I don't want to seem too accusatory, but this just felt like an angry rant without much research.
I've been to a few places on this earth, and while I know there are some Europeans who'll proudly talk about how paying for toilets helps keep them clean, I haven't noticed them being any better than gas station bathrooms in the US. Some are okay, some are total disaster sites. The only difference is someone or a machine standing at the door taking your money.
Meanwhile, in East Asia, I've never encountered a pay toilet. I've also really only encountered truly dirty toilets in the middle of very remote parks. Japan, Taiwan, and Korea all have excellent free toilets. Even China does pretty decently. Parks and urban areas across the country have toilets that are well maintained, and I noticed public bathrooms even in the middle of residential areas around Beijing that were hosed down a few times a day.
So no, I don't agree that the only way to fix things is to revert to literal nickel and diming. Learn from the countries that manage their systems better instead of giving up and saying it's impossible.
Yes, the toilets in Taiwan are great —- and free. They have masses of public toilets in park, along with cleaning attendants. But here is the rub —- in the US, they would be overrun with homeless (I’m not saying this is bad; just that it would be the reality) while in TW the people who are attending to them would likely be homeless were they in the US. Is part of this cultural? Yep, probably. Is part of it structural? I think so —- because there are roles for people in TW, the “lowest rung” of society, while the only role stateside is along the side of the road or perhaps a MCD worker.
America has extreme homelessness not as a cause of problems but as a symptom of neglect, exploitation, and a widespread lack of concern for fellow human beings. Fix homelessness and there will be fewer encampments and less nasty situations involving public and private infrastructure. It's cheaper to solve it at the core (housing) than prolong it and treat just some of the symptoms by throwing heaps of money at pernicious fallout areas like emergency rooms.
I don't understand this argument in American politics ("If we build something nice, those no good poor people will just ruin it!") and I especially don't understand it in this context. Unless my memory is far worse than I imagined, there are free toilets everywhere in the US (not so much now with COVID restrictions) and they're not all overrun with homeless. Have you never been to a public beach?
Really? I mean, if you're at an indoor venue like a Walmart or a museum, sure, but I can vouch for California being an extremely painful place to take a long walk across town. In SF every goddamn toilet in the Richmond district, Sunset district, Noe valley, Daly City, and everywhere outside the tourist hotspots are "customers only".
In LA it's even worse. Miles of streets even in the poshest neighborhoods with zero toilets. Once had to ask my GF to get access to a restaurant toilet and secretly let me in because if you're male they're usually for "customers only" but if you're female you get to use them.
I believe public toilets that are "overrun by homeless" would be an improvement over pavements used by homeless because they don't have access to toilets. Perhaps we should add some showers to public toilets as well?
Totally agree with this. Everyone has to poop, if you don't give them a place to do it, it's still going to come out, and it seems people don't get this basic logic when they complain about poo on the streets of SF.
Have you been to Taiwan outside of Taipei? The toilet situation is pretty dreadful, with most being squat toilets in really gross conditions. Thank God for 7-11 because most of the time they have decent toilets, but if there's no convenience stores nearby you better be willing to squat. Granted, they do exist, which is obviously better than them not existing, but I think your comment reflects Taipei more than most of the island.
The lowest rung there are the recyclers. They pick up recyclable trash (kind of like the trash bin ladies do in SF but unlike SF don't leave a strewn mess). They rummage through dumpsters looking for recyclable items, take them to places which can recycle them for pennies, but it's enough to survive.
It's kind of like if you had people redeeming bottles and cans and lived in section-8 housing.
But these people are going around in third hand bikes pulling hand fashioned carts, sometimes the carts are human driven if they don't have a bike.
The big difference is there is no shame in being a recycling collector, but there is shame in being a burden to society.
There are recyclable miners in the US anywhere container redemption value is charged and reclaimable.
The rich in the US don't have any shame paying little if any taxes, buying tax loopholes, and corrupting government to get more socialism for themselves and removing it and economic fairness from everyone else.
In terms of homeless folks I’ve met in the US, they do the same.
They just use the money to buy drugs / alcohol and sleep outside because the recycling money isn’t enough for rent, but it’ll get you fucked up enough you won’t care.
