> Having run into many public toilets and restrooms which were unusable because they were covered in feces or urine or had crazy homeless people in them harassing people [...]
As a matter of course- because really the issue of pay toilets is just one small protuberance from the much larger social problem, which is that currently society doesn't provide remotely appropriate care for a large segment of the mentally ill. That a tourist taking a piss in Manhattan entails thorny socioethical issues is surprising yet direct result.
The same problem repeats itself all over urban life. It's why the bus stop shelter doesn't keep you dry, why park benches are uncomfortable, and why you're likely to hear an ambulance siren at least once in an ordinary day. Someday society will realize that the underlying problem isn't a necessary truth, and everything will suddenly seem so much nicer.
> Public toilets aren't really for you, they're for the people who have nowhere else.
This is an incredibly stockholm-syndrome take. If you live in a place that isn't a total failed state, normal people actually can use the public toilets!
> I've lived and spent my time in major cities most of my life. I've used many public urban bathrooms. Like many things in cities, they are used much more heavily and often are less clean. Some have been disgusting in places, but I've never seen what you imagine.
I'm not op. I've been in public restrooms smeared with faeces.
“There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
> mostly going to be used by homeless (and a few people with medical issues like IBS)
This is a weird trope, and also just generally cruel. First: when public restrooms are generally available, they tend to be well used (I use them frequently in Tokyo, for instance). Second: even if they are mostly used by the homeless, that's good for them and us, because it means they have a humane place to use the bathroom, and it means we see less feces on the street and fewer places smell like piss.
> You had me at "My own toilet all to myself". I understand not everyone in the world is loathe to use a public restroom, but Jesus H. Christ, people use public restrooms like apes in a zoo.
It's not just cleanlines: I've also encountered issues like the hand-soap or toilet paper having run out and not been replaced, toilets not working due to plumbing issues (in one office they installed a fancy new rainwater recycling system that didn't initially work, so toilets wouldn't flush), a toilet on the top floor of a building where the flush was very weak and the cistern would take minutes to slowly refill before you could flush a second time, poorly designed sinks that look pretty but splash water everywhere when you turn on the tap, or a building only having a single cubicle so that I'd need to walk to another building if it was in use.
> A disturbing large number of businesses in poor areas block there restrooms and or are "out of order"
I hear you. I also have empathy for people who clean public bathrooms.
I strongly suspect the “rich” and “upper class” aren’t the ones putting the “out of order” signs on the doors. It’s the workers at the store who are responsible for cleaning them.
I suspect they’re tired of being responsible for cleaning up the stuff that happens in there. Feces smeared on the walls, wads of paper shoved down in the urinal and urine overflowing and flooding the floors. Vomit everywhere.
If I had to hazard a guess, if you personally organized a volunteer group, went around that neighborhood, and provided reliable bathroom cleaning services and repair you’d start seeing more bathrooms.
Next time you walk by one, ask the person at the front desk if they’ll let you clean it.
> Oh, and there's a clean bathroom in every subway station.
So this will never work in the United States.
Snark aside, every time I ride a BART elevator with a pool of piss on the floor I wonder about this country. Somehow the idea of someone peeing without paying is so offensive that we would rather stand in piss than provide public facilities.
> It's why public restrooms are always disgusting.
Not really. It's not a question of value that causes public restrooms to be less pleasant, but simply one of cleaning frequency.
Most people clean their own private restrooms/bathrooms/toilet (or have them cleaned) reasonably frequently. Increase the usage load for a public facility and you'd expect it to need to cleaning more frequently than a private one.
And so, one does indeed find public facilities with sensible cleaning intervals that are often no worse and sometimes better than private ones.
Most humans also have a somewhat instinctive distaste for urinating or defacating in a context where they can smell another human being (even one's own family!). Without very good ventilation, it's hard for a well-used public facility to avoid this, and that adds to the sense of "eergh, it's disgusting!" This is an issue, but again not one of "valuing free things".
The worst public restrooms I can think of tend to be the most lightly used, where it's hard to justify the cost of sufficiently regular cleaning, and things just get unpleasant, again without any question of values or cost-of-use.
> I used to regularly walk into public bathrooms in which someone had used the toilet and simply not flushed it
I use public restrooms once ever two days (sometimes even more) and I very rarely see that. Maybe people in your part of the world are less educated when it comes to using public toilets, or the janitors are not doing their jobs properly (if it matters I live in an Eastern-European capital city).
As for the automatic toilets, I hate them. I only had the displeasure of using them once or twice, and let me tell you, to have that flush of water invade your lower exposed parts all of the sudden while you're doing your toilet-related stuff is not at all nice, quite the contrary. Those toilets are the work of the devil.
> all they have to do to avoid the reflected stream is aim diagonally at the wall
Or, not aim at the wall at all and urinate downwind...
Why there aren't more public toilets in major towns is a mystery to me. Here in Paris there are a few, but not enough by a long shot, and for some (puritanical?) reason they close automatically at 10pm, so if you're coming out of a bar or a restaurant late at night, you're out of luck.
> Bathrooms open to the public always attract garbage humans.
Only people who have hold minimum wage jobs in the service industry know this pain.
Everyone else keeps talking about treating people like humans never having seen the ugly side.
Like, for example, the side where you walk in on these fucks shooting up and then they threaten your life on the spot and leave a mess for you to clean.
Yeah, hard to have any compassion left when you've done that day in and day out while getting paid minimum wage and then going back to shit customers at the counter.
The easiest decision, is therefore, to close your bathrooms to everyone and discriminate equally. And maybe, only let the pregnant women and truckers use them.
