This 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.
I guess if you don’t have a massive population of antisocial people who destroy the public facility, you can provide them. It’s a shame we in the west surrendered that. Not the worst thing in the world, but I do find it frustrating often to not have a bathroom available nearby (small bladder)
But, while the toilets aren’t the worst sacrifice, the cumulative sacrifices made on the alter of our huge antisocial populations are profound
> I guess if you don’t have a massive population of antisocial people who destroy the public facility, you can provide them. It’s a shame we in the west surrendered that.
What a weird way of stating the problem. There is too large a population of homeless, mentally ill, and drug addicts wandering the streets. We didn't surrender anything, at least not during the last half century in the United States. We did as little as possible to deal with homelessness and mental illness and discovered there's good money to be made incarcerating drug addicts.
SF - and probably much of the US homeless problem elsewhere - is largely cost of housing; rent and home prices are ridiculous enough that if you don't make big bucks, you are likely barely scraping by. Rents here are rising way faster than inflation, and it makes everything more expensive and means a lot more people are living that much closer to not being able to pay their rent. Way easier to end up homeless after losing your job when paying 3k/month in rent than 1k/month, as at the cheaper rent saving money is actually possible.
We've consistently built a tiny fraction of the new residential units needed for projected population growth for decades now. Supply has been barely growing while demand surged; what else should we expect?
Other parts of the country have not been as extreme, but this has played out in other cities too. We've had terrible housing policy, and increased homelessness is a direct consequence.
Spending money is necessary but not sufficient to fix this sort (or literally any sort?) of big problem.
I hope you don't think San Francisco having spent a lot of money on the problem (the $100k per person figure in isolation is deceptive, but let's not dwell on that) means we've expended more than a really minimal amount of effort as a nation on the problem. Consider how little the problem of homelessness was discussed during the last presidential cycle, or how often it's discussed in congress, and I think you'll see what I mean. (consider the words used when debating it and you'll really understand what I mean)
The problem is you can’t get people off the street if they don’t want to get off the street unless you do it forcibly. You can end the homeless problem overnight but SF is too empathetic. I’m not even saying this is a fault, I’d rather they fail on the side of empathy than succeed violently.
Something to keep in mind is that that figure includes homeless people who have been homed and are being supported, it's not just the ones currently on the streets.
And still once I was ina small restaurant that let a homeless guy use the toilet and they forced the door open after hearing crashing sounds, and he had painted the walls with his poop and jumped up and down on the sink until it broke off.
Days later I saw a sign in their window saying the bathroom was for customers only.
Prison isn't the right idea. But getting them into some sort of treatment would make sense. And that could be court mandated for repeat offenders for some crimes.
It is pretty much how China has handled it. It seems like it does actually work if your goal is to fully eliminate drug issues, but it's unacceptably harsh for most countries to palate.
I assure you, if they stopped spending that money tomorrow, things would get dramatically worse, as all the people that money keeps off the streets would be on them.
Closer familial ties + extremely harsh laws for drug sale and use. Asians realized how opium fucked China for a century and made sure none of that shit flies.
How many of their homeless are addicted to drugs or nectary ill? It seems in the US almost all visible homeless fall into at least one of those groups.
Fentanyl and meth seems to be largely a North America issue. I previously was curious how other countries dealt with it. The only country I found that had previously had a meth issue was Estonia or Latvia (not sure anymore). It apparently was really bad for years. They fixed it by finding the single meth lab. Not a solution that's viable for us.
No idea what Japan does with its homeless but my money is that it's something like forced admission which isn't gonna fly in the US.
Japan will lock people up for a long period of time if they show the sort of anti-social behavior that the most visible homeless people in North America are famous for.
The US “locks people up” at a much higher rate, and for longer, than Japan does. About 1% of the adult population is in jail in the United States, and it’s about 0.03% of the population in Japan. The US puts people in jail at 30x the rate Japan does.
It is not because the US doesn’t lock people up enough.
Japan has one of the highest numbers of psychiatric beds in the world. That's what I'm referring to. If you're experiencing psychosis in public in Japan, you will be removed from public spaces. This is not true in the US.
I tried to find some information about how Japan manages to get away from criticisms around forced labor in prison. It seems like Japan does have very poorly paid labor, as little as usd 0.05 an hour, but the incarceration rate is low.
Once again, I don't know much about Japan but I doubt there is a large ethnic minority that is only about fifteen percent of the population but somehow accounts for almost half of all incarcerated people in Japan.
From Google:
> Low Incarceration Rates: Japan maintains one of the lowest incarceration rates in the developed world (roughly 35 to 40 prisoners per 100,000 residents, compared to over 500 per 100,000 in the US).
My first thought is, I'm not certain their homeless are different in their behavior, but based on what little I know, I'm rather certain their non-homeless are. I'd expect disruption or damage to a public space of the kind that sparked this discussion to be dealt with swiftly as a high priority.
We in the west have surrendered with weak punishments and lax enforcement for anti social behaviour. In many cases even abolishing laws or putting in place public policy that prevents the imprisonment of people who commit "low level" crimes. There's a certain segment of the population who will (largely unsuccessfully) try to shame you if you promote a tough on crime approach.
In my country the entire justice system has been hijacked by activist judges who are hell bent on promoting these whacky ideas and letting serious criminals go virtually unpunished.
As others have pointed out the US has a massive prison population.
Our problem isn't insufficiently harsh punishment. Our problem is unlikely punishment. The US spends more on incarceration and less on policing and the justice system. You are less likely to get caught and punished in the US but if you get punished it's harsher. Yet studies have shown that a milder punishment that happens more swiftly and with higher certainty is much better for preventing crime.
Not sure that helps with mentally ill homeless but it's at least an improvement we could aim for
This is what China has done. Aside from drug crimes it doesn't seem like they punish any harsher than the rest of the world, they just have an incredibly good ability to follow up. If you smash the window of a store, they will find you and you'll have to pay for it. Just the knowledge that there is an almost 100% chance of having to pay to restore anything you break seems all that's needed to stop the destruction of public spaces.
On the less extreme end, Europe also has much higher rates of catching criminals and punishes then less. I understand the US is really the outlier.
I read an interesting article that laid out how that's ultimately rooted in what level of government pays for what. It's easier for local politicians to call for harsher punishment because prisons are run by state or federal but police is funded locally.
I'm just not sure that stronger punishment and enforcement is going to be the answer here. It seems like many of the Asian cultures have a much higher level of social cohesion even without the threat of punishment. How do we get (back) to higher social cohesion in the West? I recall seeing a film of a shanty town somewhere in the US during the Great Depression. It was very neat and tidy. What happened between then and now?
Stronger punishments? Probably not, but better enforcement? I believe so.
It has repeatedly been shown that the severity of punishment does not sway crime nearly as much as the certainty of punishment does [1]. This all feels like a byproduct of the hyper-individualism we have in the West and the US, especially.
Which Asian cultures are you speaking about which have high social cohesion without threat of punishment? Singapore will punish anti-social behaviour like vandalism with mandatory caning, or fine you heavily for jay walking. In Japan police will intervene much more readily in cases of public intoxication and even noise complaints.
For more serious anti social behaviour like gun crimes, violent crimes and drug trafficking there are very strong mandatory penalties up to and including corporal punishment and execution.
Conviction rates in these countries are upwards of 99%. So in cases of intervention a punishment is almost certain.
America has a low social cohension because of global immigration instead of targeted immigration compare to China. America use to share a culture because people came from the same places and shared the same religion and had a common history going back to the Romans.
....sadly more true than anyone here would probably like to admit. I love having Indian coworkers and there’s a large Indian population where I am at, but they are just completely separated in every single way from everyone else. and they keep it that way.
my Pakistani coworkers are absolutely wonderful. Sweet, hard-working, very enjoyable to talk to, but their families and lives are just a totally different universe and they don’t share it.
The honestly very poor black community around the area? they fucking hate us white people. like actively, all the time, no what no matter what you have or haven’t done they don’t like your ass one bit. i’ve seen inside some of the homes, and they are filled with independent black power movie posters about shooting Whitey. No kidding.
I know it takes a village, but when people are so very different and forced to be near each other, it doesn’t mean that they will socialize or help each other; it’s like living on two different planets. there’s all kinds of social research showing this now, and what you get is micro segregation along income lines, rather than everyone helping each other and lifting up the community together.
I wanted for most of my life for people to get along and the world to be a better place, thinking that education and modern access to information could somehow make things better. It seems that was entirely and completely wrong. when people have any kind of discomfort at all about new culture or new person or new idea? They pretty much just run away.
The people here on hacker news are probably an exception, because we are here searching for commentary and interesting ideas and new information.
> The honestly very poor black community around the area? they fucking hate us white people. like actively, all the time, no what no matter what you have or haven’t done they don’t like your ass one bit.
Did you replace folks' smoke detector batteries for them?
The way I found to get around this prejudice was to go to church most Sundays and walk around with a sling bag full of 9V batteries and knock on doors to offer to maintain smoke detectors. (It probably didn't hurt that I was also good for bumming cigarettes off of and slowing down to have a chat.)
YMMV, but showing up and doing work was apparently what my neighbors in East St. Louis and Atlanta wanted.
Its true im many places. First generation hard working. Second generation lives in the inprint of the first generation. Third generation has no connection to the original homeland and tries to find connection or it turns to antisocial behaviour.
Anti-social people as a group is a larger population than just the homeless, mentally ill, and drug addicts, though these subsets are obviously a significant portion. The superset includes people who are genuinely anti-social in their nature, may be nominally employed, have a mailing address, and a place to sleep at night. These are the people we actually surrendered to when we changed enforcement priorities in major US cities to, ostensibly, have some grace and compassion toward the subset of homeless, mentally ill, and drug addicts. This is a demonstrably true statement. For me, and many like me, I know it's true because I can do something like "walk around in a neighborhood from my youth" or "visit a downtown corridor I used to frequent as a young adult" and simply observe the difference between the then and now. It's not always about the homeless, and the oft tiring debate around what to do about them. In many US cities, larceny is de facto legal as long as you are stealing goods valued under a certain amount. This is what people are talking about when they use the word "surrender".
I assume you're talking about software engineers, because in every office I've worked in the toilets have been absolutely filthy by mid-morning.
At my current place there are boot marks on top of the toilet seat that have been there for weeks, put there by one of the 10 people in the company.
I think we can just apply the broken windows theory here. If whoever's responsible for the toilet doesn't demonstrate that they care about its state of cleanliness and repair, the people using the toilet won't care about that either.
What I want to know is if anyone can identify when exactly the homeless issue became so bad. It was already a problem when I lived in the Bay, and when I moved back to the East Coast it had been 10 years in the making (conveniently when I was away). Clearly there a some sharp lines that can be drawn somewhere. But it's hard to get some actual answers.
Edit: rough clauding indicates it was when fentanyl took off, but idk, that doesn't seem wholly accurate.
It began in 1953 when thorazine was introduced on the premise that it would allow previously institutionalized people to live normal lives with only outpatient care. This turbocharged the movement to shutter mental institutions, and their populations began to crater around 1956. [0]
For a lot of people, thorazine and its descendants have been nothing short of miraculous and have lived up to the promise. But not for everyone, and in the name of charity and respect for individual autonomy, we have chosen to allow these people to either live in awful conditions and fend for themselves or do something prison-worthy.
So, while there isn’t great data on homelessness from before the 21st century, the root cause of much of it - a societal refusal to recognize certain people as requiring lifelong care for mental illness - begins in 1953.
[0] https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?refe...
When it became unfashionable to put mentally ill people in asylums. The additional fashion of "giving local people a voice" in construction projects planning did not help either.
The problem regarding putting mentally ill people in asylums is who gets to decide who is mentally ill? I mean that's literally incarcerating people for thoughtcrime. If people have committed no crime, how can we justify taking away their freedom?
Ideally we would have a way for people who can't take care of themselves, or hold a job to be taken care of that isn't effectively putting them in prison.
Mental "asylums" that were almost as bad (and sometimes worse) than prisons is clearly bad. But just leaving people to live on the streets or end up in actual prisons isn't strictly better.
I'm not saying we should bring back the asylums, at least the way they were, but there should be a better way to take care of people who aren't able to care for themselves.
Exactly and once you're in the asylum the doctors can lobotomize and drug you to the point of insanity. People used to abuse the system to get rid of family members they had an inheritance dispute with.
FWIW you should clarify: do you mean mentally unstable people on streets, or do you mean any form of homelessness (living in cars, surfing on friends couch, etc). Because that second category is much larger and includes a lot of sincere people who are basically just priced out of the area that grew up in
It's a theory that labs in Mexico switched back over to P2P 'biker' meth (instead of the old stuff based on cough/flu meds) and that the new meth is causing progressive brain damage to users.
Antisocial people who destroy the public facility don't just come out of nowhere. People get driven to this. Not to say that you can simply ignore them when they're already everywhere, though.
Usually if you are extremely poor or extremely rich there are no consequences for you. The extremely poor are desperate and have nothing to lose, society already took everything from them. The extremely rich are above the law. As inequality increases crime increases with it, from vandalism to financial crimes.
This is why equality is so important. When the average Joe has a good job, good salary, and a home then can lose things that society has helped him to get and can take away.
> I guess if you don’t have a massive population of antisocial people who destroy the public facility, you can provide them.
Or a consistent race-based or immigrant underclass caste. A lot of countries have the blessing of not having a large population whom they can dismiss the condition of based on visual cues. They just moved from feudalism to universal humanism in one generation.
Whatever bad things you can say about China or Taiwan, they both think slavery is wrong and kings are childish. Somehow the west never caught up. Still having that debate, still trying to justify why their great-grandpas killed those people. China left Mao behind; and the US is still praying to slaveholders and mocking slaves' children, while eating their inheritance.
> It’s a shame we in the west surrendered that.
The west were slavers. They literally auctioned off women to have sex with (the "fancy trade") and put children (sometimes their own) into the fields for life. When some got the morality to be disgusted by that, it resulted in bloody wars (I would even include the wars Germany really started because it lost the colony race.) Their civil society was rife with sundown towns, and in Europe actual death factories were designed to murder civilians.
The west is run by degenerates and venerates degenerates. Until it faces that properly, it will never be safe. China did that.
> the cumulative sacrifices made on the alter of our huge antisocial populations
It's "altar," and the cliché usually refers to wasted efforts to preserve something (generally an abstract ideal.) Nobody is trying to preserve "antisocial populations." They're usually trying to dispose of the old ones after using them up, and to get new ones in who still can't vote. Ironically, the "antisocial populations" are also the ones who clean the toilets.
>Whatever bad things you can say about China or Taiwan, they both think slavery is wrong and kings are childish.
I remember China being pretty racist. A lot of people visiting got a clear message. Not aggressively but quite clear.
>The west were slavers.
Who sold them the slaves? Did Europeans go hunt for slaves or did they buy them? Who did they buy them from?
Also answer this, if Americans wouldn't have bought the African slaves, all those African-Americans that are now enjoying life in the land of the free, where would they have been born today? Think if they could push a button today to wipe slavery from the past, but that meant they get to spawn back in Africa, they would push it or not? Legitimate question. Because it's not like nothing good came out of it.
> Also answer this, if Americans wouldn't have bought the African slaves, all those African-Americans that are now enjoying life in the land of the free, where would they have been born today? Think if they could push a button today to wipe slavery from the past, but that meant they get to spawn back in Africa, they would push it or not? Legitimate question. Because it's not like nothing good came out of it.
The reason that Africa is in a poor state of affairs is because of rampant colonization and pillaging by European settlers, of which enslavement was a byproduct. In your alternate universe where slavery never happened, Ethiopia and Mali would be wealthy empires.
The Mali Empire peaked around 150 years before Christopher Columbus "discovers" the Americas, and it finally collapses in 1599, finished off by Morocco. The Transatlantic Slave Trade doesn't really kick into gear until the mid-17th centuries, after the Mali Empire is no longer around.
If you wanted a better example, you might have picked, say, Benin. That you use Mali as an example of an empire screwed by Europeans in Africa suggests to me a general poverty of knowledge about any pre-colonial African history.
You are moving the goalpost and just make up stuff. Plenty of time to ... do anything, yet nothing has really been done there. If they are so great they should have been able to defend themselves. If you want to keep the discussion real and objective, feelings aside.
I am also not trying to excuse past behaviors or anything of the sorts. It was what it was and we always strive to do better when we know better. But that being said, systems are built around what is functional considering everything that can happen. When you account for everything to insure your safety and survival, it seems to work out like it did. On all sides.
And again, these interactions are never one way, longer term there's benefits to both sides, the local country, and descendants of all slaves and slave owners.
And just as an aside, I could very well argue most of us are still slaves today, but with clearly way better conditions and freedom of movement. But if you don't toil away daily, 5 days a week, you risk medical issues or lack of shelter, kind of like the homeless discussion in this thread. In some cases even death.
So putting what a few rich people from hundreds of years ago did, on me, a regular European folk, is shortsighted or even evil. I had nothing to do with any of it, my ancestors were peasants. And the same is valid for most people OP is referring to when saying "europeans". It's pure nonsense.
'Social' isn't 'nobody annoys me'; it's empathy for, caring about, and helping others, especially those you don't like - otherwise it means nothing.
I'm in the West, and I support liberty - the defining feature of the West - uber alles; it's their right. I'm not threatening others' freedom so you can feel more at ease. (You are more of a problem for them - they can't have you locked up.)
There has to be a line draw somewhere. Generally people who say this don't actually have regular interactions with aggressive, hostile, homeless. Or are you just really cool with going to a coffee shop and have someone screaming in a pile of their own feces 20 or so feet away?
Living in Seattle, people focus a lot on the homeless because it's an obvious problem. The guy screaming at the corner, or the people sleeping on the sidewalk.
But I personally think people miss that its a symptom of greater social rot. I've had more issues with antisocial car drivers than any homeless individual. People screaming profanities because I'm crossing the street with the walk signal active, people narrowly missing me as they speed to work. Just yesterday my entire block lost power because a drunk asshole tboned another car going 75mph, killing a family of four while nearly shearing a utility pole.