This is about the same as I felt after reading this-- and his comment explaining Tokyo's free public toilets, "No homeless, no drugs, no crime, 100% politeness rate?", all but confirmed those suspicions for me. It reads more like an ideological rant than a considered treatise on potty economics.
I don't think I've ever seen a public toilet in China that flushes properly. Only those in malls in richer areas.
One time, I went into a train station cubicle, looked down and saw that all the cubicles shared one channel to do your business in, and as expected, no water was passing through to wash anything away.
Your pretty gross example covers all the toilets on several university campuses I've been to as well. Very common
They s shaped pipe hasn't been invented there yet (things may have changed in the past ten years though, but certainly not all bathrooms have been remodeled that quickly) and so the sewage pipes regularly blast out burps of stinky poo smells into the restrooms. This happens in student dorm rooms too if you have the top tier ones that have a private toilet for the room as opposed to a huge communal one.
It depends on region (and date of visit), I guess. I was in Beijing 2 years ago (so slightly pre Covid) on a business trip and while there are negatives, the toilets there were great.
I guess that’s because Beijing is a rich region, I really don’t know, were not anywhere else
Beijing gets a lot of care because that's where the rulers live and where a lot of tourists go. It got cleaned up a lot before the 2008 olympics because it was showcasing China.
Gas station bathrooms in the US are also not usually free. As a non-white male I've been told frequently they are for customers only, and have had to on many occasions point to a car actively filling up gas so they can see that I am a customer.
That said, I hate this culture though because when bathrooms aren't free, we end up with shit and urine on the sidewalks. Everyone has to poop and if you don't give them a place to do it that poop is still going to come out anyway.
Anyways, I can walk and I look completely normal. I live in Europe (Croatia) and I have to pay to use public toilets/restrooms. Sometimes I have to go 20-30 times per day. Anyways, for me, this is the worst part about living in Europe.
I believed you that you might be saying accurate things until you wrote ‘even China does pretty decently.’
I spent two weeks traveling around China and, when it comes to toilets, what you said couldn’t be more insanely inaccurate. I decline to go into details, but it’s is in every way the opposite of what you wrote.
China is huge and fast-developing, so generalizations are dangerous. The notorious partitionless poop trough is pretty much a thing of the past (although I have no doubt some survive), but these days at eg. major train stations or tourist sites, the average public toilet is just fine.
"Parks and urban areas across the country have toilets that are well maintained..." is referring to far more than just major train stations and tourist sites.
> I've been to a few places on this earth, and while I know there are some Europeans who'll proudly talk about how paying for toilets helps keep them clean, I haven't noticed them being any better than gas station bathrooms in the US. Some are okay, some are total disaster sites. The only difference is someone or a machine standing at the door taking your money.
As somebody who is disabled and who is a cultural American holding both US and EU (Croatian) citizenship, this is the worst part about living in Europe for me.
This is life threatening and it means I cannot hold it. I also have to go to the bathroom several times per day. Obviously I take medications for it. But, I also have to get Botox injections to my bladder every 3 months, under general anesthesia (as in intubated).
So, seriously f*** everyone who thinks it is OK to charge people to use the bathroom. For me, it is life threatening to not use the bathroom right away.
I guess you've never been to Thailand, Malaysia or the Philippines but I would agree that nickel and diming does not == quality/experience in this stance.
And completely misses the fact that the US has LOTS of free toilets--gas stations, state run rest stops, McDonald's and other fast food joints, Walmart/Target and other big box stores, pharmacy/drugstores, etc.
What has actually been asserted through dogwhistling is that "There are few free public restrooms where there are lots of homeless and/or drugs". That probably is true.
That tends to be cause and effect: an increase in homeless and/or drug users generally causes free toilets to shut down so as not to be an attractive nuisance.
> The problems of public infrastructure are not money.