> For urban liberals, that means confronting some uncomfortable choices. A public space (and transit is public) is supposed to be open to all, but if we want public spaces to be livable, that probably means smells and behaviors are more tightly regulated in public, either through direct enforcement by transit police (unlikely) or more social pressure (also unlikely).
All you list here is repressive regulation, with all the problems that come with it - e.g. both unintended (correlation between homelessness distribution and ethnicity) and intended (discriminatory behavior by police) racism.
The worst problem in public from a safety point of view are homeless and mentally unstable people, and then "wild urination" and litter. To use police against the first two is just plain inhumane even if it's the sad "standard" - the solution to these problems are affordable housing and accessible mental health care. Using repression only shifts the problem to somewhere else, it does not solve the problem.
As for wild urination and litter, the issue here is that public toilets and trash bins are scarce. In Munich for example, trains used to have litter bins at every seat, buses and trams had tiny litter bins bins for tickets and small litter and a lot of subway stations had public, free-to-use toilets - both were cut due to cost-cutting, and then the problems arose.
>>Restrooms within U.S. urban centers are hard to find, for patrons only
Like you said, find a restaurant, or a Dunking Donuts and buy something...or just sneak in. Look at the menu up as you're thinking and then run to the bathroom. At the places I usually is it I don't feel guilty, if I ate there yesterday I paid for today's bathroom use :)
Public bathrooms are a lot of trouble with cleaning, crime etc and usually are closed at nighttime in parks too. Tech can mitigate some of those concerns but still...
> One of the biggest perks of working downtown in a moderately sized or larger city is being able to go to the bathroom there outside of work hours.
I'm in a big city in Canada and there was a downtown farmer's market here for a while. Literally smack in the middle of the city, went up and down a few streets on Saturday mornings. Loved going, was a short walk and had lots of good eats, local produce, etc.
But no bathrooms. None of the local places would let you in if you weren't paying, and the only way I could make a head call was at the local YMCA -- and the only reason they let me in was cuz I was a member of their gym.
It's crazy to me how you can be in the center a huge edifice of planning, piping, conduits, etc. and still not be able to find a toilet.
edit: they did normally have porta-johns but didn't this morning. On at least one occasion I'd seen people tip them over, hopefully with no one in them.
> because we wouldn't want any place for the homeless to feel human either
I'm sorry, that is nonsense. Who is "we" anyway? Voters? Government? The rich and famous? C'mon.
Nobody cares about who uses a bathroom. The issue is how it is used and cared for.
Public bathrooms, regardless of the venue, tend to suffer from the tragedy of the commons [0] effect. Most people use them as they would their own bathroom at home. All you need is a very small percentage who just don't care, who are absolute pigs, to ruin them for everyone. If you have ever gone to a public restroom at a Los Angeles beach you know exactly what I am talking about. They are nothing less than disgusting and sometimes revolting. And this is so due to a small percentage of animals (1%? Who knows?) who have no concept of social responsibility and consideration towards others.
My guess is you are not aware of what happened this year at schools all over the US [1] (and maybe elsewhere). This, again, was at the hands of a very small number of kids who, for who-knows-what-reason decide it is OK to behave like animals. At our kids school a handful (3 to 5?) actually got arrested. The school had to close all bathrooms except for two. Students had to ask for permission to go and could only go one at a time. They had to post a person outside each bathroom to go inspect it after a student got done. The animals caused tens of thousands of dollars in damages and the inconvenience to well-behaved kids cannot be measured.
And then there's a sense of scale. If you own a small restaurant, you can't have 300 people come in just to use the bathroom. You are not a bathroom facility. These things cost money and upkeep and, yes, they need to be clean and available for customers. At the limit you'd have to hire multiple staff just to clean and maintain the bathrooms --because they will get trashed.
As is always the case, reality isn't driven by a single convenient variable. One has to consider the multiple (tens, hundreds...) of drivers behind any effect. It isn't single-cause -> effect. It's often incomprehensibly-complex-multivariate-problem -> effect.
>Giving 50 cent for a restaurant when only using the bathroom is just a sign of good behavior in my view.
Why? If you're already eating there, why should you pay to use the toilet? And if you're not eating there, then why are you there to use the toilet? Just use a public one. If there aren't sufficient public toilets, that sounds like a failure of the municipal government. Any good city should have lots of public toilets outside, in train stations, or in large shared buildings.
>in even major cities with high population density
I'd say that was typically where the issue is. I wouldn't expect to find a bathroom in the middle of random forest of course but pretty much anywhere in suburbia/exurbia has grocery stores, Walmarts, McDonalds, gas stations, with restrooms you can use. Worst case, make a small purchase.
> But apart from parks those are places that people have to go to because there aren't any public toilets!
Seems like you have it backward. There aren't public toilets because people can go to SO many other places for a bathroom.
> public parks are the only public ones you listed.
I only listed 2. Public parks and rest stops. Rest stops are public.
I can go on if you'd like... government buildings, libraries, bus terminals, train terminals, beaches, malls, pretty much any business that lets the general public walk in its doors... hotels...
As a matter of course- because really the issue of pay toilets is just one small protuberance from the much larger social problem, which is that currently society doesn't provide remotely appropriate care for a large segment of the mentally ill. That a tourist taking a piss in Manhattan entails thorny socioethical issues is surprising yet direct result.
The same problem repeats itself all over urban life. It's why the bus stop shelter doesn't keep you dry, why park benches are uncomfortable, and why you're likely to hear an ambulance siren at least once in an ordinary day. Someday society will realize that the underlying problem isn't a necessary truth, and everything will suddenly seem so much nicer.
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