The reality is that even if the line is drawn with the homeless the undercurrent of social rot is still there and it's not getting better. And I don't see people calling for car drivers to be institutionalized, quite the opposite in most cases even when they commit homicide.
In a lot of large cities, local governments reacted to the 2020-2023 protests against police brutality by drastically reducing traffic enforcement. Aggressive drivers can get away with a lot more bad behavior now and have little fear of consequences. When voters elect leaders like Katie Wilson this is one of the inevitable consequences.
I haven't heard of that, other than laws banning pulling people over for minor mechanical issues like broken tailights (used sometimes as coverup for prejudice). Could you give examples?
> Aggressive drivers can get away with a lot more bad behavior now and have little fear of consequences.
I haven't noticed driving getting worse, except around the pandemic. Is there data?
1. The cities didn't 'react' to those protests by reducing enforcement, cops started quiet-quitting.[1]
2. Katie Wilson was elected last fucking year, replacing a pro-cop, pro-establishment incumbent, whereas the usual suspects have been bitching about Seattle for decades. Par for the course, of course, the usual newspapers were running hit pieces about how her failed policies have ruined the city a day after she took office, without a shred of self-reflection.
[1] Wasn't so long ago that Seattle's top-paid cop ($390,000/year!) was caught collecting overtime by napping in her car... Illegally parked in the middle of a bus-only lane. (I guess that's also Katie's fault, despite it being a year prior to her election.)
This is just false, considering I've lived across the US. My experience has been pretty universally the same whether or not I lived in Texas, Virginia or Washington. People that are incredibly sheltered like to believe that it's unique to their city, or the result of partisan politics but the reality is that the rot is deeper than that. One of the most famous examples was in deep red Texas: Ethan Couch.
There is something not right with many Seattle-area residents. Some weird combination of anger issues, low self-esteem, and terrible driving skills. I moved to SoCal earlier this year and have seen much less rage and incompetence on the roads. I don’t get flipped off on a daily basis anymore for driving a particular polarizing electric car. No more pairs of Subarus going 5-10 under, blocking the whole road and inducing rage in the lineup of cars.
I see and interact with apparently unhoused people all the time, and I've never had a problem.
> someone screaming in a pile of their own feces 20 or so feet away?
This is a hypothetical, and follows a typical pattern of trying to box people into a response using a situation that effectively never happens. It's like people asking if you'd support torture 'if you knew there was a bomb in an elementary school somewhere in NY, but didn't know which one'. That's never happened.
I have had many apparently housed people yell at or even threaten me, and almost run me over.
So I've never seen it or anything like it, spending lots of time in many neighborhoods of many cities. Human shit, to provoke an emotional reaction (of disgust) at other humans, is a favorite of the anti-freedom crowd. It's not the unhoused people, generally the most vulnerable people I know and encounter, that disgust me.
The problem is that once you draw "the line", then what? Warehouse a bunch of helpless people in overcrowded prisons? Bus them to some other less-draconian municipality? Forcibly drug them into quasi-submission and then turn them loose again until the depot injection wears off? Or perhaps we should "just kill 'em", as Fox & Friends cohost Brian Kilmeade once suggested?
If they are committing crimes, they should be imprisoned for an appropriate period of time as a deterrent to crime, a punishment for their actions, and to facilitate rehabilitation (even though evidence shows this doesn't really happen).
If they are mentally ill and unable to care for themselves or pose a threat to the community because of their mental illness, they should be institutionalized and treated. If they are able to be released into the community after a period of time, checks should be performed to ensure compliance with treatment/medication.
The most important part of incarceration is removing what is a quantifiable risk to the public from the public square. Everything else is secondary. The point of a state having police powers is to ensure for the common good, it is not to continually indulge those who wish to damage that common good. To the extent that the state is responsible for e.g. punishment and rehabilitation, these are ancillary responsibilities that are (or were) downstream from removing threats to the common good from the public square.
Seems like, after all of these police and prosecutorial "reforms", we are back to deriving why many state powers exist from first principles. Fun to watch in real time.
Lacking a house isn't a threat to others. I've rarely seen an unhoused people do harm. Annoying you isn't harm. Making rich people uncomfortable isn't a crime.
> common good
A term used to justify taking away liberty from people you don't like - 'it might take away their rights, but it's good for people in 'common''. The point of government, as Jefferson eloquently put it in the document that birthed the US, is to protect people's rights.
I think you need to fix the cause not treat the symptom. I mean you should treat the symptoms as well, while fixing the cause of the issue.
Atm it seems everyone is trying to figure out how to treat the symptom, and they don't even know why, and they keep completely quiet about the cause of it all. Completely and utter mystery, or framed vague and unfixable enough that they do not have to really address it.
What the Swiss did back in the 80's with the heroin program...that's misinterpreted by US and they're specifically trying to mess it up in application. The Swiss didn't just give lab grade heroin to junkies, they ran a serious mental care and social reintegration program and used the heroin as basically bait. You had access to it but you had to go to their facilities where specialized people could start working with you.
What the US is doing is a mockery of that, they want it to fail so they can say it's not working and they shouldn't even try it in the future.
And I think it's quite clear to basically anyone with two neurons what the cause of it is, but authorities there are going to pretend they do not understand it. That it's some mystical unexplainable cause.
Forced rehab if needed and then somewhere they can work to pay their way, learn the skills to help themselves. There's a ton of manual labor that needs doing, potholes to be fixed.
If someone’s forcing society to pay for their living expenses, it only seems fair for society to force them to labor to cover the expenses.
I’m sure the next objection will be “what, so you’re going to concentrate them in some kind of camp?” Yes because that’s the smart thing to do with a large scale problem. Use scalable solutions.
Sorry I've been to China plenty and the toilets aren't clean. I mean it's better than nothing but some of them are nightmare fuel. But, the "privately" owned public toilets are decent, i.e. those in malls and hotels etc. Quite the same story for many Asian countries too.
I was also shocked by the cost incurred if you get out of home diarrhoea in Europe. Might as well buy adult diapers.
I'll never forget my visit to a bathroom at a huge hotpot restaurant in Chongqing. Open stalls with squatty toilets, feces everywhere and a single towel.
"EU" is too broad of a term to describe cultural/social/political norms such as public toilets. There are places in the EU with fairly decent toilets, and others with almost none. In some you have to pay in many public toilets, in others they are free. The best bet in most places are public buildings such as libraries. And very often cafes etc allow you use a toilet, esp if you have health reasons and ask them nicely, though ymmv. The biggest issue as others said is vandalism, so in (richer) countries where public toilets are cleaned more often the toilets are much better.
Is the keyword customers though? In other words you’ve got to spend money to use the toilet?
In America I can walk in to a restaurant, even a nicer one and ask to use the bathroom and very likely would be shown strait to it. It’s not 100% of the time everywhere, especially places like Times Square, but I’d say that the norm is no spend required.
Okay I'm going to have to say that this _really_ depends on where you are. Sometimes, yes, especially newer buildings, but man I have seen some horrors there in the past few years when it comes to bathrooms in terms of cleanliness and smell (the frequent smoking in a lot of bathrooms doesn't help). This is coming from someone primarily experiencing Canadian and American bathrooms, for reference, and a lot of those are pretty nasty. I think it's getting better at least...
Just to be clear though I agree generally, at least from my experience with East Asia. Hong Kong often has really good bathrooms now IMO (I feel like it improved a lot between 2018 to 2023?). Japan is also really good from my experience (fancy-ass bidets). Taiwan was fine too from my recollection.
That kinda applies to anywhere in the world. On the average, I've seen much cleaner toilets in first-tier China cities than first-tier US cities.
And much more accessible as well. Free public toilets literally everywhere. All over the city, in every shopping center, in every coffee shop. And you don't need to buy a coffee and trash it to use them.
Small nitpicky correction, but in China, city tiers are designated by policy and generally correlate to the quality of life for the middle class there. The US doesn't have a tier system. If it did, it wouldn't make much sense because the quality of life in American suburbs and exurbs is generally better than the most developed cities (unless you're rich, of course).
Free, clean toilets are everywhere in America, just not in the dense city centers (walkable, transit-oriented, mid-rise or higher) that people tend to visit on vacation. I'd estimate only 10-15% of Americans live in these city centers, whereas in China it's probably closer to 50%. With the raw numbers, this difference shouldn't be underestimated.
> I've seen much cleaner toilets in first-tier China cities than first-tier US cities.
That definitely tracks. LA has a massive unhoused person issue, many of whom with severe mental disorders. You feel a lot that in the commons, especially as you get near DTLA. New York is shabby and dirty in general. More so than a big city usually is. And it's not really a charming shabbiness from an extreme subtropical climate as you get in Taiwan.
The relationship China has with its tier 1 cities is more similar to other Asian countries, like Japan and Korea, than it is to the US.
There are multiple forms of "accessible". For someone impaired and unable to drive, the Chinese cities win hands-down because transportation is a non-issue.
The worst toilet I ever saw was in China, but at 5000 meters in Sichuan, it was two slippery two by fours that you had to straddle on over a big open pit (don't slip or lose balance!).
My favorite was a place in Chinatown with a curtain for privacy. Outside a couple of guys where killing a seemingly limitless collection of lives chickens.
What'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.
Diabetics use short needle subcutaneous syringes that can be recapped and disposed of later. They have to have their insulin stored somewhere, which is just as suitable for a used syringe.
If you are diabetic, you may NOT use a public syringe disposal bin, you SHALL carry your used needle home and dispose of it there. On order of Kevin Thibedeau!
> 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.
I looked into this a while back (~6 years ago) and it basically broke down like this: diabetics outnumber injectable drug users two to one but not all diabetics use injectable insulin and the ones that do are more likely to do so at home. Drug users, however, have less compunction about sticking themselves in a public space, particular the homeless. Best guess based on these numbers is that it's a 50-50 split between these populations as to who's using public sharps containers.
> society's tacit approval to do what they're doing, thus accelerating the societal rot.
This argument could be made about providing drugs themselves but fails under the faintest scrutiny for sharps containers because said containers have wide uses beyond shooting up heroin.
> not all diabetics use injectable insulin and the ones that do are more likely to do so at home.
I'd love to hear the citation for this one, as people using injectable insulin generally need to do in conjunction with eating, and I can't think of where you'd get the idea that T1 diabetics who use injectable insulin avoid eating outside the home as a general rule.
Granted, nowadays plenty of people are using insulin pumps which decimates disposable syringe use, but I'm really puzzled where you picked up that in-home/away-from-home impression from.
Homeless heroin addicts who inject themselves in public are not uniformly distributed. Thus while in some places you would expect some such injectable drug use in a public toilet (though I doubt most would bother to go find a toilet for that anyway), that is unlikely for the majority of toilets in a country that contain syringe disposers. On the other hand, one would expect that diabetics who inject insulin would be closer to be uniformly distributed (conditional to the population distribution).
If one could find syringe disposers only in areas where public heroin use commonly takes place that would be believable, but it is not the case.
In contrast, there are actual, real programs and places in many countries to manage issues arising with syringe use, trying to reduce syringe sharing to reduce blood-transmissible diseases etc.
Anyone with type 1 diabetes is injecting while outside the home. Usually it's a long acting baseline insulin that you can inject at home and then a faster acting one that you inject before eating or drinking anything that's not water.
> Ask yourself if that's truly what motivated those being installed...
What motivates this infrastructure is the danger to workers if syringes are just thrown into the trash.
My dad had type one diabetes with a type A personality, and was very particular about making sure that syringes were disposed of properly. Not everyone is this careful, and they put others at risk.
> The problem is they still throw their needles all over the ground.
Yeah, well, that's your culture and a direct end result of how people are treated and made to feel part of or outside of it.
In Australia there are diabetics and drug addicts as much as anywhere, but rarely problems with sharps on the ground or littering in general- go figure <shrug>.
> The problem is they still throw their needles all over the ground
But it's better if at least some of them are in the trash and not scattered around, isn't it? I may be wrong but it seems to me that public opinion doesn't matter to these people anyway, so there's no point in getting rid of such garbage bins
They weren't saying there is anything wrong with the syringe disposal per se, but instead that it's indicative of the people who use those facilities and the priorities of the authorities that manage them.
It is observed that you have junkies shooting up in bathrooms, evidenced by needles strewn on the ground. So the solution from the authorities is to install syringe disposal containers.
It's like how immigrants are treated in the US. There's nothing wrong with them. They're in fact very beneficial. But since half of the dominant political ideology in the region cannot exist without a boogeyman, they get attacked anyway because they make a convenient boogeyman.
This has very little to do with public amenities. It has everything to do with toleration of homelessness and drug use. I don't understand why the west tolerates it at all.
I'm genuinely concerned to ask what you're proposing?
Drug use is already unlawful, and the homeless are routinely criminalized for existing - so if that is "tolerate" then what proposals are you trying to promote?
I'm sure he meant removing the profit incentives from the pharmaceutical and housing industries, disentangling cartels like the Sacklers from the politicians they own, in general tolerating the Epstein class
I've been to many of the major cities in China and hubs in-between and I have not seen a single public toilet that is clean. Humid, stinky, wet, stained with shite and urine yes but "clean", no way!8-((
> I lived for many years in China and Thailand, and toilets are free, clean, and plentiful there
I don't know about China but this was the opposite of my experience in Thailand. The majority of public toilets I encountered had an attendant you had to pay for access. Shopping malls / hotels / other places were you were already paying to be there were the exception of course.
In every part of Thailand I've been to outside BKK, there's a gas station almost every few kilometers on every major road. Almost every gas station has a public restroom that's open 24/7, unattended. The ones that don't have a public restroom are typically right next to a string of restaurants that have a restroom you can use during the day for free if you ask.
Not that I don't believe you, but don't take that to be a common occurrence in Japan at all. By and large, Japan is a safe haven of clean and comfortable public restrooms. There are always exceptions, of course.
China, clean?? Some of the worst toilets, public or private, I've encountered in China. Can't say how Europe compares but I'd rank China a distant last amongst Australia, Vietnam, Japan, America, Canada, and South Korea (there's more countries to fit in there but I'm not going to list them all).
Yeah I have IBS too. In Iceland once I ran into a gas station to use the toilet. The idiot owner tried to charge me about USD 3 as I came out. I just said I'll fill up gas and be a customer and he backed off. I filled about $0.10 of gas and left.
Weird. When I was living in Beijing, I made a mental map of all my bathroom choices when I wasn't at a luxury shopping mall, because they just weren't that convenient and available. This includes squats, which I included since sit down toilets were often hogged by some guy on the phone doing a long smoking session (squats never were, which is great when you absolutely need to go!).
But this was in the time when Xi had just taken office, so it is probably better now. I didn't see any issues on my trip to Chengdu this summer. I have a lot bigger problems in downtown Seattle today, which is just really bad (either the toilets don't exist, or there is some homeless guy doing drugs in the only stall they have). Sigh.
> As a person with IBS I basically cannot peacefully go outside in EU.
Try Poland. Basically every restaurant needs to have a toilet and every one of those must be made available to passers by, not just customers. They are clean and plentiful.
It's mandated by law. Your country is just one political decision from this luxury.
Yes it sucks. Much worse in Central America than Asia, apparently (many places will let you use the bathroom but they aren't very clean and many lack toilet paper or soap). Most of (non-EU, anyway) Europe is more kind about using facilities than the USA (when the businesses that have them are open, anyway).
There are apps and websites to find restrooms but the free restroom in America is indeed dying. Experiments with things like self-sanitizing enclosed all-inclusive pay toilet stations in outdoor areas in large cities in America almost all ended in them being carted away, broken, since people just seem to break them (for fun or sport, who knows). I guess people expected more for their quarter or fifty cents or a dollar than just emergency facility usage. Pity.
I took my son to Sydney, Australia and we used a public toilet at the main train station and I turned around for 10 seconds and my son had located a syringe and was about to grab it. Some scumbag just left it on top of the syringe bin, probably too stoned to put it in. It was truly horrifying.
The only place I’ve seen worse toilets is USA and Europe. Toilets in Japan are a dream.
Lack 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.
A reduction of public restrooms didn't stop the worst 10% of society from having public sex, shooting up drugs, or destroying an area with their lack of defacatory etiquette -- did it?
In places where these things were problems with public restrooms, they remain problems without public restrooms.
The 10%'ers are still doing their dastardly things. The remaining 90% of society still has the same messes to clean up (or to willfully ignore).
You’re making the mistake of thinking there’s a top down process. That’s not what’s happening. It goes like this: “if I close my public restroom then all of the people asking for a public restroom will have to go across the street and they will not bother me anymore“
The problem of course then is the guy across the street is forced to make the same decision
You don't see how maintaining a bathroom where the worst of society engage in public sex, do drugs, and shit it up in general - is more of a liability than without those things happening?
Try hiring someone for a job where the job could sometimes be cleaning up bodily fluids and odors in a bathroom. Even the government deems it infeasible.
Or, think about how much someone would have to pay you to do that job.
My first job was "stockboy" at Kmart in 1996, at 1996 American minimum wage, and part of the job involved cleaning toilets.
And, honestly? If more people had to clean toilets in use by other people, maybe we wouldn't have so many folks expecting other people to clean up after them. I see countless posts in my Facebook group about trash on the street. In the time it took to take a photo and post it to social media, they could have picked up the trash and taken it to a nearby bin.
But I suppose that experience goes two ways. Some people think they're above the human condition, to the point where they won't even clean up after themselves, even in their own homes. And other people recognize that it's actually not that hard to clean things up, if you just do it. We all have good and bad days.
The toilets you cleaned in 1996 were no where near as disgusting/dangerous as what the public toilets look like now from fentanyl zombies and meth heads. I doubt you had to worry about pricking yourself on a recently used needle ever. Those people simply didn't exist on this level back then and there were more options. Please stop with the 'I hiked uphill both ways' routine... life is worse now than in 1996 in almost every way. We shouldn't be expected to ignore it and just put up with it. People should stop making excuses for it and address the root of the problem.