The problems of American public infrastructure are exactly money, which is to say, the differences in funding capital projects versus funding maintenance. Forget public toilets for a second - one of the reasons why America's roads and bridges are falling apart is because they were built with Federal dollars, but no Federal provision was made for their maintenance. So what happens is that non-urban localities look at the responses to their maintenance RFPs, calculate that they would need to triple property taxes to afford it, and so decide not to do anything instead. Why would the maintenance of public toilets be any different? It's just another public expenditure. So writers like the author come up with mental gymnastics to try to find some kind of private solution that will take quarters from those who save every quarter to help them get their next fix. As if an addict would prefer a toilet to a dose. It's facetious on its face (pun intended, I guess).
America isn't like this because of "culture". America is like this because of the combination of a) Congress not being able to shoulder these maintenance burdens itself (because they are the responsibility of state governments) b) state governments being both financially restrained (people are willing to pay only so much in state taxes when they already pay so much in federal taxes) and monetarily constrained (no power to print their own dollars, often constitutionally required to balance their budgets). So nobody is empowered (in the real sense of funding) to provide for the maintenance of the public commons.
It’s also true that the US system is relatively unique among western nations in being skewed in favor of rural rather than urban interests. The US has the most extensive and in many cases over-developed rural infrastructure in the world, and that creates an enormous maintenance and funding drain compared to many nations that invest principally in their major cities and not so much in their rural hinterlands. Perhaps the most extreme counter-example being Singapore which has no rural hinterlands.
It's of another scale,but Belgium (especially Flanders) has the same problem. The political party that was in power for a long time favourited rural areas (because that's where the voters were). I guess the same applies to the US with the Republican party?
Do you have any actual data to show that our roads and bridges are falling apart? Where I live the potholes get filled and none of our bridges have collapsed.
> no Federal provision was made for their maintenance.
That's not quite true. The federal gas tax was created specifically to fund the construction and maintenance of roads and bridges. States add their own taxes onto this.
The problem is not that no one thought about maintenance. It's that politicians have not raised the gas tax in about 30 years. Thus, steadily shrinking the amount of real dollars available for maintenance.
It's not a lack of foresight. It's a lack of political will.
Actually, the first federal gasoline taxes in the US predate the interstate highway system and were part of a bill that raised taxes on a variety of goods in the name of general revenue. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revenue_Act_of_1932 and therefore not really related to maintenance. Furthermore, a great proportion of gasoline tax revenue in the modern era is not spent on highway maintenance but rather diverted to other earmarked purposes https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_taxes_in_the_United_Sta...
A lack of political will might prevent Congress from raising the tax that would most economically efficiently raise revenue for highway maintenance, but it is not the primary roadblock (what is it with me and the puns today?) that prevents Congress from spending less-economically-efficiently-raised funds on infrastructure maintenance.
I live in an economy with ubiquitous free toilets and they do not all descend to the unbearable.
Socialised maintenance of the commons takes many forms. Only a reductionist believes the absence of paid toilets reduces toilets to the unspeakably bad.
I concede the best toilets are free, but gatekept by transactional relationships of higher worth. The razors I steal from Singapore Airlines majestic marble temples in changi are both put out for me to steal and funded from my frequent flyer value. But, the toilets by the bayside I use when I go for fish and chips by the jetty are not, they are kept clean because we want that, to maximise utility for chip eaters.
Sure, it's a "tax" -so what? You want it to devolve to a 50c charge and beggars shit in bags? Screw you.
Absolutely not, but in like sense, nothing is free. The dirty public toilets are free because of an externality: your gastro-enteritis costs you time and money, but the toilet owner doesn't care. Or, if its New Zealand, the bag of poo you tossed out the window of the car, is somebody else's problem. (I mention this, because lack of public toilets near hiking grounds, and a larger than normal population of backpackers in vans, living the good life, has lead to a surge of people flinging poo-bags into the wilds. People never cease to amaze me: come to the shire, visit the lord of the rings, see the mighty mountains, fling a bag of poo at it)
The free public toilet in New zealand Designed by Hundertwasser is perhaps my favourite example of what you can get, if you stop obsessing about cost.
Singapore Airlines never said "we have the best toilets with amazing schmick razors to take as schwag" -it wasn't on the brochure when I got gold class. No, its not free. Overall none of the airport toilets are free, its assumed you bought rights to be inside the airport secured zone.
