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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.)
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
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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/
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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...
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?
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.
I am going to start calling the reduction or removal of minor things that helped society "micro regressions".
Is tragedy of the commons overused?
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
Surely bathrooms are something we can produce faster than the rate at which population increases.
Enpissification?
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
> 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.
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.
I want to know where the public water fountains went. Those are arguably a safety feature.
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Here in the SoCal area the homeless were taking over bathrooms to live in.
I used one these things in Portugal a few years ago.
They are definitely not thought for women.
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.
Where are we throwing homeless people in jail for pissing outside?
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
A pissoir is of little comfort when you badly need a shittoir.
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...
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.
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.
Blame the raccoons!
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.
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.
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/
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.
They all look like lovely "cottages".
Hence one of the activities they are best known for - "cottaging".
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.
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.
They were lost due to the tender ministrations of the bottom quintile.
You're blaming ... the poor?
No, the antisocial.
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.
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
Just switch to porta-potties.
> 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.
"Closed due to COVID-19"
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