Doesn’t literally every bathroom need someone to clean up body fluids and odors from time to time? At the last gas station, big box hardware store, and McDonalds I visited in the West, log sheets hung inside the bathrooms indicating they’re supposedly cleaned as often as hourly.
It doesn’t really bother me. At many of the places I work and volunteer, our norm is to establish a rota, so as not to shove the job onto whoever’s lowest paid, least experienced, or most willing to be bullied into it.
Yeah, I did this at 16 at a gas station and got paid 8.75 an hour, there are lots of people out there doing this type of work in the private sector. Its not glamorous thats for sure but supply/demand will dictate the labor market. The government doesn't deem it infeasible because hiring is difficult, its because they aren't willing to pay a reasonable wage for the work.
How many likely Heptitis-infected needles and excrement smears did you clean up? per week or per day? Try 10x that and see if 8.75/hour is still setting your 16 year old mind with visions of dancing Super Nintendos and Segas.
Obviously there exists a price at which people will do it. But if the government isn't willing to pay it, it seems unfair to expect businesses to pay it.
What are you taking about? Literally every restaurant and retail worker has had to do this. I was cleaning toilets in high school. You think restaurant restrooms are clean before the workers go in to clean them? You think people aren't shitting in urinals in Best Buy?
Obviously, it is priced into operating a restaurant, where there have to be restrooms. In the context of the comment I replied to:
>How is maintaining public restrooms a "massive liability"? Surely its an inconvenience but massive liability seems a bit of a hyperbole.
The labor costs of having a bathroom be cleaned (in certain regions) might very well be cost prohibitive, hence the OP’s linked article. For example, Best Buy has to spend money to keep bathrooms clean, whereas online only vendors don’t. Maybe it can make sense for Best Buy (or smaller operations like coffee shops) to not have a restroom.
Given enough money, there would be people willing to do all that, buy proper gear and disinfectants, etc.
But that would cost so much that most municipalities or businesses would not afford that.
Some places, of course, do afford that; they are relatively few, as one might expect. Especially as people become more wealthy and the cost of their work grows.
I think it is infeasible because I saw restrooms become less numerous and more restricted over the past 4 decades. If it was feasible, the OP’s article wouldn’t be describing a real phenomenon.
As for the class I was raised in, my parents worked 24/7, my mom cleaned 20+ bathrooms every day, and my parents, myself and my sister slept in one room until I was 16 years old. I have also worked at places where public restrooms were obliterated, and caused quite a bit of rancor among the staff, resulting in restrictions on who could use them.
But that is neither here nor there on the current supply and demand of people willing to do that job.
If the government is underfunded enough to not be able to hire bathroom cleaners, how can anyone expect a barely surviving retail business to afford it?
The problem was not eliminated. If anything, the effects were amplified.
It just moved the poop mess and dirty needles from one defined space back to everywhere else. In this way, they're easier to accidentally encounter while out-and-about, and yet simultaneously harder to intentionally find and clean up.
I think this kind of result has strong resemblance to what is colloquially known as a footgun.
Closing bigger public bathrooms and switching to individually lockable bathrooms - cells, basically, often with codes if at a business did work.
It filters out that bottom 10% that can't coherently speak or present themselves to pass a vibe check in asking for bathroom access.
Things did improve for those with standards, at the cost of having to deal with the bathroom equivalent of barbed wire topped walls around your home compound. That IS better than walking in on the bottom 10% or the disasters they create, but only slightly.
Collectively, squeezing the bottom out by denying them access building by building, block by block has helped turn parts of cities around. It's not that different than locking up your food high in the air when camping so animals don't get into it - they don't come around and stop coming around if they are.
> A reduction of public restrooms didn't stop the worst 10% of society from having public sex, shooting up drugs, or destroying an area with their lack of defacatory etiquette -- did it?
It certainly had some limitating factor. Until late 2010-early 2020s, public displays of gay sex were considered improper rather than brave, injecting drugs in public was a matter for the police, and shitting on the streets was considered a nuisance that could be avoided by the shitter having self-agency and choosing to shit elsewhere.
A friend owns pizza restaurants. They leapt at the opportunity during covid to shut their bathrooms to the public, and have continued to (illegally) keep the bathrooms closed as much as possible.
People made horrific messes in them. Employees and/or owners had to clean them. They don't wish to do so. Public messes; private employees and/or owners being made to clean them is pretty much the story.
You'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.
The fallacy in "the tragedy of the commons" is that there's something inherent in having a shared resource that dooms the shared resource. At least this is the popular understanding. And I'll add that if we look at shared resources both with more breadth -- e.g. across history and cultures -- and in more depth -- e.g. cross-analysis, they come out looking much more successful than you'd think.
That's not true. As with all game theory payouts, it's not saying that a Nash equilibrium is inevitable, it's saying that to avoid it you need incentives outside the game, it's saying that the incentives of the game itself don't suffice.
In terms of "the tragedy of the commons", that outside incentive is usually public shaming in smaller communities, or rules and laws in larger and more anonymous communities. If you look at shared resources across history and cultures, you usually find communities enforce very strong outside incentives against spoiling the commons instead of just relying on the kindness of strangers.
That isn’t what the tragedy of the commons is. It isn’t about something inherent in having a shared resource that dooms it.
It is about the idea that when there is a limited, shared public resource, individuals making rational self-interested decisions will often lead to a situation which no individual would choose.
That doesn’t mean it always has to end in tragedy, though. It just means you can’t just go fully “laissez faire” and let everyone do whatever they want, and expect the common to be preserved. The only way to protect the common is to take some sort of collective action; pass a law that limits how much an individual can take from the common, or set a quota and allow people to bid, etc.
The collective action doesn’t even always have to be a legislative action; you could create a taboo around using too much of a common, or use social shaming to get people to only use their share.
The point is that you have to take SOME collective action to prevent the tragedy.
I 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.
And 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.
We are all at the mercy of the bottom quintile. The rules you follow (or are expected to follow) are based on the behavior of the bottom quintile, the taxes you pay are to support the bottom quintile, the greatest risks to your life and property come from the bottom quintile, the dearth of comfortable public spaces is because you have to allow the bottom quintile to be there, and our zoning laws (in the US) are developed for fear of the bottom quintile.
Sometimes I wonder what fraction of America's economic dynamism is based simply on people's desperate desire to make enough money to not have to live around the bottom quintile.
Much the biggest chunk of US federal spending is Social Security, the great majority of which is pensions. Pensioners are very variable but they're mostly not in the bottom quintile. Then "nondefense discretionary" spending which is a mixed bag but again is mostly not bottom quintile. After that comes Medicare which again is mostly pensioners. Then defense, which isn't really "to support" any particular subset of the population. Then Medicaid, a lot of which is for poorer people, so I'll give you that one. Then "other" which from the description in the chart is mostly not bottom quintile. Then income security programs, which is probably mostly bottom quintile. If we say that all of Medicaid and income security are "bottom quintile", 10% each of Social Security and Medicare, and 20% each of "nondefense discretionary" and "other", go to support the bottom quintile -- which I think is probably all on the generous side -- then that comes to about $1.56T out of $6.1T of spending, or out of $5.5T if you prefer not to count debt servicing.
The greatest risks to my life and property are from disease (for my life), wear and tear plus accident (for my physical property), and stock market instability (for my investments). None of those things has much to do with the bottom quintile.
In the US, homicides are about 0.02% of deaths, and most of those happen to people within that bottom quintile you evidently resent so much.
The dearth of comfortable public spaces is because you have to allow the bottom quintile to be there and not-bottom-quintile people like you want to make those spaces as unwelcoming to them as possible even at the cost of making them less comfortable for everyone. And also because your society has failed to provide the bottom quintile with better places for the things you don't like them doing than those public spaces.
It may well be true that zoning laws are developed for fear of the bottom quintile. You might want to consider the possibility that the fear is as much of a problem there as the bottom quintile itself.
> I think bottom quintile refers to the worst people not necessarily the poor or whatever.
Yes. In the UK the rate of incest is increasing due to migration from Middle East, North Africa, and Pakistan. An NHS Genomics Education Programme blog in Sept 2025 acknowledged the risk of birth defects doubling, but cited the benefits of 'stronger family support', 'economic advantages' and argued against a ban in favour of 'counselling and education'.
Despite the vast majority of the British public not participating in incest, the NHS seemed to think it is right that they pay for the care of the people that do.
A common shared resource - the NHS - is exploited by the worst people (who value economic advantages over their child's health) and everyone suffers.
Virtually all offices I've worked in, the bathrooms have been less than ideally used by colleagues. The people you'd class as 'commons' may not be having public sex, shooting up drugs, but many can be dirty and/or selfish. And this is in an office where cleaners regularly clean the facilities (I'd hazard more frequently than public toilets are cleaned). There's always be pee on the floor, pee on the seat, etc etc.
Homelessness and the post-2008 wave of poverty ruined it. A few people who need to use a public bathroom everyday is fine, but when you have 100x of ppl who are desuetude, on drugs, mentally ill etc. emptying their medications and needles and so on it becomes a public health hazard, attracts crime, and overwhelms staff. Better to just shut it down altogether or limit to staff only. .
Portland put out portable toilets during the pandemic. They had big signs on them about how toilet access was a human right, or something like that.
One by one, they were all burned down. Homeless people seem to be really good at destroying stuff. My apartment building is taking on new low income tenants and the rate of fires - with sprinkler activation - is boggling. The public park I walk by often is losing a little bit more greenery to homeless fires every few months, but I’m still saddened by the loss of a large, beautiful tree - torched by a camper.
The problem isn’t removing public resources, it’s keeping them in working order against a persistent opponent.
The utter lack of it? There's an entire industrial complex around homeless "support" to do magic tricks on money.
Portland's county allocates $9m annually. LA's county allocates $4b annually. Should it be 2x that? 20x? 200x before any positive change occurs?
"Mental health" is a non-answer designed to shift accountability and agency from individuals into everyone else vis a vis whatever system is expected to provide this vague "support", despite the failed track record of these systems to improve anything but their employees' and contractors' pockets.
It's because 50% of voters are choosing to decriminalize laws and make everything into the oppression olympics. California legislature just proposed allowing 'crimes of necessity' this week. We can't have nice things now because crimes are not enforced/prosecuted and there are no consequences. We're moving from a high trust to low trust society in rapid time.
People who vote in favor of these soft on crime polices should be required to provide a room in their home to these people they want to keep out of jail.
The replies here really exemplify the core reason we have this problem - about 50% of the population (on HN, probably more outside of HN) doesn't understand that everything has an economic cost, and cleaning hepititis-infected needles and excrement smears up all day is an extremely costly activity, not just because no one wants to do it, but because if someone gets sick they'll sue the city for tens millions of dollars.
> 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.
You 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.
Not 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.
We'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.
> 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).
The 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
And 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).
I 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.
The 50 cents is dual purpose, the one is obvious in that it pays for the attendant and them keeping it clean, but the other is like using a coin to unlock a trolley, it cuts back misuse by a lot. Once you've been to free vs 50 cent toilets a few times you'll see (and smell) the difference.
In Australia all toilets are free and they are mostly in great condition. I was surprised visiting Italy and having to pay money for some of the worst maintained toilets I’d seen.
The trolley analogy doesn't really hold up in this context, does it?
The incentive to do the right thing that a coin-deposit shopping cart ("trolley") adds is the ultimate return of that coin. It's not much money, but it is nonetheless returned when the cart is put back where it belongs.
If a cart always costs 50 cents and there is no hope of ever getting that money back, then: The monetary incentive to return the cart doesn't exist.
> If a cart always costs 50 cents and there is no hope of ever getting that money back, then: The monetary incentive to return the cart doesn't exist
The grandparent post is just talking about incentives.
I guess what you're saying is that if you pay 50 cents for the bathroom then there's no actual incentive to keep it clean because the 50 cents is gone either way, unlike a cart deposit?
You're probably right about that, but I also don't think most people actually need an incentive not to make a huge mess. I would put money that most messes in public bathrooms are caused by the people that the 50 cent charge filters out. The rest experience some social pressure from the attendant to keep things clean. If all else fails, the attendant can clean up a mess before the next person uses it
Would much prefer this than what we have in NYC, which is go into a bar or cafe, buy something small and then use the restroom. Another thing I'll do sometimes is if I see a busy bar where the bartender isn't paying attention you can walk in, pretend you're looking for friends you're meeting, use the toilet and then sneak out.
As the result will be shit and piss elsewhere in the open, a compromise could be having shitty free public toilets and nice toilets where you pay (or maybe not nice, but bearable).
The alternative would be social workers, more psychotherapists, free healthcare, ...
Not all people are doomed from the start to become asocial messed up beings. Probably no one is - but they all have a history and their reasons. And even messed up beings who don't mind shitting anywhere - can suddenly get some conscience again, if someone speaks to them in the right words.
Also even the most messed up people would use a urinal, if avaiable.
That 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.
The 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.
I've seen paid toilets in train stations (last month in le Mans, a few years ago in a corner of Montparnasse station, though that was before the last round of renovation) and in a mall (CNIT in la Defense). Some RATP train stations have public toilets that you can access with your train ticket, so it's not quite free.
I was just in Paris and I never had to pay for the public sidewalk toilets. Where did you see paid ones? I didn't get to all the arrondisements, so I'm curious.
I was in Nice as well and found one place that had a public urinal(my back was literally to people walking around). It was a bit odd...but I really had to go.
- Ask the attendant.
- Explain the problem.
- Someone behind you gives you fifty cents.
- Attendant waves you in.
- Come back and pay later.
- Someone nearby helps.
Public 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.
I'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.
But then japan has the opposite problem with trash bins.
There was a stretch of road around 600m long, where there were at least 100 vending machine and exactly ZERO trash containers. And no, people did not keep after themselves, I saw plenty of discarded cans on the floor, just slightly outside of vision.
Generally the norm is to have a recycling bin for cans and plastic bottles right next to every vending machine (or group of machines). At least that’s the case 99% of the time when I buy a drink at a vending machine. And vendors that sell food/drinks will typically allow you to dispose of any remaining trash when you are finished.
Im heavily touristed areas, though, it’s become a topic of much outrage on social media where people are illegally dumping garbage in recycling bins. A lot of times foreigners are blamed - and to be fair there are lots of videos out there of foreigners disposing of trash incorrectly - but of course it’s not just foreigners who are responsible. And this illegal dumping seems to have led to some vendors not putting out recycling bins in heavily touristed areas - with a new law being passed in response as well as new fines for littering [1]. So possibly the area where you experienced this issue has already seen some improvement in the past year.
I’ve also noticed that a lot of Japanese people will just leave a can on the ground if no bin is provided (or if the bin is full). The expectation is generally that if you sell some food item, you also need to accept the trash after it’s consumed. So it seems like vendors are “punished” with a pile of trash for breaking that social contract.
On a similar note, if you ever buy food from a food truck or stall, the vendor will usually happily dispose of any trash when you’re finished - even if they don’t explicitly put a trash can out.
In my opinion though public trash cans and public toilets aren’t really equivalent. It may be inconvenient, but you can always just hold onto trash until you reach a suitable place to dispose of it. But when it comes to using the toilet - and especially for children or people with certain disabilities - there’s a limit to how long you can hold it in.
This 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.
Around 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.
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).
Yeah. 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.
SF 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.
Interesting. 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.
Not 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.
I 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.
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
It probably isn't as much about population growth as the increasing wealth gap. My hypothesis would be that a society where people don't feel fair distribution of wealth is more prone to this 'abuse' that you call 'overuse'.
Options:
(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.
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.
Playing the devil's advocate: The law also determined that any space, public or private, can't be used for same-sex sexual activity. So that was a driving force for people seeking completely anonymous encounters, in spaces that aren't linked to either person.
Surely 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.
It 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?
the pissoir . . . the greatest concession most of them made to privacy was a little iron screen separating the user from the street.
Look at the photos in the article, they weren't enclosed stalls. Its elegant in a way, just a couple feet of opaque material that wraps the beltline of a central aiming point. Basically as good as going on a tree but without people getting uptight.
You have not understood the question. It is not asking who determines the use/intent of a space, it is asking who determines the meaning of the space. The law determines that it is not to be used for sexual activities. But what is the true meaning of the space? Is the true meaning the law, and only the law?
>The law determines that public space can't be used for any sexual activity.
When it's one person, true, but when it's a population, the politics historically changes and the law accedes to pressure to stop enforcing that determination.
They'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.)
I 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.
many 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.
In 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.
At 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.
We 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.
Having lived in SF, LA and NYC, I find it very hard to believe that the homeless or the addicts roaming the streets in big cities are being thrown into jail for much of anything short of overt violent behavior. You can see people drop a deuce in the middle of Mission St any day of the week and nobody bats an eye. As people say, "it's just a normal part of life in a big city".
A few years ago I visited downtown SF for a convention at Moscone center. I remember walking along St Patrick’s thinking this is a beautiful place but , my God, the entire area stinks of urine.
Public urination is not a sex offence, it's a misdemeanor.
You don't get arrested for public urination. You get a citation, if you are drunk they might haul you to the jail for public intoxication, but you are out when you sober up.
As long as you don't pee near a school and what not you should be fine.
Several 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.
Public parks and transit centers make sense. I was thinking more in urban areas, not large public land. For example, if I was in a town and needed to go to the bathroom, usually the only option is hoping a business will let you use their restroom.
We've got a ton of actually-public restrooms in my neck of the woods (in Ohio).
Public rest areas are pretty common along major highways and these include restrooms.
Publicly-owned parks usually provide a place to poop, too: Sometimes it's an installation with composting toilets, sometimes it's just a seat over a septic pit that needs pumped out periodically. Sometimes, it's fancy with flushing toilets and sinks for handwashing. Other times, it's just a rented portajohn (that may be full of spiders and smell like death, or be very tidy). And sometimes, they're locked at night when the park is closed. But -- usually -- public parks of any substance offer something for facilities.