But the basic toilets in Changi, are streets ahead of many other economies, and are not unusual: Public amenity in Singapore is really clean, and really well maintained.
Only a reductionist would argue New Yorks toilet problem stems from a lack of paid toilets.
Yep. It's the capitalist mindset that disregards privilege and the suffering of the homeless because it's more expedient to scapegoat them in the name of a false dichotomy: "progress" and "ruin."
> Kristof and the Times, of course, would prefer a national infrastructure project to provide free toilets. If you've followed this over the years, you will see many efforts at government provided toilets. Costs are often hundreds of thousands of dollars, and the effort falls apart. There are some free toilets. In Chicago, the park district still had some. Without the incentive to charge a bit of money, they were typically disgusting and dangerous.
Most cities and towns already have a large number of free toilets in parks and businesses. Some are privately owned and maintained, some are publicly owned and maintained. There just aren't enough of them (in most US cities). This is clearly a problem that can be solved with a little planning and adequate funding.
And realistically, a root of the cost problem is that one could expect that about 90% of the costs are created by 1% of the users. Bathrooms aren't expensive to operate as long as people don't make a mess. I find it surprising that even working a tech industry job in a building complex populated by generally competent, responsible adults that there are almost always paper towels on the floor of the bathroom. I can understand once in awhile maybe dropping one, or not noticing that it didn't make its way into the waste basket. Or a person with joint or mobility issues might not be able to reach down and pick it up. But still, it's a continuous thing. Why?
Ideally we'd find a way to alter the average person's behavior not to make a mess in the bathroom, but that's easier said than done. I don't know what the right policies there would be that aren't overly intrusive.
No, that's not attainable. You'll always have people with health problems, mobility issues, young children, people with poor aim, and so on who will tend to cause a disproportionate amount of cleanliness issues. But a little more care from everyone would lessen the problem.
> Bathrooms aren't expensive to operate as long as
Read the entire article. You need to hire an attendant or someone who at least cleans regularly. That’s the major cost, especially at $15/hour minimum wage + health benefits + 3 workers per 24-hour day.
You don't need an attendant being there 24/7, why would you? Just regular cleaning ( like every hour/few hours), which can probably be done by few people ( as in a team of two can cover 10 toilets).
Sure that could happen. But it doesn't have to. We already have a lot of public infrastructure: schools, roads, government buildings, parks, and so on. Some of those projects are managed well, and some aren't. Either way, we put up with it because on average the benefits of those things outweigh the costs. Public restrooms aren't fundamentally different from all the other forms of public infrastructure we already have.
Privacy is one. A lot of people don't carry cash, and probably few carry coins anymore. Which means going with electronic payment. Do you want there to be an electronic record of every time you paid to use a restroom?
Another is precedent. If charging for a restroom were allowed, it would likely be done in a lot of places that are currently free. That seems like a step backwards.
A third is that if pay toilets were a big business, then such businesses would have a strong incentive to lobby their local governments against constructing new free bathrooms.
Monetize every biological necessity: it's the American way!
Oxygen, water, food, sleep, sex, socialization, excretion, entertainment, industriousness: 6 out of 8 ain't bad, but those two more are attainable if we change attitudes through a holistic social media and mass marketing campaign.
I have lived in London, NZ, Australia. All have had free toilets. Why? Growing up in NZ free bathrooms were normal so we take it for granted. Yes, a small population means that these facilities were less likely to be abused. But London? In Shoreditch, a part of East London that is full of pubs and hipsters quaffing the Devil's Dandruff the council sets up urinals in the street where any punter can see you pissing but only your back (it's an Octagonal urinal and you face a wall). This was a fantastic solution to an ancient problem. This may offend the yanks God-fearing sensibilities but surely a step up from seeing the perps member out in full view. The open nature of this urinal also means people are less likely to rob, kill or shag you. Surely one of you lads could bring the weeze trough to SF and make a bundle? A ye entrepreneurs or no?
