paychecks away from smoking fentanyl, screaming at random people, and masturbating on public transit.
- doom2 22d ago> Most of us are much closer to living in a porta potty than we’d like to think Because of women and no-fault divorce? Didn't expect to see that conclusion in the comments. Maybe if we make it illegal it might slightly lower rates of homelessness, but let's see what it does to domestic violence, suicide, and spousal homicide statistics.
- 999900000999 22d agoAlright. Be single. Get sick. Get fired. Medical bills will ruin you instead. America has an accelerated path to homelessness most civilized countries lack.
- qwerty_clicks 23d agoThe us is not a first world country.
- lefra 23d agoLots of comments here blaming the bad state of toilets on homeless people doing drugs. They're not the only issue. In France, toilets on highways are often disgusting. French highways have stupid-high tolls, so these toilets are used by people who have access to a car, and can spare a few tens of € to get to their destination faster. Not your typical drug-using homeless person. I'd say it's more that some people don't care to clean after themselves, and once the toilet is dirty, no one will touch it if they add up to the mess.
- gib444 22d ago> In France, toilets on highways are often disgusting For real. I once saw one totally covered in blood, like a horrible murder scene. It was one of the more rural ones, at a rest stop / park. And I just kind of rolled my eyes as I wasn't even surprised
- voxgeevio 23d agoOptions: (a) SF should offer a tax incentive for any business that opens up their bathrooms to the public (b)Contract out installation of clean, well-designed porta-potties with regular cleaning (c) What else? It's ridiculous that a "world class" city has very few public bathrooms.
- herbst 23d agoIn Bern, Switzerland there are still a few of those "historic" Pissoir in public. (Well at least 2 that come to my mind, one actually really old) - the second near a club is also used by girls, I never watched how but they do. As a tourist I imagine its hard to find a toilet if you need one right now. If you lived here for a while you know where to go, and that it's either shared with junkies or costs CHF 2. Or in rare occasions nether of both
- rendall 23d ago> "If you’ve ever been wandering the streets of Chicago or New York, wondering why there’s no place to pee..." Oh, there are places to pee, if you're brave. My last venture into a NYC public restroom was the one at Sun Yat-sen Plaza, which is under a beautiful pavilion. There was a man hanging around the urinals without apparent purpose other than staring at me because of course there was. There was only 1 working stall of 3, over the entire surface of which someone had managed to squirt at least a quart of liquid poo.
- MathMonkeyMan 22d agoThat's a nice park. Most dudes I assume piss on the sidewalk.
- rendall 16d agoIt's a roulette which can lead to a ticket, or an entry in the sex-offender registry, or nothing. Where it stops, nobody knows. Best just buy something at a bar, restaurant, café to get bathroom privileges.
- jimnotgym 23d agoI feel like HN should ban discussion of homelessness, due to the extreme ignorance and prejudice of the comments. A bunch of people who don't know the first thing about it jumping to conclusions. The quality of the comments here is so so poor.
- defrost 23d agoAnd there's an argument that the ignorance and poor comment quality is exactly why they should be kept, highlighted, and passed about.
- jimnotgym 23d agoBut what does one learn, if one is ignorant and is only reading ignorant comments?
- defrost 23d agoThe reason red-backs have the publicly visible red stripe is so others can identify them for what they are. You're advocating for making red-backs less visible? Consider Meta-borg, it's their own comment history that may damn them in the multiplying deliberate child manipulation trials as common people clearly see how they think.
- jimnotgym 22d agoI don't get the references, sorry, but I do see your underlying point. I just wish the people who value critical thinking so highly when we are talking about the js ecosystem or llms, didn't turn into Victorians when we talk about poverty
- defrost 22d agoApologies, busy times IRL. Red backs are an Australian spider that has a painful, potentially fatal, bite - you want to know what they are when dealing with them (often just moving them away from people you love, sometimes straight up the vacuum tube). Meta - formerly Facebook, is facing an increasing number of trials across the US and other countries related to their internally discussed in emails handling of children. attracting them, hooking them, and grooming them to be adult units of income, etc - regardless of detrimental effects.
- jocelyner 23d ago[dead]
- eru 23d agoMuch of the US banned paid public bathrooms. The people behind the initiative dreamed of getting a cornucopia of free public bathrooms.
- capibara13 23d agoPro tip: find a McDonald's
- VCFundedGenYer 22d agoWhen I visited Europe it was even worse. Everywhere was a pay toilet, and most of the time, they were very far apart, or weren't around at all. In some walkways and tunnels where the toilets closed for the evening, there was excrement right outside the door. It's such a disrespect to basic humanity.
- jsat 22d agoAmerica banned pay bathrooms, and now we have no public bathrooms
- deleted 22d ago[deleted]
- teddyh 22d agoThe article does not even begin to answer the question of the title.
- randusername 22d agoSo what's the answer? Where did they all go and why? Was the takeaway supposed to be "public bathroom" meant either public urinal (ruined by stigma for gay sex and blackmail) or saloon (ruined by temperance)? We're missing like 100 years of the story chronicling psychiatric over-optimism, deinstitutionalization, gentrification of barely livable housing, rent-seeking, and all the rest of the factors. I think it's a maintenance story. It's unglamorous, invisible maintenance. There's no such thing as a perpetually clean bathroom because it is exclusively used by tidy people-- messes happen everywhere but they are ignored more in some places and that compounds and invites abuse.
- amilios 22d agoAbandoning paid public bathrooms was a mistake. Better to pay a dollar and have a clean bathroom than to have 10x fewer public bathrooms but free.
- alexpotato 22d ago> But of course, there is one key clue missing from the photograph: the smell Have been re-reading At Home by Bill Bryson [0] and just started the chapter on the bathroom. He mentions that home bathrooms often smelled b/c the "u bend" [1] hadn't yet been invented. Couldn't a public urinal be designed with a water flush function + u bend to avoid the smell? PS Highly recommend the book if you are into the history of technology both from "what series of inventions got us to here" but also "what was life like before those inventions and how were they adopted" 0 - https://amzn.to/4xlWN1m https://amzn.to/4xlWN1m 1 - https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/l40fso/eli5_how_do_ubend_pipes_work/ https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/l40fso/e...
- 100percentjake 22d agoMy hometown of Wichita, Kansas recently installed two fully plumbed public restrooms in our downtown core and it was, predictably, met with incensed rage online at the cost of durable vandal-proof public utilities and tearing up concrete to run sewer and water lines to them, and used as an example of "government waste on stupid bathrooms", similar to a project starting next week that cuts down one of our asinine five-lane highway-sized surface streets to a more reasonable 3 lanes as a traffic calming measure, to a similarly predictable chorus of politically charged pejoratives and entitlement. It's such a shame that somewhat objective, proven improvements to the general quality of life in an urban area are so quickly dismissed by selfish entitled idiots and used as political leverage by politicians because it's "Big Government".
- encoderer 22d agoIn American cities, as long as you don’t look like a bum, hotel lobbies are usually accessible.
- Henchman21 22d agoAlways remember: the cruelty is the point
- thomastjeffery 22d agoIronic to see an article lamenting the loss of public utilities from JSTOR.
- p0w3n3d 22d agoThis is quite a problem in London. I've been there recently and you really cannot go to toilet if not in a hotel office or a museum