Just last week, I worked next to a public park in a very small town (population ~2,000) with some well-maintained basketball and tennis courts. There were a couple of portajohns present. (I did not investigate them further.)
And when there's a major events that draw crowds, like our very public fireworks displays in downtown areas: Temporary restroom facilities are provided.
What we don't have very much of here are permanent, literal-public restrooms in the denser parts of cities. That is very problematic, but it is slowly improving[1].
> I don't think I've seen a public bathroom in America in my lifetime.
You've never been to the beach, a city park (or state or national park), a highway rest stop, or any of the thousands of other places public restrooms exist?
Its not a take, it was a personal observation that ive since realized is wrong because I wasnt considering bathrooms on large public land, I was thinking about small plots of public bathrooms within large urban areas. Obviously publicly owned airports have bathrooms.
I was also not considering things like port-a-potties during public events, since i was only considering permanent structures.
the public bathroom should be redesigned so that one can do only the thing it is designed for - and maybe it needs to be a single-user design.
Almost like an airline bathroom size - might be a bit claustrophobic but these are for emergencies and space saving would be big.
the doors could be wired to sensors that are connected to a central network that shows in real-time the availability and also some alarms if something is out of the ordinary etc.
Lots 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.
I 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.
Almost 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.
Odd. 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.
Something 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.
This reminds me of a story I heard (read?) a long time ago. At Disney World they had a rule about a garbage can being within a 10 foot distance of basically anywhere in the park. The logic was that when a garbage can is nearby, there is additional social pressure not to litter, and the result was that they were able to save money on park cleanup because people used the cans.
When I see lone overflowing garbage cans in big cities I think about this.
> I usually don't have to walk more than a block or two to find one.
That is not the situation in most of the city, whether it be "nice" parts or "nasty" parts. Restaurant districts tend to have more trash cans than anywhere else, but the presence of a restaurant district is no guarantee of good trash can coverage. Source: I've walked around so much of San Francisco in my ~fifteen years here.
In the places I frequent that have reasonable trash can coverage, I've found that trash cans are very slowly disappearing and never coming back. Maybe they get fucked up beyond usefulness and don't get replaced? I really have no idea.
Agreed. 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.
I'm not sure that anyone in the management ladder is affected. People don't generally choose a fast food restaurant or convenience store based on the cleanliness of their parking lots, so sales isn't going to be affected. Nor is staff, already cut to minimal levels, going to be given additional hours to keep the parking lots clean.
There even might be a disincentive to have garbage cans if they can't be maintained. People who don't litter will either take the extra step of going indoors, or they might leave it in their own car to throw out later. Whereas people who do litter will do so regardless of when there are trash cans. By removing outdoor trash cans, you've "saved" the staff the time to monitor and clear out those trash cans.
People do chose fast food by the neighborhood. When I was at McDonald's - 30 years ago so this may have changed - corporate policy was you would clean your parking lot and everyone for one block. We were encouraged to paint any abandoned building in the one block range at our expense just to ensure the area looked nice.
If that's really your take on this then I have no option but to accept it.
Let's move forward.
What incentivized them to provide the trash cans to begin with, might you suppose? They aren't cheap to buy, or to maintain, or to keep emptied daily (or as they fill up, or whatever). But yet: They were things that existed, and their existence was definitely deliberate.
What motivates companies that still provide outdoor trash cans to continue to do so?
It's probably part of the initial franchise standards, required and signed off by the fast food corporation. Or the shopping center design. We know as a society, that we need garbage cans, so they are budgeted for and installed.
But owners are always looking for ways to save money. If the garbage can works fine, it gets maintained. But if it gets hit by a car, or the wind blows it away, it might not be at the top of the list of things to fix. The remnants of the garbage can are removed. The expense gets put off for another month. And slowly the lack of garbage cans becomes normal, and staff can remove another responsibility from their list.
Now the situation becomes, who wants to spend a bunch of money to put in garbage cans, and also add onto the staff's workload? It's not like customers are asking for the manager to install garbage cans.
Every single time we interact, it becomes increasingly clear that you aren't picking up my words at all.
I feel like I'm chatting with ChatGPT 3, as I was years ago when it would just articulately weasel its way around everything I asked with a profundity of deflective nonsense in response to any query.
Or at least: That's what it did when it wasn't confidently introducing hallucinations as rote facts.
> It's probably part of the initial franchise standards, required and signed off by the fast food corporation.
Why were they required? What motivated this requirement?
Someone, somewhere, at some point: They decided that there shall be trash cans. This is a thing that happened. What compelled them to make this decision, might you suppose?
(If you don't have an answer, then that's fine by me. It's a rhetorical question at this point. I've already internally rejected your reasoning for the trash cans becoming gone while outwardly accepting that your opinion is simply inflexibly the way that it is. It is unlikely that I can be further swayed by a lack of an opinion for why the trash cans originated to begin with.)
> 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.
No matter what, big or small, it's always a Republican's fault, huh.
One of the primary goals of the pandemic and lockdowns was to eliminate cost centers for every business.
If you notice how courtesy services disappeared, and many facilities were closed, because of a lack of staff or funds to clean them and maintain them.
It has actually been difficult to get into a restroom at certain restaurants, even now; sometimes I will find a handwritten sign there like “Employees Only” which is against health codes.
I rode a scooter to a “Drive-In” burger restaurant last month. Not a drive-thru, mind you, but a place where folks pulled up in cars and carhops served them, and they ate while parked. And this place had picnic tables, so I ordered a burger combo and tried to wash my hands.
There was no restroom available, and I contacted the order-taker guy and asked to confirm, and then I asked to cancel my order. He said “Your order is ready!” and I said hell naw, if you don’t have a restroom then you’re not serving anyone, so I got my refund...
In city centers it's usually counter-terrorism: it's easy to throw a timed bomb in a metal garbage can and flee the scene, so they got rid of them (London did because of IRA, and of course now they have Islamic terrorism). Outside of city centers it's about (lack of) recycling: it's easier to check if you're recycling correctly in your home bin than public bins.
It was pretty common with the IRA, apparently. They hid bombs in metal garbage cans and used the shrapnel as a damage multiplier. I think they did that at a commercial center and killed several people.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-23695239
> More than 2,000 bins were cleared from the Square Mile after a truck bomb killed one person and injured 44
While I'm not intimate with the difference between British English and American English, I'm pretty confident "Truck Bomb" does not mean a bomb inside a rubbish bin.
But yes, vehicles are a great vector for terrorism and I'm honestly surprised at how few instances there are of people just running other over. But it's also one of the reasons in the US basically every government building has large concrete planters around them (can't ram a truck through it).
Explosion resistant trash receptacles do exist but they’re pricey so it makes sense London didn’t replace theirs. The most common place to see them is in airports.
> 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/
> 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?
Not ruined, just diminished. If too much of the $0.25 is taken by fees, then make it $0.50, or $1, or whatever. In many places, there'd be plenty of business still.
> 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.
Nowadays it'd be $5.25 per use, plus tip (22% or more).
Another example of completely counterproductive interference in the free market, this time eliminating public toilets more or less entirely because you can't make money from them and the state is too incompetent to provide them.
Fun 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.
Plus, 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!
Friends were just in Australia and were immensely impressed by not only the ubiquitous public bathrooms, but also how well maintained and clean they are.
These 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.
> 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
Sounds 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.
In 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
Call 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.
The 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.
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.
One 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.
IMO 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?
city where I live does have that. And there are also homeless shelters that you're allowed to use for three months of the year. And the homeless spend every November/December trying to figure out when are you going to check into that homeless shelter for your three months so you can be off the streets when it is deathly cold outside.
Most of the homeless have significant issues and are not going to get off the street. In better cases a messy divorce is at fault and they could hold a job but they refuse because it would not help their life.
There's also one rich person in my city who chooses to live in a tent year round. When you have a ton of money, being homeless is actually freedom because you can afford a nice warm sleeping bag and a nice tent. It makes a huge difference. This is one person out of, I don't know how many, but hundreds at least. Mostly I bring this man up because it messes up everyone's expectation of how you should deal with the homeless.
> 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.
The 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.
When 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.
Some 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.
People 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.
People have no choice but to smear feces on the wall and leave needles on the floor of public restrooms, or urinate inside a moving bus because housing is too expensive?
Housing and wealth inequality is an undeniable issue. So is anti-social behaviour. You can be poor and even homeless without throwing self-respect out of the window. People are either responsible for their actions, in which case criminal and civil charges are on the cards, or they are not (due to mental illness and/or substance abuse) and need to be institutionalized.
When the social contract fails you, why pay any regard to it at all? It's not a matter of pure, exogenous choice to do those things. It's not some abstract preference that surviving in the margins has afforded the freedom to exercise. It's a way to make sense out of the world and to have some shred of a sense of agency in a world where a person otherwise has no power.
>It's a way to make sense out of the world and to have some shred of a sense of agency in a world where a person otherwise has no power.
Wouldn't poo-cassos be better framed in an institution cell away from the other 90% of society? That way they can get the mental support they need and rebuild their agency. If you don't have agency, you need conservators to help you address it. For children, those are parents. For adults, that's the state.
Otherwise we're admitting participation in a society is pure benefit without any responsibilities.
Because you're a decent person. Or, put another way, if you choose to disregard the social contract, you show your lack of quality of character. Either way, it's still a choice and not forced upon people by their circumstances.
I 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.
Sure, 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.
This 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.
I guess if you don’t have a massive population of antisocial people who destroy the public facility, you can provide them. It’s a shame we in the west surrendered that. Not the worst thing in the world, but I do find it frustrating often to not have a bathroom available nearby (small bladder)
But, while the toilets aren’t the worst sacrifice, the cumulative sacrifices made on the alter of our huge antisocial populations are profound
> I guess if you don’t have a massive population of antisocial people who destroy the public facility, you can provide them. It’s a shame we in the west surrendered that.
What a weird way of stating the problem. There is too large a population of homeless, mentally ill, and drug addicts wandering the streets. We didn't surrender anything, at least not during the last half century in the United States. We did as little as possible to deal with homelessness and mental illness and discovered there's good money to be made incarcerating drug addicts.
> We did as little as possible to deal with homelessness and mental illness
SF would beg to differ. They have a budget of $100k per homeless person. They can't solve the problem because the problem is not money
SF - and probably much of the US homeless problem elsewhere - is largely cost of housing; rent and home prices are ridiculous enough that if you don't make big bucks, you are likely barely scraping by. Rents here are rising way faster than inflation, and it makes everything more expensive and means a lot more people are living that much closer to not being able to pay their rent. Way easier to end up homeless after losing your job when paying 3k/month in rent than 1k/month, as at the cheaper rent saving money is actually possible.
We've consistently built a tiny fraction of the new residential units needed for projected population growth for decades now. Supply has been barely growing while demand surged; what else should we expect?
Other parts of the country have not been as extreme, but this has played out in other cities too. We've had terrible housing policy, and increased homelessness is a direct consequence.
Spending money is necessary but not sufficient to fix this sort (or literally any sort?) of big problem.
I hope you don't think San Francisco having spent a lot of money on the problem (the $100k per person figure in isolation is deceptive, but let's not dwell on that) means we've expended more than a really minimal amount of effort as a nation on the problem. Consider how little the problem of homelessness was discussed during the last presidential cycle, or how often it's discussed in congress, and I think you'll see what I mean. (consider the words used when debating it and you'll really understand what I mean)
The problem is you can’t get people off the street if they don’t want to get off the street unless you do it forcibly. You can end the homeless problem overnight but SF is too empathetic. I’m not even saying this is a fault, I’d rather they fail on the side of empathy than succeed violently.
Just because you can spend money poorly doesn’t mean money isn’t needed to fix an issue.
Something to keep in mind is that that figure includes homeless people who have been homed and are being supported, it's not just the ones currently on the streets.
And still once I was ina small restaurant that let a homeless guy use the toilet and they forced the door open after hearing crashing sounds, and he had painted the walls with his poop and jumped up and down on the sink until it broke off.
Days later I saw a sign in their window saying the bathroom was for customers only.
The problem is money, but for preventing homelessness and mental illness in the first place.
What do you suggest the solution is?
Life sentences in prison for any drug crime.
Prison isn't the right idea. But getting them into some sort of treatment would make sense. And that could be court mandated for repeat offenders for some crimes.
So anyone who has LSD on them gets life in prison? Sounds expensive. Is that how other countries have avoided having this many visible homeless?
Any concerns about police placing drugs on someone if punishment is this harsh?
It is pretty much how China has handled it. It seems like it does actually work if your goal is to fully eliminate drug issues, but it's unacceptably harsh for most countries to palate.
Why is it expensive? Forced labor and for profit prisons exist.
And if there is a life sentence on hard drugs who would possibly have them on them?
You could also make it the 3rd offense or something, not that difficult.
Yeah, that is actually how a lot of countries in Asia have handled the problem
Soylent Green.
So mass murder?
I assure you, if they stopped spending that money tomorrow, things would get dramatically worse, as all the people that money keeps off the streets would be on them.
Spending less money more efficiently would not make the problem worse.
Do they spend $100,000 per homeless person in Europe and Asia? If not, why don't they have similar problems?
Closer familial ties + extremely harsh laws for drug sale and use. Asians realized how opium fucked China for a century and made sure none of that shit flies.
in japan the homeless people clean up after themselves and don’t destroy everything
what’s the difference here?
How many of their homeless are addicted to drugs or nectary ill? It seems in the US almost all visible homeless fall into at least one of those groups.
Fentanyl and meth seems to be largely a North America issue. I previously was curious how other countries dealt with it. The only country I found that had previously had a meth issue was Estonia or Latvia (not sure anymore). It apparently was really bad for years. They fixed it by finding the single meth lab. Not a solution that's viable for us.
No idea what Japan does with its homeless but my money is that it's something like forced admission which isn't gonna fly in the US.
Japan will lock people up for a long period of time if they show the sort of anti-social behavior that the most visible homeless people in North America are famous for.
The US “locks people up” at a much higher rate, and for longer, than Japan does. About 1% of the adult population is in jail in the United States, and it’s about 0.03% of the population in Japan. The US puts people in jail at 30x the rate Japan does.
It is not because the US doesn’t lock people up enough.
Japan has one of the highest numbers of psychiatric beds in the world. That's what I'm referring to. If you're experiencing psychosis in public in Japan, you will be removed from public spaces. This is not true in the US.
Thank “One flew over cuckoos nest” for that.
Yes it is. It’s because they let them out again.
The trains run on time sure enough.
I tried to find some information about how Japan manages to get away from criticisms around forced labor in prison. It seems like Japan does have very poorly paid labor, as little as usd 0.05 an hour, but the incarceration rate is low.
Once again, I don't know much about Japan but I doubt there is a large ethnic minority that is only about fifteen percent of the population but somehow accounts for almost half of all incarcerated people in Japan.
From Google:
> Low Incarceration Rates: Japan maintains one of the lowest incarceration rates in the developed world (roughly 35 to 40 prisoners per 100,000 residents, compared to over 500 per 100,000 in the US).
They are Japanese.
My first thought is, I'm not certain their homeless are different in their behavior, but based on what little I know, I'm rather certain their non-homeless are. I'd expect disruption or damage to a public space of the kind that sparked this discussion to be dealt with swiftly as a high priority.
We in the west have surrendered with weak punishments and lax enforcement for anti social behaviour. In many cases even abolishing laws or putting in place public policy that prevents the imprisonment of people who commit "low level" crimes. There's a certain segment of the population who will (largely unsuccessfully) try to shame you if you promote a tough on crime approach.
In my country the entire justice system has been hijacked by activist judges who are hell bent on promoting these whacky ideas and letting serious criminals go virtually unpunished.
As others have pointed out the US has a massive prison population.
Our problem isn't insufficiently harsh punishment. Our problem is unlikely punishment. The US spends more on incarceration and less on policing and the justice system. You are less likely to get caught and punished in the US but if you get punished it's harsher. Yet studies have shown that a milder punishment that happens more swiftly and with higher certainty is much better for preventing crime.
Not sure that helps with mentally ill homeless but it's at least an improvement we could aim for
This is what China has done. Aside from drug crimes it doesn't seem like they punish any harsher than the rest of the world, they just have an incredibly good ability to follow up. If you smash the window of a store, they will find you and you'll have to pay for it. Just the knowledge that there is an almost 100% chance of having to pay to restore anything you break seems all that's needed to stop the destruction of public spaces.
On the less extreme end, Europe also has much higher rates of catching criminals and punishes then less. I understand the US is really the outlier.
I read an interesting article that laid out how that's ultimately rooted in what level of government pays for what. It's easier for local politicians to call for harsher punishment because prisons are run by state or federal but police is funded locally.
I'm just not sure that stronger punishment and enforcement is going to be the answer here. It seems like many of the Asian cultures have a much higher level of social cohesion even without the threat of punishment. How do we get (back) to higher social cohesion in the West? I recall seeing a film of a shanty town somewhere in the US during the Great Depression. It was very neat and tidy. What happened between then and now?
Stronger punishments? Probably not, but better enforcement? I believe so.
It has repeatedly been shown that the severity of punishment does not sway crime nearly as much as the certainty of punishment does [1]. This all feels like a byproduct of the hyper-individualism we have in the West and the US, especially.
[1] https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/670398
Is the problem social cohesion or mental illness and meth and fentanyl addiction?
Which Asian cultures are you speaking about which have high social cohesion without threat of punishment? Singapore will punish anti-social behaviour like vandalism with mandatory caning, or fine you heavily for jay walking. In Japan police will intervene much more readily in cases of public intoxication and even noise complaints.
For more serious anti social behaviour like gun crimes, violent crimes and drug trafficking there are very strong mandatory penalties up to and including corporal punishment and execution.
Conviction rates in these countries are upwards of 99%. So in cases of intervention a punishment is almost certain.
America has a low social cohension because of global immigration instead of targeted immigration compare to China. America use to share a culture because people came from the same places and shared the same religion and had a common history going back to the Romans.
....sadly more true than anyone here would probably like to admit. I love having Indian coworkers and there’s a large Indian population where I am at, but they are just completely separated in every single way from everyone else. and they keep it that way.
my Pakistani coworkers are absolutely wonderful. Sweet, hard-working, very enjoyable to talk to, but their families and lives are just a totally different universe and they don’t share it.
The honestly very poor black community around the area? they fucking hate us white people. like actively, all the time, no what no matter what you have or haven’t done they don’t like your ass one bit. i’ve seen inside some of the homes, and they are filled with independent black power movie posters about shooting Whitey. No kidding.
I know it takes a village, but when people are so very different and forced to be near each other, it doesn’t mean that they will socialize or help each other; it’s like living on two different planets. there’s all kinds of social research showing this now, and what you get is micro segregation along income lines, rather than everyone helping each other and lifting up the community together.
I wanted for most of my life for people to get along and the world to be a better place, thinking that education and modern access to information could somehow make things better. It seems that was entirely and completely wrong. when people have any kind of discomfort at all about new culture or new person or new idea? They pretty much just run away.
The people here on hacker news are probably an exception, because we are here searching for commentary and interesting ideas and new information.
> The honestly very poor black community around the area? they fucking hate us white people. like actively, all the time, no what no matter what you have or haven’t done they don’t like your ass one bit.
Did you replace folks' smoke detector batteries for them?
The way I found to get around this prejudice was to go to church most Sundays and walk around with a sling bag full of 9V batteries and knock on doors to offer to maintain smoke detectors. (It probably didn't hurt that I was also good for bumming cigarettes off of and slowing down to have a chat.)
YMMV, but showing up and doing work was apparently what my neighbors in East St. Louis and Atlanta wanted.
Wait, so the smoke detector thing is real? I assumed it was just a racist stereotype.
What an awful society you live in.
It is not like that where I live.
The first generation of immigrants have trouble, natural enough. But are very keen that their children do better.
As for racism: Most racism here is systemic, from the state. There is casual ignorant racism, of course, but little hate.
What a mess has been made of your country. You should work to fix it.
It took us a lot of work to get here, and we have a long way to go. But I cannot imagine living in a society such as you describe.
Where I’m from, Sweden, typically it is the second and third generation immigrants who exhibit antisocial behaviour.
Its true im many places. First generation hard working. Second generation lives in the inprint of the first generation. Third generation has no connection to the original homeland and tries to find connection or it turns to antisocial behaviour.
The United States is certainly part of the west, and we incarcerate people at a higher rate than any other advanced nation, BY FAR.
The idea that we are soft on crime is insane.
Harsher punishments do not lead to lower crime.
cortesoft says "Harsher punishments do not lead to lower crime."
Nonsense! Increase the punishment and it does. At the extreme, death for every crime, harsher punishments would totally eliminate criminal recidivism.
Do you have evidence that harsher punishments have a causal effect on crime rates?
It would not stop crimes committed by the people in charge of enforcing the draconian punishments.
Anti-social people as a group is a larger population than just the homeless, mentally ill, and drug addicts, though these subsets are obviously a significant portion. The superset includes people who are genuinely anti-social in their nature, may be nominally employed, have a mailing address, and a place to sleep at night. These are the people we actually surrendered to when we changed enforcement priorities in major US cities to, ostensibly, have some grace and compassion toward the subset of homeless, mentally ill, and drug addicts. This is a demonstrably true statement. For me, and many like me, I know it's true because I can do something like "walk around in a neighborhood from my youth" or "visit a downtown corridor I used to frequent as a young adult" and simply observe the difference between the then and now. It's not always about the homeless, and the oft tiring debate around what to do about them. In many US cities, larceny is de facto legal as long as you are stealing goods valued under a certain amount. This is what people are talking about when they use the word "surrender".
I assume you're talking about software engineers, because in every office I've worked in the toilets have been absolutely filthy by mid-morning.
At my current place there are boot marks on top of the toilet seat that have been there for weeks, put there by one of the 10 people in the company.
I think we can just apply the broken windows theory here. If whoever's responsible for the toilet doesn't demonstrate that they care about its state of cleanliness and repair, the people using the toilet won't care about that either.
> At my current place there are boot marks on top of the toilet seat that have been there for weeks, put there by one of the 10 people in the company.
Are you complaining no one cleaned it up, including you? Or are you complaining that the company didn't get cleaning services?
I'm saying the presence of the boot marks make me less likely to clean up any mess I make in there.
That seems hard to believe. I've been in many tech company offices around the US and they're usually fine.
Where is your office located? What are the national origins of your co-workers?
> boot marks
"So, Inspector Lestrade, ..."
What worries you about the boot marks specifically?
Exactly.
People are asses. Don’t assume you know everybody’s history.
Maybe the guy is one legged and has to jump on the toilet seat to keep his balance.
Is this a serious question? Maybe people don't want to put their bare ass down on filthy bootprints.
He didn't didn't want to be the SECOND person squatting with boots!
Well that first guy didn’t want to put his butt where other guy’s butts have been, that’d be pretty gross.
I don’t think we should put the homeless in forcible shelters like they do in east Asia.
Yet another consequence of no longer living in a high-trust society.
What I want to know is if anyone can identify when exactly the homeless issue became so bad. It was already a problem when I lived in the Bay, and when I moved back to the East Coast it had been 10 years in the making (conveniently when I was away). Clearly there a some sharp lines that can be drawn somewhere. But it's hard to get some actual answers.
Edit: rough clauding indicates it was when fentanyl took off, but idk, that doesn't seem wholly accurate.
It began in 1953 when thorazine was introduced on the premise that it would allow previously institutionalized people to live normal lives with only outpatient care. This turbocharged the movement to shutter mental institutions, and their populations began to crater around 1956. [0] For a lot of people, thorazine and its descendants have been nothing short of miraculous and have lived up to the promise. But not for everyone, and in the name of charity and respect for individual autonomy, we have chosen to allow these people to either live in awful conditions and fend for themselves or do something prison-worthy. So, while there isn’t great data on homelessness from before the 21st century, the root cause of much of it - a societal refusal to recognize certain people as requiring lifelong care for mental illness - begins in 1953. [0] https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?refe...
The advert in the Wikipedia page for chlorpromazine (aka thorazine) has some... vivid imagery.
When it became unfashionable to put mentally ill people in asylums. The additional fashion of "giving local people a voice" in construction projects planning did not help either.
The problem regarding putting mentally ill people in asylums is who gets to decide who is mentally ill? I mean that's literally incarcerating people for thoughtcrime. If people have committed no crime, how can we justify taking away their freedom?
Ideally we would have a way for people who can't take care of themselves, or hold a job to be taken care of that isn't effectively putting them in prison.
Mental "asylums" that were almost as bad (and sometimes worse) than prisons is clearly bad. But just leaving people to live on the streets or end up in actual prisons isn't strictly better.
I'm not saying we should bring back the asylums, at least the way they were, but there should be a better way to take care of people who aren't able to care for themselves.
Yet strangely, we imprison people based on their intent all the time.
For years a woman ran around in traffic and was killed by a car to protect her from the state. Nothing could be done? She had to die?
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/heatherknight/article/Ca...
Exactly and once you're in the asylum the doctors can lobotomize and drug you to the point of insanity. People used to abuse the system to get rid of family members they had an inheritance dispute with.
FWIW you should clarify: do you mean mentally unstable people on streets, or do you mean any form of homelessness (living in cars, surfing on friends couch, etc). Because that second category is much larger and includes a lot of sincere people who are basically just priced out of the area that grew up in
California is a garden of eden, a paradise to live in or see.. but believe it or not you won't find it so hot if you ain't got that do(ough)-re-mi.
https://woodyguthrie.org/Lyrics/Do_Re_Mi.htm
Circa 2015 when the reformulation of meth made it more likely to induce psychosis — as the new flow chemistry version altered which isomers were made.
At least, in Seattle.
What is the new formulation? How does it differ at a chemical level?
It's a theory that labs in Mexico switched back over to P2P 'biker' meth (instead of the old stuff based on cough/flu meds) and that the new meth is causing progressive brain damage to users.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/11/the-new...
In China, it has more to do with putting drug users into labor camps: https://madeinchinajournal.com/2019/10/25/punish-and-cure-fo...
Antisocial people who destroy the public facility don't just come out of nowhere. People get driven to this. Not to say that you can simply ignore them when they're already everywhere, though.
People aren't driven to this, they escalate to this when there are no consequences attached to lesser antisocial behavior.
> no consequences
Usually if you are extremely poor or extremely rich there are no consequences for you. The extremely poor are desperate and have nothing to lose, society already took everything from them. The extremely rich are above the law. As inequality increases crime increases with it, from vandalism to financial crimes.
This is why equality is so important. When the average Joe has a good job, good salary, and a home then can lose things that society has helped him to get and can take away.
What exactly (supposedly) drives someone to destroy public facilities?
> I guess if you don’t have a massive population of antisocial people who destroy the public facility, you can provide them.
Or a consistent race-based or immigrant underclass caste. A lot of countries have the blessing of not having a large population whom they can dismiss the condition of based on visual cues. They just moved from feudalism to universal humanism in one generation.
Whatever bad things you can say about China or Taiwan, they both think slavery is wrong and kings are childish. Somehow the west never caught up. Still having that debate, still trying to justify why their great-grandpas killed those people. China left Mao behind; and the US is still praying to slaveholders and mocking slaves' children, while eating their inheritance.
> It’s a shame we in the west surrendered that.
The west were slavers. They literally auctioned off women to have sex with (the "fancy trade") and put children (sometimes their own) into the fields for life. When some got the morality to be disgusted by that, it resulted in bloody wars (I would even include the wars Germany really started because it lost the colony race.) Their civil society was rife with sundown towns, and in Europe actual death factories were designed to murder civilians.
The west is run by degenerates and venerates degenerates. Until it faces that properly, it will never be safe. China did that.
> the cumulative sacrifices made on the alter of our huge antisocial populations
It's "altar," and the cliché usually refers to wasted efforts to preserve something (generally an abstract ideal.) Nobody is trying to preserve "antisocial populations." They're usually trying to dispose of the old ones after using them up, and to get new ones in who still can't vote. Ironically, the "antisocial populations" are also the ones who clean the toilets.
>Whatever bad things you can say about China or Taiwan, they both think slavery is wrong and kings are childish.
I remember China being pretty racist. A lot of people visiting got a clear message. Not aggressively but quite clear.
>The west were slavers.
Who sold them the slaves? Did Europeans go hunt for slaves or did they buy them? Who did they buy them from?
Also answer this, if Americans wouldn't have bought the African slaves, all those African-Americans that are now enjoying life in the land of the free, where would they have been born today? Think if they could push a button today to wipe slavery from the past, but that meant they get to spawn back in Africa, they would push it or not? Legitimate question. Because it's not like nothing good came out of it.
> Also answer this, if Americans wouldn't have bought the African slaves, all those African-Americans that are now enjoying life in the land of the free, where would they have been born today? Think if they could push a button today to wipe slavery from the past, but that meant they get to spawn back in Africa, they would push it or not? Legitimate question. Because it's not like nothing good came out of it.
The reason that Africa is in a poor state of affairs is because of rampant colonization and pillaging by European settlers, of which enslavement was a byproduct. In your alternate universe where slavery never happened, Ethiopia and Mali would be wealthy empires.
The Mali Empire peaked around 150 years before Christopher Columbus "discovers" the Americas, and it finally collapses in 1599, finished off by Morocco. The Transatlantic Slave Trade doesn't really kick into gear until the mid-17th centuries, after the Mali Empire is no longer around.
If you wanted a better example, you might have picked, say, Benin. That you use Mali as an example of an empire screwed by Europeans in Africa suggests to me a general poverty of knowledge about any pre-colonial African history.
You are moving the goalpost and just make up stuff. Plenty of time to ... do anything, yet nothing has really been done there. If they are so great they should have been able to defend themselves. If you want to keep the discussion real and objective, feelings aside.
I am also not trying to excuse past behaviors or anything of the sorts. It was what it was and we always strive to do better when we know better. But that being said, systems are built around what is functional considering everything that can happen. When you account for everything to insure your safety and survival, it seems to work out like it did. On all sides.
And again, these interactions are never one way, longer term there's benefits to both sides, the local country, and descendants of all slaves and slave owners.
And just as an aside, I could very well argue most of us are still slaves today, but with clearly way better conditions and freedom of movement. But if you don't toil away daily, 5 days a week, you risk medical issues or lack of shelter, kind of like the homeless discussion in this thread. In some cases even death.
So putting what a few rich people from hundreds of years ago did, on me, a regular European folk, is shortsighted or even evil. I had nothing to do with any of it, my ancestors were peasants. And the same is valid for most people OP is referring to when saying "europeans". It's pure nonsense.
Reading about the history and effects will help clarify some of your confusion.
> massive population of antisocial people
'Social' isn't 'nobody annoys me'; it's empathy for, caring about, and helping others, especially those you don't like - otherwise it means nothing.
I'm in the West, and I support liberty - the defining feature of the West - uber alles; it's their right. I'm not threatening others' freedom so you can feel more at ease. (You are more of a problem for them - they can't have you locked up.)
There has to be a line draw somewhere. Generally people who say this don't actually have regular interactions with aggressive, hostile, homeless. Or are you just really cool with going to a coffee shop and have someone screaming in a pile of their own feces 20 or so feet away?
Living in Seattle, people focus a lot on the homeless because it's an obvious problem. The guy screaming at the corner, or the people sleeping on the sidewalk.
But I personally think people miss that its a symptom of greater social rot. I've had more issues with antisocial car drivers than any homeless individual. People screaming profanities because I'm crossing the street with the walk signal active, people narrowly missing me as they speed to work. Just yesterday my entire block lost power because a drunk asshole tboned another car going 75mph, killing a family of four while nearly shearing a utility pole.
The reality is that even if the line is drawn with the homeless the undercurrent of social rot is still there and it's not getting better. And I don't see people calling for car drivers to be institutionalized, quite the opposite in most cases even when they commit homicide.
In a lot of large cities, local governments reacted to the 2020-2023 protests against police brutality by drastically reducing traffic enforcement. Aggressive drivers can get away with a lot more bad behavior now and have little fear of consequences. When voters elect leaders like Katie Wilson this is one of the inevitable consequences.
> drastically reducing traffic enforcement.
I haven't heard of that, other than laws banning pulling people over for minor mechanical issues like broken tailights (used sometimes as coverup for prejudice). Could you give examples?
> Aggressive drivers can get away with a lot more bad behavior now and have little fear of consequences.
I haven't noticed driving getting worse, except around the pandemic. Is there data?
1. The cities didn't 'react' to those protests by reducing enforcement, cops started quiet-quitting.[1]
2. Katie Wilson was elected last fucking year, replacing a pro-cop, pro-establishment incumbent, whereas the usual suspects have been bitching about Seattle for decades. Par for the course, of course, the usual newspapers were running hit pieces about how her failed policies have ruined the city a day after she took office, without a shred of self-reflection.
[1] Wasn't so long ago that Seattle's top-paid cop ($390,000/year!) was caught collecting overtime by napping in her car... Illegally parked in the middle of a bus-only lane. (I guess that's also Katie's fault, despite it being a year prior to her election.)
This is just false, considering I've lived across the US. My experience has been pretty universally the same whether or not I lived in Texas, Virginia or Washington. People that are incredibly sheltered like to believe that it's unique to their city, or the result of partisan politics but the reality is that the rot is deeper than that. One of the most famous examples was in deep red Texas: Ethan Couch.
There is something not right with many Seattle-area residents. Some weird combination of anger issues, low self-esteem, and terrible driving skills. I moved to SoCal earlier this year and have seen much less rage and incompetence on the roads. I don’t get flipped off on a daily basis anymore for driving a particular polarizing electric car. No more pairs of Subarus going 5-10 under, blocking the whole road and inducing rage in the lineup of cars.
I see and interact with apparently unhoused people all the time, and I've never had a problem.
> someone screaming in a pile of their own feces 20 or so feet away?
This is a hypothetical, and follows a typical pattern of trying to box people into a response using a situation that effectively never happens. It's like people asking if you'd support torture 'if you knew there was a bomb in an elementary school somewhere in NY, but didn't know which one'. That's never happened.
I have had many apparently housed people yell at or even threaten me, and almost run me over.
So I've never seen it or anything like it, spending lots of time in many neighborhoods of many cities. Human shit, to provoke an emotional reaction (of disgust) at other humans, is a favorite of the anti-freedom crowd. It's not the unhoused people, generally the most vulnerable people I know and encounter, that disgust me.
The problem is that once you draw "the line", then what? Warehouse a bunch of helpless people in overcrowded prisons? Bus them to some other less-draconian municipality? Forcibly drug them into quasi-submission and then turn them loose again until the depot injection wears off? Or perhaps we should "just kill 'em", as Fox & Friends cohost Brian Kilmeade once suggested?
If they are committing crimes, they should be imprisoned for an appropriate period of time as a deterrent to crime, a punishment for their actions, and to facilitate rehabilitation (even though evidence shows this doesn't really happen).
If they are mentally ill and unable to care for themselves or pose a threat to the community because of their mental illness, they should be institutionalized and treated. If they are able to be released into the community after a period of time, checks should be performed to ensure compliance with treatment/medication.
The most important part of incarceration is removing what is a quantifiable risk to the public from the public square. Everything else is secondary. The point of a state having police powers is to ensure for the common good, it is not to continually indulge those who wish to damage that common good. To the extent that the state is responsible for e.g. punishment and rehabilitation, these are ancillary responsibilities that are (or were) downstream from removing threats to the common good from the public square.
Seems like, after all of these police and prosecutorial "reforms", we are back to deriving why many state powers exist from first principles. Fun to watch in real time.
Lacking a house isn't a threat to others. I've rarely seen an unhoused people do harm. Annoying you isn't harm. Making rich people uncomfortable isn't a crime.
> common good
A term used to justify taking away liberty from people you don't like - 'it might take away their rights, but it's good for people in 'common''. The point of government, as Jefferson eloquently put it in the document that birthed the US, is to protect people's rights.
I think you need to fix the cause not treat the symptom. I mean you should treat the symptoms as well, while fixing the cause of the issue.
Atm it seems everyone is trying to figure out how to treat the symptom, and they don't even know why, and they keep completely quiet about the cause of it all. Completely and utter mystery, or framed vague and unfixable enough that they do not have to really address it.
What the Swiss did back in the 80's with the heroin program...that's misinterpreted by US and they're specifically trying to mess it up in application. The Swiss didn't just give lab grade heroin to junkies, they ran a serious mental care and social reintegration program and used the heroin as basically bait. You had access to it but you had to go to their facilities where specialized people could start working with you.
What the US is doing is a mockery of that, they want it to fail so they can say it's not working and they shouldn't even try it in the future.
And I think it's quite clear to basically anyone with two neurons what the cause of it is, but authorities there are going to pretend they do not understand it. That it's some mystical unexplainable cause.
Right now, many places in the US aren’t even “treating the symptoms”.
We can start there, then move to address the more structural, long-term problems that contribute to these issues.
An action that reduces drug use by 5% a decade from now is fine, but taking a criminal off the street today yields far greater present value.
If they're doing lots of vandalism then yes put them in prisons. Get rid of 90% of drug charges to make room.
You get a much better score if the imprisonment is trying to rehab them, of course.
Forced rehab if needed and then somewhere they can work to pay their way, learn the skills to help themselves. There's a ton of manual labor that needs doing, potholes to be fixed.
Oh, so forced labour then?
If someone’s forcing society to pay for their living expenses, it only seems fair for society to force them to labor to cover the expenses.
I’m sure the next objection will be “what, so you’re going to concentrate them in some kind of camp?” Yes because that’s the smart thing to do with a large scale problem. Use scalable solutions.
By definition, destroying public utilities is antisocial. Antisocial behavior is a huge problem in the US.
Sorry I've been to China plenty and the toilets aren't clean. I mean it's better than nothing but some of them are nightmare fuel. But, the "privately" owned public toilets are decent, i.e. those in malls and hotels etc. Quite the same story for many Asian countries too.
I was also shocked by the cost incurred if you get out of home diarrhoea in Europe. Might as well buy adult diapers.
I'll never forget my visit to a bathroom at a huge hotpot restaurant in Chongqing. Open stalls with squatty toilets, feces everywhere and a single towel.
"EU" is too broad of a term to describe cultural/social/political norms such as public toilets. There are places in the EU with fairly decent toilets, and others with almost none. In some you have to pay in many public toilets, in others they are free. The best bet in most places are public buildings such as libraries. And very often cafes etc allow you use a toilet, esp if you have health reasons and ask them nicely, though ymmv. The biggest issue as others said is vandalism, so in (richer) countries where public toilets are cleaned more often the toilets are much better.
Cafes/restaurants are required by law to provide toilets to customers, afaik
Is the keyword customers though? In other words you’ve got to spend money to use the toilet?
In America I can walk in to a restaurant, even a nicer one and ask to use the bathroom and very likely would be shown strait to it. It’s not 100% of the time everywhere, especially places like Times Square, but I’d say that the norm is no spend required.
Huh. I encounter "customers only" signs quite frequently in the US, as well as bathrooms that require codes or keys.
> China
> toilets are... clean
Okay I'm going to have to say that this _really_ depends on where you are. Sometimes, yes, especially newer buildings, but man I have seen some horrors there in the past few years when it comes to bathrooms in terms of cleanliness and smell (the frequent smoking in a lot of bathrooms doesn't help). This is coming from someone primarily experiencing Canadian and American bathrooms, for reference, and a lot of those are pretty nasty. I think it's getting better at least...
Just to be clear though I agree generally, at least from my experience with East Asia. Hong Kong often has really good bathrooms now IMO (I feel like it improved a lot between 2018 to 2023?). Japan is also really good from my experience (fancy-ass bidets). Taiwan was fine too from my recollection.
> _really_ depends on where you are
That kinda applies to anywhere in the world. On the average, I've seen much cleaner toilets in first-tier China cities than first-tier US cities.
And much more accessible as well. Free public toilets literally everywhere. All over the city, in every shopping center, in every coffee shop. And you don't need to buy a coffee and trash it to use them.
Small nitpicky correction, but in China, city tiers are designated by policy and generally correlate to the quality of life for the middle class there. The US doesn't have a tier system. If it did, it wouldn't make much sense because the quality of life in American suburbs and exurbs is generally better than the most developed cities (unless you're rich, of course).
Free, clean toilets are everywhere in America, just not in the dense city centers (walkable, transit-oriented, mid-rise or higher) that people tend to visit on vacation. I'd estimate only 10-15% of Americans live in these city centers, whereas in China it's probably closer to 50%. With the raw numbers, this difference shouldn't be underestimated.
> not in the dense city centers
aka exactly the place people need them regardless of which country
In the boonies it's much more acceptable to go in the bush in either country as well
As much as a dislike the suburbs, they aren't "the boonies" and it won't be acceptable at all to go in the bush there.
Unfun fact: in Bogotá, it seems to be quite acceptable to piss in the bush everywhere, even in the centro histórico.
> I've seen much cleaner toilets in first-tier China cities than first-tier US cities.
That definitely tracks. LA has a massive unhoused person issue, many of whom with severe mental disorders. You feel a lot that in the commons, especially as you get near DTLA. New York is shabby and dirty in general. More so than a big city usually is. And it's not really a charming shabbiness from an extreme subtropical climate as you get in Taiwan.
The relationship China has with its tier 1 cities is more similar to other Asian countries, like Japan and Korea, than it is to the US.
Chinese first tier cities aren't accessible, you can't even live there as a country bumpkin.
There are multiple forms of "accessible". For someone impaired and unable to drive, the Chinese cities win hands-down because transportation is a non-issue.
The hukou reforms in May were a good first step, but for now, you're right.
The worst toilet I ever saw was in China, but at 5000 meters in Sichuan, it was two slippery two by fours that you had to straddle on over a big open pit (don't slip or lose balance!).
That was such an awesome trip circa 2005.
> 5000 meters in Sichuan
Pretty sure you were in Tibetan areas at those altitudes, a large part of Sichuan is actually Tibetan.
Well the worst one I ever saw was in New York City, of all places.
My favorite was a place in Chinatown with a curtain for privacy. Outside a couple of guys where killing a seemingly limitless collection of lives chickens.
What'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.
Some measures that mitigate a problem are associated with places where said problem is a frequent occurrence.
If a place has tornado drills and tornado shelters, it's a safe bet that tornados are at least somewhat likely.
Some safety and security measures have the effect of making a place feel unsafe and insecure, for this reason.
Diabetics use short needle subcutaneous syringes that can be recapped and disposed of later. They have to have their insulin stored somewhere, which is just as suitable for a used syringe.
If you are diabetic, you may NOT use a public syringe disposal bin, you SHALL carry your used needle home and dispose of it there. On order of Kevin Thibedeau!
Why? Who's that?
> 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.
I looked into this a while back (~6 years ago) and it basically broke down like this: diabetics outnumber injectable drug users two to one but not all diabetics use injectable insulin and the ones that do are more likely to do so at home. Drug users, however, have less compunction about sticking themselves in a public space, particular the homeless. Best guess based on these numbers is that it's a 50-50 split between these populations as to who's using public sharps containers.
> society's tacit approval to do what they're doing, thus accelerating the societal rot.
This argument could be made about providing drugs themselves but fails under the faintest scrutiny for sharps containers because said containers have wide uses beyond shooting up heroin.
> not all diabetics use injectable insulin and the ones that do are more likely to do so at home.
I'd love to hear the citation for this one, as people using injectable insulin generally need to do in conjunction with eating, and I can't think of where you'd get the idea that T1 diabetics who use injectable insulin avoid eating outside the home as a general rule.
Granted, nowadays plenty of people are using insulin pumps which decimates disposable syringe use, but I'm really puzzled where you picked up that in-home/away-from-home impression from.
I think they're referring to type 2 diabetics who might just be on a long lasting insulin and not need to inject at every meal?
Homeless heroin addicts who inject themselves in public are not uniformly distributed. Thus while in some places you would expect some such injectable drug use in a public toilet (though I doubt most would bother to go find a toilet for that anyway), that is unlikely for the majority of toilets in a country that contain syringe disposers. On the other hand, one would expect that diabetics who inject insulin would be closer to be uniformly distributed (conditional to the population distribution).
If one could find syringe disposers only in areas where public heroin use commonly takes place that would be believable, but it is not the case.
In contrast, there are actual, real programs and places in many countries to manage issues arising with syringe use, trying to reduce syringe sharing to reduce blood-transmissible diseases etc.
Anyone with type 1 diabetes is injecting while outside the home. Usually it's a long acting baseline insulin that you can inject at home and then a faster acting one that you inject before eating or drinking anything that's not water.
> Ask yourself if that's truly what motivated those being installed...
What motivates this infrastructure is the danger to workers if syringes are just thrown into the trash.
My dad had type one diabetes with a type A personality, and was very particular about making sure that syringes were disposed of properly. Not everyone is this careful, and they put others at risk.
> The problem is they still throw their needles all over the ground.
Yeah, well, that's your culture and a direct end result of how people are treated and made to feel part of or outside of it.
In Australia there are diabetics and drug addicts as much as anywhere, but rarely problems with sharps on the ground or littering in general- go figure <shrug>.
Drug use: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-08-15/australian-drug-use-w...
That's about a gram each over the year, or rather many people don't use, a few use a lot.Diabetics, sharp disposal: https://www.diabetesaustralia.com.au/resources/safe-sharps/
Drug users, sharps: https://www.healthywa.wa.gov.au/Articles/U_Z/Where-to-find-n...
At the suburban council level: https://cosp.t1cloud.com/apps/KnowledgeBase/mySouthPerth/art...
Nobody's choosing to use heroin because it's slightly easier to not litter needles. The tiny harm reduction measure is good.
> The problem is they still throw their needles all over the ground
But it's better if at least some of them are in the trash and not scattered around, isn't it? I may be wrong but it seems to me that public opinion doesn't matter to these people anyway, so there's no point in getting rid of such garbage bins
oook, so if according to your message, the disposals are mostly used by diabetics, then again, what's wrong with them?
They weren't saying there is anything wrong with the syringe disposal per se, but instead that it's indicative of the people who use those facilities and the priorities of the authorities that manage them.
It is observed that you have junkies shooting up in bathrooms, evidenced by needles strewn on the ground. So the solution from the authorities is to install syringe disposal containers.
> So the solution from the authorities is to install syringe disposal containers.
Given the cost vs the benefits, why not? A box mounted to a wall is a pittance.
Feel free to elaborate your plan for the junkies that would be cost effective, practical and ethical.
It's like how immigrants are treated in the US. There's nothing wrong with them. They're in fact very beneficial. But since half of the dominant political ideology in the region cannot exist without a boogeyman, they get attacked anyway because they make a convenient boogeyman.
This has very little to do with public amenities. It has everything to do with toleration of homelessness and drug use. I don't understand why the west tolerates it at all.
I'm genuinely concerned to ask what you're proposing?
Drug use is already unlawful, and the homeless are routinely criminalized for existing - so if that is "tolerate" then what proposals are you trying to promote?
I'm sure he meant removing the profit incentives from the pharmaceutical and housing industries, disentangling cartels like the Sacklers from the politicians they own, in general tolerating the Epstein class
You think we don't tolerate the homeless in the West? Man oh man, some traveling would do you good.
I've been to many of the major cities in China and hubs in-between and I have not seen a single public toilet that is clean. Humid, stinky, wet, stained with shite and urine yes but "clean", no way!8-((
> I lived for many years in China and Thailand, and toilets are free, clean, and plentiful there
I don't know about China but this was the opposite of my experience in Thailand. The majority of public toilets I encountered had an attendant you had to pay for access. Shopping malls / hotels / other places were you were already paying to be there were the exception of course.
In every part of Thailand I've been to outside BKK, there's a gas station almost every few kilometers on every major road. Almost every gas station has a public restroom that's open 24/7, unattended. The ones that don't have a public restroom are typically right next to a string of restaurants that have a restroom you can use during the day for free if you ask.
That's also true of the US.
I am ok with paying for public toilets if they are being kept clean.
In Japan, I've seen attendants looking for some payment to use bathrooms in hotels.
I think you just stumbled upon a one-off. I've lived here my entire adult life and never encountered this.
Where? 11 years living in Japan and I've never seen this once, and never heard it from friends or family.
It was in Tokyo. Couldn't tell you the specific hotel. But it had our event coordinator livid and she simply ignored them.
Not that I don't believe you, but don't take that to be a common occurrence in Japan at all. By and large, Japan is a safe haven of clean and comfortable public restrooms. There are always exceptions, of course.
China, clean?? Some of the worst toilets, public or private, I've encountered in China. Can't say how Europe compares but I'd rank China a distant last amongst Australia, Vietnam, Japan, America, Canada, and South Korea (there's more countries to fit in there but I'm not going to list them all).
Yeah I have IBS too. In Iceland once I ran into a gas station to use the toilet. The idiot owner tried to charge me about USD 3 as I came out. I just said I'll fill up gas and be a customer and he backed off. I filled about $0.10 of gas and left.
Weird. When I was living in Beijing, I made a mental map of all my bathroom choices when I wasn't at a luxury shopping mall, because they just weren't that convenient and available. This includes squats, which I included since sit down toilets were often hogged by some guy on the phone doing a long smoking session (squats never were, which is great when you absolutely need to go!).
But this was in the time when Xi had just taken office, so it is probably better now. I didn't see any issues on my trip to Chengdu this summer. I have a lot bigger problems in downtown Seattle today, which is just really bad (either the toilets don't exist, or there is some homeless guy doing drugs in the only stall they have). Sigh.
> As a person with IBS I basically cannot peacefully go outside in EU.
Try Poland. Basically every restaurant needs to have a toilet and every one of those must be made available to passers by, not just customers. They are clean and plentiful.
It's mandated by law. Your country is just one political decision from this luxury.
Yes it sucks. Much worse in Central America than Asia, apparently (many places will let you use the bathroom but they aren't very clean and many lack toilet paper or soap). Most of (non-EU, anyway) Europe is more kind about using facilities than the USA (when the businesses that have them are open, anyway).
There are apps and websites to find restrooms but the free restroom in America is indeed dying. Experiments with things like self-sanitizing enclosed all-inclusive pay toilet stations in outdoor areas in large cities in America almost all ended in them being carted away, broken, since people just seem to break them (for fun or sport, who knows). I guess people expected more for their quarter or fifty cents or a dollar than just emergency facility usage. Pity.
> Then take any shopping mall in Bangkok
That is an extremely small subset of Thailand. I wouldn’t surprised if high end malls in any western capital city also had good toilets.
Most toilets outside of malls in Thailand were bring your own soap and toilet paper and covered in water from the bum guns.
I took my son to Sydney, Australia and we used a public toilet at the main train station and I turned around for 10 seconds and my son had located a syringe and was about to grab it. Some scumbag just left it on top of the syringe bin, probably too stoned to put it in. It was truly horrifying.
The only place I’ve seen worse toilets is USA and Europe. Toilets in Japan are a dream.
Lack 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.
A reduction of public restrooms didn't stop the worst 10% of society from having public sex, shooting up drugs, or destroying an area with their lack of defacatory etiquette -- did it?
In places where these things were problems with public restrooms, they remain problems without public restrooms.
The 10%'ers are still doing their dastardly things. The remaining 90% of society still has the same messes to clean up (or to willfully ignore).
Nothing has been improved in this process.
You’re making the mistake of thinking there’s a top down process. That’s not what’s happening. It goes like this: “if I close my public restroom then all of the people asking for a public restroom will have to go across the street and they will not bother me anymore“
The problem of course then is the guy across the street is forced to make the same decision
I've made no such mistake.
Agreed. However it becomes unstable and a massive liability for society to maintain public restrooms.
So yes the 10% fuck it up for everyone unless cracked down on.
How is maintaining public restrooms a "massive liability"? Surely its an inconvenience but massive liability seems a bit of a hyperbole.
You don't see how maintaining a bathroom where the worst of society engage in public sex, do drugs, and shit it up in general - is more of a liability than without those things happening?
Try hiring someone for a job where the job could sometimes be cleaning up bodily fluids and odors in a bathroom. Even the government deems it infeasible.
Or, think about how much someone would have to pay you to do that job.
My first job was "stockboy" at Kmart in 1996, at 1996 American minimum wage, and part of the job involved cleaning toilets.
And, honestly? If more people had to clean toilets in use by other people, maybe we wouldn't have so many folks expecting other people to clean up after them. I see countless posts in my Facebook group about trash on the street. In the time it took to take a photo and post it to social media, they could have picked up the trash and taken it to a nearby bin.
But I suppose that experience goes two ways. Some people think they're above the human condition, to the point where they won't even clean up after themselves, even in their own homes. And other people recognize that it's actually not that hard to clean things up, if you just do it. We all have good and bad days.
Cleaning up trash, wiping tables, mopping the floor is one thing.
Cleaning up bodily fluids, which likely come from drug users, is a whole other thing.
The toilets you cleaned in 1996 were no where near as disgusting/dangerous as what the public toilets look like now from fentanyl zombies and meth heads. I doubt you had to worry about pricking yourself on a recently used needle ever. Those people simply didn't exist on this level back then and there were more options. Please stop with the 'I hiked uphill both ways' routine... life is worse now than in 1996 in almost every way. We shouldn't be expected to ignore it and just put up with it. People should stop making excuses for it and address the root of the problem.
Doesn’t literally every bathroom need someone to clean up body fluids and odors from time to time? At the last gas station, big box hardware store, and McDonalds I visited in the West, log sheets hung inside the bathrooms indicating they’re supposedly cleaned as often as hourly.
It doesn’t really bother me. At many of the places I work and volunteer, our norm is to establish a rota, so as not to shove the job onto whoever’s lowest paid, least experienced, or most willing to be bullied into it.
Yeah, I did this at 16 at a gas station and got paid 8.75 an hour, there are lots of people out there doing this type of work in the private sector. Its not glamorous thats for sure but supply/demand will dictate the labor market. The government doesn't deem it infeasible because hiring is difficult, its because they aren't willing to pay a reasonable wage for the work.
How many likely Heptitis-infected needles and excrement smears did you clean up? per week or per day? Try 10x that and see if 8.75/hour is still setting your 16 year old mind with visions of dancing Super Nintendos and Segas.
Obviously there exists a price at which people will do it. But if the government isn't willing to pay it, it seems unfair to expect businesses to pay it.
What are you taking about? Literally every restaurant and retail worker has had to do this. I was cleaning toilets in high school. You think restaurant restrooms are clean before the workers go in to clean them? You think people aren't shitting in urinals in Best Buy?
Obviously, it is priced into operating a restaurant, where there have to be restrooms. In the context of the comment I replied to:
>How is maintaining public restrooms a "massive liability"? Surely its an inconvenience but massive liability seems a bit of a hyperbole.
The labor costs of having a bathroom be cleaned (in certain regions) might very well be cost prohibitive, hence the OP’s linked article. For example, Best Buy has to spend money to keep bathrooms clean, whereas online only vendors don’t. Maybe it can make sense for Best Buy (or smaller operations like coffee shops) to not have a restroom.
Given enough money, there would be people willing to do all that, buy proper gear and disinfectants, etc.
But that would cost so much that most municipalities or businesses would not afford that.
Some places, of course, do afford that; they are relatively few, as one might expect. Especially as people become more wealthy and the cost of their work grows.
Was a cart pusher at target and was frequently shanghaid into cleaning toilets.
I think you might be giving away the class you were raised in if you think it’s infeasible to pay people to clean toilets.
I think it is infeasible because I saw restrooms become less numerous and more restricted over the past 4 decades. If it was feasible, the OP’s article wouldn’t be describing a real phenomenon.
As for the class I was raised in, my parents worked 24/7, my mom cleaned 20+ bathrooms every day, and my parents, myself and my sister slept in one room until I was 16 years old. I have also worked at places where public restrooms were obliterated, and caused quite a bit of rancor among the staff, resulting in restrictions on who could use them.
But that is neither here nor there on the current supply and demand of people willing to do that job.
Also: the liability of getting stuck with a needle.
> Even the government deems it infeasible.
Because they are underfunded often.
Funny how the government is "underfunded", yet can spend billions and trillions on plenty of things.
The parts of government responsible for public toilets are not the ones spending billions or trillions of dollars on things.
If the government is underfunded enough to not be able to hire bathroom cleaners, how can anyone expect a barely surviving retail business to afford it?
The same liability exists without them.
The problem was not eliminated. If anything, the effects were amplified.
It just moved the poop mess and dirty needles from one defined space back to everywhere else. In this way, they're easier to accidentally encounter while out-and-about, and yet simultaneously harder to intentionally find and clean up.
I think this kind of result has strong resemblance to what is colloquially known as a footgun.
Closing bigger public bathrooms and switching to individually lockable bathrooms - cells, basically, often with codes if at a business did work.
It filters out that bottom 10% that can't coherently speak or present themselves to pass a vibe check in asking for bathroom access.
Things did improve for those with standards, at the cost of having to deal with the bathroom equivalent of barbed wire topped walls around your home compound. That IS better than walking in on the bottom 10% or the disasters they create, but only slightly.
Collectively, squeezing the bottom out by denying them access building by building, block by block has helped turn parts of cities around. It's not that different than locking up your food high in the air when camping so animals don't get into it - they don't come around and stop coming around if they are.
> A reduction of public restrooms didn't stop the worst 10% of society from having public sex, shooting up drugs, or destroying an area with their lack of defacatory etiquette -- did it?
It certainly had some limitating factor. Until late 2010-early 2020s, public displays of gay sex were considered improper rather than brave, injecting drugs in public was a matter for the police, and shitting on the streets was considered a nuisance that could be avoided by the shitter having self-agency and choosing to shit elsewhere.
A friend owns pizza restaurants. They leapt at the opportunity during covid to shut their bathrooms to the public, and have continued to (illegally) keep the bathrooms closed as much as possible.
People made horrific messes in them. Employees and/or owners had to clean them. They don't wish to do so. Public messes; private employees and/or owners being made to clean them is pretty much the story.
This is wrong and you both know it.
Grow up.
You'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.
The fallacy in "the tragedy of the commons" is that there's something inherent in having a shared resource that dooms the shared resource. At least this is the popular understanding. And I'll add that if we look at shared resources both with more breadth -- e.g. across history and cultures -- and in more depth -- e.g. cross-analysis, they come out looking much more successful than you'd think.
That's not true. As with all game theory payouts, it's not saying that a Nash equilibrium is inevitable, it's saying that to avoid it you need incentives outside the game, it's saying that the incentives of the game itself don't suffice.
In terms of "the tragedy of the commons", that outside incentive is usually public shaming in smaller communities, or rules and laws in larger and more anonymous communities. If you look at shared resources across history and cultures, you usually find communities enforce very strong outside incentives against spoiling the commons instead of just relying on the kindness of strangers.
That isn’t what the tragedy of the commons is. It isn’t about something inherent in having a shared resource that dooms it.
It is about the idea that when there is a limited, shared public resource, individuals making rational self-interested decisions will often lead to a situation which no individual would choose.
That doesn’t mean it always has to end in tragedy, though. It just means you can’t just go fully “laissez faire” and let everyone do whatever they want, and expect the common to be preserved. The only way to protect the common is to take some sort of collective action; pass a law that limits how much an individual can take from the common, or set a quota and allow people to bid, etc.
The collective action doesn’t even always have to be a legislative action; you could create a taboo around using too much of a common, or use social shaming to get people to only use their share.
The point is that you have to take SOME collective action to prevent the tragedy.
Thanks for both teaching me and not losing the forest for the trees of my point.
I 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.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/41212064
Exactly. Just need to find time to properly read this.
And 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.
We are experiencing "changing consumer habits"
Ten percent is way too optimistic, I'd say 20% are destroying everything for the majority.
We are all at the mercy of the bottom quintile. The rules you follow (or are expected to follow) are based on the behavior of the bottom quintile, the taxes you pay are to support the bottom quintile, the greatest risks to your life and property come from the bottom quintile, the dearth of comfortable public spaces is because you have to allow the bottom quintile to be there, and our zoning laws (in the US) are developed for fear of the bottom quintile.
Sometimes I wonder what fraction of America's economic dynamism is based simply on people's desperate desire to make enough money to not have to live around the bottom quintile.
Pretty much all of that is false.
The rules I'm expected to follow based on the bottom quintile are generally rules that are no trouble for me to follow.
The taxes I pay support way more than just the bottom quintile. I'm actually in the UK but I guess you're in the US, so here's a rough breakdown based on this infographic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_spending_in_the_Uni....
Much the biggest chunk of US federal spending is Social Security, the great majority of which is pensions. Pensioners are very variable but they're mostly not in the bottom quintile. Then "nondefense discretionary" spending which is a mixed bag but again is mostly not bottom quintile. After that comes Medicare which again is mostly pensioners. Then defense, which isn't really "to support" any particular subset of the population. Then Medicaid, a lot of which is for poorer people, so I'll give you that one. Then "other" which from the description in the chart is mostly not bottom quintile. Then income security programs, which is probably mostly bottom quintile. If we say that all of Medicaid and income security are "bottom quintile", 10% each of Social Security and Medicare, and 20% each of "nondefense discretionary" and "other", go to support the bottom quintile -- which I think is probably all on the generous side -- then that comes to about $1.56T out of $6.1T of spending, or out of $5.5T if you prefer not to count debt servicing.
The greatest risks to my life and property are from disease (for my life), wear and tear plus accident (for my physical property), and stock market instability (for my investments). None of those things has much to do with the bottom quintile.
In the US, homicides are about 0.02% of deaths, and most of those happen to people within that bottom quintile you evidently resent so much.
The dearth of comfortable public spaces is because you have to allow the bottom quintile to be there and not-bottom-quintile people like you want to make those spaces as unwelcoming to them as possible even at the cost of making them less comfortable for everyone. And also because your society has failed to provide the bottom quintile with better places for the things you don't like them doing than those public spaces.
It may well be true that zoning laws are developed for fear of the bottom quintile. You might want to consider the possibility that the fear is as much of a problem there as the bottom quintile itself.
I think bottom quintile refers to the worst people not necessarily the poor or whatever.
> > I'm actually in the UK
> I think bottom quintile refers to the worst people not necessarily the poor or whatever.
Yes. In the UK the rate of incest is increasing due to migration from Middle East, North Africa, and Pakistan. An NHS Genomics Education Programme blog in Sept 2025 acknowledged the risk of birth defects doubling, but cited the benefits of 'stronger family support', 'economic advantages' and argued against a ban in favour of 'counselling and education'.
Despite the vast majority of the British public not participating in incest, the NHS seemed to think it is right that they pay for the care of the people that do.
A common shared resource - the NHS - is exploited by the worst people (who value economic advantages over their child's health) and everyone suffers.
https://www.bmj.com/content/391/bmj.r2061
>The worst 10%
In reality, about 2% or even less.
We could live in paradise if we just removed them from society. Put them in a box.
Some people here seem to identify with that 10%.
I don't think I quite agree with that.
Virtually all offices I've worked in, the bathrooms have been less than ideally used by colleagues. The people you'd class as 'commons' may not be having public sex, shooting up drugs, but many can be dirty and/or selfish. And this is in an office where cleaners regularly clean the facilities (I'd hazard more frequently than public toilets are cleaned). There's always be pee on the floor, pee on the seat, etc etc.
I'm of the opinion that the pee issue happens when there is no urinal. Insufficient urinals => no toilets in usable state.
The distribution in those offices is probably the same, a small percentage of people cause almost all the nastiness.
This is real. But also "pee on the seat" is gross but not the level of damage a diseased homeless dude does to a bathroom.
Homelessness and the post-2008 wave of poverty ruined it. A few people who need to use a public bathroom everyday is fine, but when you have 100x of ppl who are desuetude, on drugs, mentally ill etc. emptying their medications and needles and so on it becomes a public health hazard, attracts crime, and overwhelms staff. Better to just shut it down altogether or limit to staff only. .
Good thing that stops the "destitute, on drugs, mentally ill etc" from doing this simply by removing the public toilets right?
Portland put out portable toilets during the pandemic. They had big signs on them about how toilet access was a human right, or something like that.
One by one, they were all burned down. Homeless people seem to be really good at destroying stuff. My apartment building is taking on new low income tenants and the rate of fires - with sprinkler activation - is boggling. The public park I walk by often is losing a little bit more greenery to homeless fires every few months, but I’m still saddened by the loss of a large, beautiful tree - torched by a camper.
The problem isn’t removing public resources, it’s keeping them in working order against a persistent opponent.
Seems like the problem is the utter lack of mental health support to me.
The utter lack of it? There's an entire industrial complex around homeless "support" to do magic tricks on money.
Portland's county allocates $9m annually. LA's county allocates $4b annually. Should it be 2x that? 20x? 200x before any positive change occurs?
"Mental health" is a non-answer designed to shift accountability and agency from individuals into everyone else vis a vis whatever system is expected to provide this vague "support", despite the failed track record of these systems to improve anything but their employees' and contractors' pockets.
Well it becomes someone else's problem, right? That kind of short-term thinking is in vogue at the moment.
It's because 50% of voters are choosing to decriminalize laws and make everything into the oppression olympics. California legislature just proposed allowing 'crimes of necessity' this week. We can't have nice things now because crimes are not enforced/prosecuted and there are no consequences. We're moving from a high trust to low trust society in rapid time.
People who vote in favor of these soft on crime polices should be required to provide a room in their home to these people they want to keep out of jail.
The replies here really exemplify the core reason we have this problem - about 50% of the population (on HN, probably more outside of HN) doesn't understand that everything has an economic cost, and cleaning hepititis-infected needles and excrement smears up all day is an extremely costly activity, not just because no one wants to do it, but because if someone gets sick they'll sue the city for tens millions of dollars.
> 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.
You 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.
Not 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.
We'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.
> 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).
Brother Iran isn't the US's first rodeo in the middle east
https://www.brown.edu/news/2021-09-01/costsofwar
The actual number is 8 trillion
The 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
And 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).
> 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?
I 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.
The 50 cents is dual purpose, the one is obvious in that it pays for the attendant and them keeping it clean, but the other is like using a coin to unlock a trolley, it cuts back misuse by a lot. Once you've been to free vs 50 cent toilets a few times you'll see (and smell) the difference.
In Australia all toilets are free and they are mostly in great condition. I was surprised visiting Italy and having to pay money for some of the worst maintained toilets I’d seen.
The trolley analogy doesn't really hold up in this context, does it?
The incentive to do the right thing that a coin-deposit shopping cart ("trolley") adds is the ultimate return of that coin. It's not much money, but it is nonetheless returned when the cart is put back where it belongs.
If a cart always costs 50 cents and there is no hope of ever getting that money back, then: The monetary incentive to return the cart doesn't exist.
Well, even if you don’t get your 50 cents back you usually have an incentive to leave the restroom when you’re done.
Does stretching the analogy help to ameliorate the difference betwixt a payment and a returnable deposit?
Be...twixt?
Yes, it's a word.
It's an archaic word.
It's one of my most favorite of words.
> If a cart always costs 50 cents and there is no hope of ever getting that money back, then: The monetary incentive to return the cart doesn't exist
The grandparent post is just talking about incentives.
I guess what you're saying is that if you pay 50 cents for the bathroom then there's no actual incentive to keep it clean because the 50 cents is gone either way, unlike a cart deposit?
You're probably right about that, but I also don't think most people actually need an incentive not to make a huge mess. I would put money that most messes in public bathrooms are caused by the people that the 50 cent charge filters out. The rest experience some social pressure from the attendant to keep things clean. If all else fails, the attendant can clean up a mess before the next person uses it
manning the loo in a developed country would be a much higher expense, and that too if you can convince someone to do it.
Would much prefer this than what we have in NYC, which is go into a bar or cafe, buy something small and then use the restroom. Another thing I'll do sometimes is if I see a busy bar where the bartender isn't paying attention you can walk in, pretend you're looking for friends you're meeting, use the toilet and then sneak out.
As the result will be shit and piss elsewhere in the open, a compromise could be having shitty free public toilets and nice toilets where you pay (or maybe not nice, but bearable).
The alternative would be social workers, more psychotherapists, free healthcare, ...
Surely more social workers will stop people from pissing on the floor
Not all people are doomed from the start to become asocial messed up beings. Probably no one is - but they all have a history and their reasons. And even messed up beings who don't mind shitting anywhere - can suddenly get some conscience again, if someone speaks to them in the right words.
Also even the most messed up people would use a urinal, if avaiable.
That 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.
The 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.
I've seen paid toilets in train stations (last month in le Mans, a few years ago in a corner of Montparnasse station, though that was before the last round of renovation) and in a mall (CNIT in la Defense). Some RATP train stations have public toilets that you can access with your train ticket, so it's not quite free.
I went to Paris a month ago and saw paid public toilets. Those enclosed things on the sidewalk.
I was just in Paris and I never had to pay for the public sidewalk toilets. Where did you see paid ones? I didn't get to all the arrondisements, so I'm curious.
I don't remember actually. I was staying in Montparnasse so the 14th. Was 1 Euro wherever it was. Might've been this one: https://maps.app.goo.gl/5vPoD7jM3ELyP6gL7
And it's not this other one on the same street, cause this was free https://maps.app.goo.gl/Firjcsabthu8DHtQ6
Yes; the inverse is not true; making it free won't ensure that it won't happen.
This was a year ago in Nice for reference.
I was in Nice as well and found one place that had a public urinal(my back was literally to people walking around). It was a bit odd...but I really had to go.
Oh 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.
The 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 ..
:)
> but this setup is certainly better than eliminating public restrooms entirely.
Somehow that seems ensured regardless.
how is that different from what they'd do if the pay toilet didn't exist?
It also makes it more likely that hobos and drug addicts don't soil and destroy the public bathrooms.
Public 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.
I'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.
But then japan has the opposite problem with trash bins.
There was a stretch of road around 600m long, where there were at least 100 vending machine and exactly ZERO trash containers. And no, people did not keep after themselves, I saw plenty of discarded cans on the floor, just slightly outside of vision.
Tokyo, 2025.
Generally the norm is to have a recycling bin for cans and plastic bottles right next to every vending machine (or group of machines). At least that’s the case 99% of the time when I buy a drink at a vending machine. And vendors that sell food/drinks will typically allow you to dispose of any remaining trash when you are finished.
Im heavily touristed areas, though, it’s become a topic of much outrage on social media where people are illegally dumping garbage in recycling bins. A lot of times foreigners are blamed - and to be fair there are lots of videos out there of foreigners disposing of trash incorrectly - but of course it’s not just foreigners who are responsible. And this illegal dumping seems to have led to some vendors not putting out recycling bins in heavily touristed areas - with a new law being passed in response as well as new fines for littering [1]. So possibly the area where you experienced this issue has already seen some improvement in the past year.
I’ve also noticed that a lot of Japanese people will just leave a can on the ground if no bin is provided (or if the bin is full). The expectation is generally that if you sell some food item, you also need to accept the trash after it’s consumed. So it seems like vendors are “punished” with a pile of trash for breaking that social contract.
On a similar note, if you ever buy food from a food truck or stall, the vendor will usually happily dispose of any trash when you’re finished - even if they don’t explicitly put a trash can out.
In my opinion though public trash cans and public toilets aren’t really equivalent. It may be inconvenient, but you can always just hold onto trash until you reach a suitable place to dispose of it. But when it comes to using the toilet - and especially for children or people with certain disabilities - there’s a limit to how long you can hold it in.
[1] https://soranews24.com/2025/12/11/tokyo-considering-law-requ...
This 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.
Around 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.
For 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
San 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-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).
Yeah. 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.
SF 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.
Interesting. 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.
Not 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.
I 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.
Oh, there's definitely a well-used star-shaped public toilet off the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Highland Avenue.
I am going to start calling the reduction or removal of minor things that helped society "micro regressions".
Is tragedy of the commons overused?
Enpissification?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y31WAq4cENo
Micro-regressions will largely be in the realm of charity and hospitality as society has aggressively embodied capitalism's cost and benefit analysis.
Don't forget privacy
Feels like tons of micro regressions around our expectations of privacy these days
I’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
It probably isn't as much about population growth as the increasing wealth gap. My hypothesis would be that a society where people don't feel fair distribution of wealth is more prone to this 'abuse' that you call 'overuse'.
I think it's mostly drug addicts.
Surely bathrooms are something we can produce faster than the rate at which population increases.
people can destroy things faster than you can build or even maintain them is the problem.
it's mean to identify the certain people or hold them accountable, though, so we don't.
but wouldn't that also follow... more people can create and maintain more common resources?
tbh I think this falls into a more familiar pattern with a coincidentally fitting name: enshittification
no one makes money off of public toilets, so they don't exist anymore
Options: (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.
Strange "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.
Playing the devil's advocate: The law also determined that any space, public or private, can't be used for same-sex sexual activity. So that was a driving force for people seeking completely anonymous encounters, in spaces that aren't linked to either person.
Surely 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_wha...
See also also: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/come-on-obviously-the-purpo...
It 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?
> The law determines that public space can't be used for any sexual activity.
Follow-up question: Does an enclosed stall count as "public space"?
If I'm about to step into it 5 seconds after you leave, yes it does.
And yet when I want to do some photography, as is my right in public spaces, everyone gets all indignant.
the pissoir . . . the greatest concession most of them made to privacy was a little iron screen separating the user from the street.
Look at the photos in the article, they weren't enclosed stalls. Its elegant in a way, just a couple feet of opaque material that wraps the beltline of a central aiming point. Basically as good as going on a tree but without people getting uptight.
You have not understood the question. It is not asking who determines the use/intent of a space, it is asking who determines the meaning of the space. The law determines that it is not to be used for sexual activities. But what is the true meaning of the space? Is the true meaning the law, and only the law?
>The law determines that public space can't be used for any sexual activity.
When it's one person, true, but when it's a population, the politics historically changes and the law accedes to pressure to stop enforcing that determination.
They'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.)
That didn't stop... a lot of people.
Don't know where they went, but here they are :
https://cartes.app/?cat=toilettes&perspective=non#14.58/48.8...
I 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.
They'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
Useful 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/
many 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.
This is how you do it.
Australian public toilets: https://toiletmap.gov.au/
Creative commons dataset: https://data.gov.au/data/dataset/national-public-toilet-map
I want to know where the public water fountains went. Those are arguably a safety feature.
In 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/...
At 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.
Here in the SoCal area the homeless were taking over bathrooms to live in.
I think it stopped once public bathrooms became used for things other than taking a whizz
Yeah 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?
We 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_i... - the road to hell is paved with good intentions I suppose.
Having lived in SF, LA and NYC, I find it very hard to believe that the homeless or the addicts roaming the streets in big cities are being thrown into jail for much of anything short of overt violent behavior. You can see people drop a deuce in the middle of Mission St any day of the week and nobody bats an eye. As people say, "it's just a normal part of life in a big city".
We're not throwing the homeless in jail here, but all the streets smell like urine and you have to watch your step on the sidewalk.
A few years ago I visited downtown SF for a convention at Moscone center. I remember walking along St Patrick’s thinking this is a beautiful place but , my God, the entire area stinks of urine.
Public urination is not a sex offence, it's a misdemeanor.
You don't get arrested for public urination. You get a citation, if you are drunk they might haul you to the jail for public intoxication, but you are out when you sober up.
As long as you don't pee near a school and what not you should be fine.
Where are we throwing homeless people in jail for pissing outside?
The public pays for them via taxes.
> Who pays for them?
Americans. The same population as most of the beneficiaries.
The problem with homeless is also what do you do with them when you find them?
Several 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.
We all pay for it. We do this whether publicly-accessible restrooms exist or do not exist.
Everybody poops; shit happens. The only real question is: Where does this shit happen?
> I never really understood the economics of public restrooms in America. Who pays for them?
Local sales, income, and/or property taxes.
Municipalities, counties, state, and the federal government all have the power of taxation in the US.
I don't think I've seen a public bathroom in America in my lifetime. They're all privately owned, usually required through regulation.
But to answer your question, public things are paid for by the public.
Never been to a public park with a bathroom, or a state provided highway rest stop?
Many transit centers are owned and operated by a municipal transit agency and typically have restrooms, especially large airports and train stations.
Public parks and transit centers make sense. I was thinking more in urban areas, not large public land. For example, if I was in a town and needed to go to the bathroom, usually the only option is hoping a business will let you use their restroom.
We've got a ton of actually-public restrooms in my neck of the woods (in Ohio).
Public rest areas are pretty common along major highways and these include restrooms.
Publicly-owned parks usually provide a place to poop, too: Sometimes it's an installation with composting toilets, sometimes it's just a seat over a septic pit that needs pumped out periodically. Sometimes, it's fancy with flushing toilets and sinks for handwashing. Other times, it's just a rented portajohn (that may be full of spiders and smell like death, or be very tidy). And sometimes, they're locked at night when the park is closed. But -- usually -- public parks of any substance offer something for facilities.
Just last week, I worked next to a public park in a very small town (population ~2,000) with some well-maintained basketball and tennis courts. There were a couple of portajohns present. (I did not investigate them further.)
And when there's a major events that draw crowds, like our very public fireworks displays in downtown areas: Temporary restroom facilities are provided.
What we don't have very much of here are permanent, literal-public restrooms in the denser parts of cities. That is very problematic, but it is slowly improving[1].
[1]: https://downtownservices.org/news-article/three-public-restr...
> I don't think I've seen a public bathroom in America in my lifetime.
You've never been to the beach, a city park (or state or national park), a highway rest stop, or any of the thousands of other places public restrooms exist?
What a weird take...
Its not a take, it was a personal observation that ive since realized is wrong because I wasnt considering bathrooms on large public land, I was thinking about small plots of public bathrooms within large urban areas. Obviously publicly owned airports have bathrooms.
I was also not considering things like port-a-potties during public events, since i was only considering permanent structures.
the public bathroom should be redesigned so that one can do only the thing it is designed for - and maybe it needs to be a single-user design.
Almost like an airline bathroom size - might be a bit claustrophobic but these are for emergencies and space saving would be big.
the doors could be wired to sensors that are connected to a central network that shows in real-time the availability and also some alarms if something is out of the ordinary etc.
How do you accommodate ADA requirements?
perfect is the enemy of the good...
how about some of them being ADA-conforming, with maps noting where they are?
Lots 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.
A pissoir is of little comfort when you badly need a shittoir.
I used one these things in Portugal a few years ago.
They are definitely not thought for women.
But 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%.
I 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.
seeing the commons get worse in your lifetime, span of 10-15 years, if we're really precise about it, really is quite a trip.
The us is not a first world country.
They take them away when there’s too many drug addicts wandering around being a nuissance.
No public washrooms -> societal decay.
Almost 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.
Not for long.
Odd. 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.
Something 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.
This reminds me of a story I heard (read?) a long time ago. At Disney World they had a rule about a garbage can being within a 10 foot distance of basically anywhere in the park. The logic was that when a garbage can is nearby, there is additional social pressure not to litter, and the result was that they were able to save money on park cleanup because people used the cans.
When I see lone overflowing garbage cans in big cities I think about this.
I haul my garbage home in my backpack like a good little global citizen but the lack of trash cans in San Francisco is crazy
https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/SAN-FRANCISCO-Trash-c...
I feel like there are plenty personally. I usually don't have to walk more than a block or two to find one.
That article is from 20 years ago by the way
> I usually don't have to walk more than a block or two to find one.
That is not the situation in most of the city, whether it be "nice" parts or "nasty" parts. Restaurant districts tend to have more trash cans than anywhere else, but the presence of a restaurant district is no guarantee of good trash can coverage. Source: I've walked around so much of San Francisco in my ~fifteen years here.
In the places I frequent that have reasonable trash can coverage, I've found that trash cans are very slowly disappearing and never coming back. Maybe they get fucked up beyond usefulness and don't get replaced? I really have no idea.
You would think it's in the interest of whoever is responsible for keeping those areas clean to offer garbage cans.
I 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.
It would be, if the responsible parties were making rational decisions.
It is unlikely the low-ranked employees responsible for cleaning up garbage are making decisions on whether to construct or retain garbage cans.
Agreed. 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.
I'm not sure that anyone in the management ladder is affected. People don't generally choose a fast food restaurant or convenience store based on the cleanliness of their parking lots, so sales isn't going to be affected. Nor is staff, already cut to minimal levels, going to be given additional hours to keep the parking lots clean.
There even might be a disincentive to have garbage cans if they can't be maintained. People who don't litter will either take the extra step of going indoors, or they might leave it in their own car to throw out later. Whereas people who do litter will do so regardless of when there are trash cans. By removing outdoor trash cans, you've "saved" the staff the time to monitor and clear out those trash cans.
People do chose fast food by the neighborhood. When I was at McDonald's - 30 years ago so this may have changed - corporate policy was you would clean your parking lot and everyone for one block. We were encouraged to paint any abandoned building in the one block range at our expense just to ensure the area looked nice.
If that's really your take on this then I have no option but to accept it.
Let's move forward.
What incentivized them to provide the trash cans to begin with, might you suppose? They aren't cheap to buy, or to maintain, or to keep emptied daily (or as they fill up, or whatever). But yet: They were things that existed, and their existence was definitely deliberate.
What motivates companies that still provide outdoor trash cans to continue to do so?
It's probably part of the initial franchise standards, required and signed off by the fast food corporation. Or the shopping center design. We know as a society, that we need garbage cans, so they are budgeted for and installed.
But owners are always looking for ways to save money. If the garbage can works fine, it gets maintained. But if it gets hit by a car, or the wind blows it away, it might not be at the top of the list of things to fix. The remnants of the garbage can are removed. The expense gets put off for another month. And slowly the lack of garbage cans becomes normal, and staff can remove another responsibility from their list.
Now the situation becomes, who wants to spend a bunch of money to put in garbage cans, and also add onto the staff's workload? It's not like customers are asking for the manager to install garbage cans.
Every single time we interact, it becomes increasingly clear that you aren't picking up my words at all.
I feel like I'm chatting with ChatGPT 3, as I was years ago when it would just articulately weasel its way around everything I asked with a profundity of deflective nonsense in response to any query.
Or at least: That's what it did when it wasn't confidently introducing hallucinations as rote facts.
> It's probably part of the initial franchise standards, required and signed off by the fast food corporation.
Why were they required? What motivated this requirement?
Someone, somewhere, at some point: They decided that there shall be trash cans. This is a thing that happened. What compelled them to make this decision, might you suppose?
(If you don't have an answer, then that's fine by me. It's a rhetorical question at this point. I've already internally rejected your reasoning for the trash cans becoming gone while outwardly accepting that your opinion is simply inflexibly the way that it is. It is unlikely that I can be further swayed by a lack of an opinion for why the trash cans originated to begin with.)
> 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.
No matter what, big or small, it's always a Republican's fault, huh.
One of the primary goals of the pandemic and lockdowns was to eliminate cost centers for every business.
If you notice how courtesy services disappeared, and many facilities were closed, because of a lack of staff or funds to clean them and maintain them.
It has actually been difficult to get into a restroom at certain restaurants, even now; sometimes I will find a handwritten sign there like “Employees Only” which is against health codes.
I rode a scooter to a “Drive-In” burger restaurant last month. Not a drive-thru, mind you, but a place where folks pulled up in cars and carhops served them, and they ate while parked. And this place had picnic tables, so I ordered a burger combo and tried to wash my hands.
There was no restroom available, and I contacted the order-taker guy and asked to confirm, and then I asked to cancel my order. He said “Your order is ready!” and I said hell naw, if you don’t have a restroom then you’re not serving anyone, so I got my refund...
> I had some trash in my car I needed to get rid of
Bring it home and use your own trash can? I don’t really understand why you need to immediately get rid of it.
In city centers it's usually counter-terrorism: it's easy to throw a timed bomb in a metal garbage can and flee the scene, so they got rid of them (London did because of IRA, and of course now they have Islamic terrorism). Outside of city centers it's about (lack of) recycling: it's easier to check if you're recycling correctly in your home bin than public bins.
Why would you throw a bomb into a garbage can? Who loiters next to one?
100% just drop it behind you as you exit the tram. Way better metal container for blasting.
"Counter-terrorism" just means nobody thought about it more than 2 seconds or else they'd have a more specific reason.
It was pretty common with the IRA, apparently. They hid bombs in metal garbage cans and used the shrapnel as a damage multiplier. I think they did that at a commercial center and killed several people. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-23695239
> More than 2,000 bins were cleared from the Square Mile after a truck bomb killed one person and injured 44
While I'm not intimate with the difference between British English and American English, I'm pretty confident "Truck Bomb" does not mean a bomb inside a rubbish bin.
But yes, vehicles are a great vector for terrorism and I'm honestly surprised at how few instances there are of people just running other over. But it's also one of the reasons in the US basically every government building has large concrete planters around them (can't ram a truck through it).
Explosion resistant trash receptacles do exist but they’re pricey so it makes sense London didn’t replace theirs. The most common place to see them is in airports.
Blame the raccoons!
Downstream of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_to_End_Pay_Toilets_i...
Fascinating 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/
> 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?
Not ruined, just diminished. If too much of the $0.25 is taken by fees, then make it $0.50, or $1, or whatever. In many places, there'd be plenty of business still.
It gets ruined by the government choosing to not operate an electronic money transfer system as infrastructure similar to cash.
>operate an electronic money transfer system as infrastructure similar to cash.
if the government were smart they'd pass a law to do this, makes it much easier to get rid of cash
> 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.
Nowadays it'd be $5.25 per use, plus tip (22% or more).
Another example of completely counterproductive interference in the free market, this time eliminating public toilets more or less entirely because you can't make money from them and the state is too incompetent to provide them.
Fun 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.
drug users ruin everything. it's why we cant have nice things anymore
One advanced civilization has tens of thousand of free public toilets.
https://lazyholidayplanner.com/essential-tools/japan-toilet-...
https://www.cnn.com/travel/gallery/japanese-public-toilet-ph...
https://www.toilet-map-jp.com/en
https://toiletrix.org/toilets/japan
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Public_toilets_i...
Plus, 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!
Yes, 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.
Friends 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.
They all look like lovely "cottages".
Hence one of the activities they are best known for - "cottaging".
These 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 :)
there's a market for a gig-economy app where someone brings a toilet to you.
Alan Jones ruined them for everyone.
> 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
Sounds 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.
This is why anyone from Eastern PA knows Wawa is considered essential public infrastructure.
In 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
Then you need another piss
They're successful for a reason haha
I 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.
Call 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.
The 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?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_to_End_Pay_Toilets_i...Sperry Rand building, 14th floor, Morgan Apparel. Mention my name- they'll give you the key.
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.
Same 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.
Just switch to porta-potties.
Funny how the answer is yet again more tech: bathroomaccess.com - add one when you find it.
Jim Crow
They were lost due to the tender ministrations of the bottom quintile.
You're blaming ... the poor?
No, the antisocial.
One 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.
IMO 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?
city where I live does have that. And there are also homeless shelters that you're allowed to use for three months of the year. And the homeless spend every November/December trying to figure out when are you going to check into that homeless shelter for your three months so you can be off the streets when it is deathly cold outside.
Most of the homeless have significant issues and are not going to get off the street. In better cases a messy divorce is at fault and they could hold a job but they refuse because it would not help their life.
There's also one rich person in my city who chooses to live in a tent year round. When you have a ton of money, being homeless is actually freedom because you can afford a nice warm sleeping bag and a nice tent. It makes a huge difference. This is one person out of, I don't know how many, but hundreds at least. Mostly I bring this man up because it messes up everyone's expectation of how you should deal with the homeless.
> 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.
This is true, and an understated consequence of homelessness. My city is working on deploying portapotties for the homeless for this reason.
The 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.
When 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.
"Closed due to COVID-19"
While living in France, I finally learned how to hold my bladder for half a day like an adult
Some 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.
People 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.
People have no choice but to smear feces on the wall and leave needles on the floor of public restrooms, or urinate inside a moving bus because housing is too expensive?
Housing and wealth inequality is an undeniable issue. So is anti-social behaviour. You can be poor and even homeless without throwing self-respect out of the window. People are either responsible for their actions, in which case criminal and civil charges are on the cards, or they are not (due to mental illness and/or substance abuse) and need to be institutionalized.
When the social contract fails you, why pay any regard to it at all? It's not a matter of pure, exogenous choice to do those things. It's not some abstract preference that surviving in the margins has afforded the freedom to exercise. It's a way to make sense out of the world and to have some shred of a sense of agency in a world where a person otherwise has no power.
>It's a way to make sense out of the world and to have some shred of a sense of agency in a world where a person otherwise has no power.
Wouldn't poo-cassos be better framed in an institution cell away from the other 90% of society? That way they can get the mental support they need and rebuild their agency. If you don't have agency, you need conservators to help you address it. For children, those are parents. For adults, that's the state.
Otherwise we're admitting participation in a society is pure benefit without any responsibilities.
No, it's mostly severe drug addiction and mental illness.
Because you're a decent person. Or, put another way, if you choose to disregard the social contract, you show your lack of quality of character. Either way, it's still a choice and not forced upon people by their circumstances.
I 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.
Sure, 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.
I've personally never paid for a yacht or someone else's wedding, I'm not sure what you're talking about...