It will not be implemented in SF because it's only suitable for men. Switzerland appears to have created a solution for women by providing disposable paper "funnels" so the ladies can use it too, but because people lack any decency they would all be stolen within minutes in SF--and if you think creating a male-only public urinal won't fly in SF, just wait until you propose that the women should have to put in a quarter to get a funnel that the men don't need :)
Belgium towns often have these out for festivals and other events. Shaped like an X about 1.5 to 2m high and about 2 x 2m with a yellow hose draining to the nearest sewer. If they didn't, dudes would just pee wherever. I bet that women are out-of-luck and just go somewhere discreet.
Thank you for the link. I enjoyed the historical photos! At Glastonbury music festival, the ladies call these funnels "she wees". Bring back the pissoir!
I grew up in a city where every habitable structure had to have separate indoor functional toilets. Roach closets in the back of the building weren’t acceptable, shared bathrooms didn’t cut it, always out of order or bombed out toilets were not allowed, customers only was not allowed.
So I was in for a shock just about everywhere else in the world. Make that everywhere else in America - a toilet in France might just be a hole in the floor, but at least it’s a clean hole in the floor. The toilets in New York City are horrific. Imagine trying to go to the bathroom in an airplane - an American airline not a fancy sovereign airline - except every surface is covered with standing fluids, the walls are alive, the lights are dim, there is no toilet paper, and there is always guy standing behind you that thinks a broken lock means you are looking for anonymous bathroom sex. That is assuming that the establishment has a public restroom, and you’ve made a purchase, and there isn’t a homeless guy with a Cosmo magazine occupying the only toilet for hours. Then on top of that imagine you have your young son or daughter with you and your trying to let them go to the bathroom or go to the bathroom yourself with letting them touch any surface or their clothing absorb any of the mysterious standing liquids.
The toilets at LaGuardia airport will also greet you with a loud piercing siren if you sit for more then thirty seconds. That’s a really jerk move so I decided to see how long that siren would go, they shut off after approx twenty minutes.
People always make fun of truck stop bathrooms but coming from NYC they are always a step up - clean, dry, vermin free, well lit, changing tables, soap, toilet paper, locks on the door, and I’ve yet to be propositioned in any of the truck stop bathrooms.
The bit that always bothers me about US toilets is how poor the privacy is. The cubicle door is like 1m high and raised nearly 40cm off the floor, and often poorly fits on the frame. I'm told it's for ease of cleaning but we accomplish that with raising them only 10cm here and extending enough for at least a standing adult.
That's not to say we don't have crappy stalls here, but they seem the norm in the US and the exception at home
They are designed that way to make people uncomfortable so that they will leave quickly. Plus Americans don’t know how to act so the doors get broken a lot by people kicking them or swinging on them.
At one bank I worked at had this really disgusting overweight guy - he couldn’t fit into a normal stall, and he was too lazy to walk across the floor to the handicap bathroom he could fit in, so he would just wedge in as much as he could and cut loose. No aim, just random salvo fire. Every single day.
This is always a fun thing to explain to people at home in Tokyo.
"Oh wow this office building put the toilet outside the security cordon."
"What."
"Well the guard checking badges is there and the toilet is outside that, so, well, that would never happen [in a big city in US]."
"... Do you think the valuable things in this building are stored... in the toilet?"
"Ah, no, that's not the nature of the problem."
"What is..."
"... It's complicated."
"How complicated can it be?"
"It's actually not complicated but more of a taboo to acknowledge."
In addition to the economic, political, and social factors discussed elsewhere in these comments, the notion of “taboo” also, I think, helps to explain the difference between the availability of public toilets in the U.S. and in Japan (and maybe other Asian countries). Nicholas Kristof’s column has a kind of “taboo-breaking” undertone, as if he is aware that he is writing about a subject that would normally not be mentioned in the New York Times. And, in fact, I don’t recall seeing similar articles more than a few times before in nearly six decades of reading mainstream U.S. print media.
In contrast, in Japan, where I’ve been reading mainstream newspapers for nearly four decades, the topic is not taboo at all, and it’s not unusual to see articles about public toilets and related matters. A search at Google News in Japanese now finds recent articles (some paywalled, all in Japanese) about a survey of public toilets in Okayama City [1], a move to build more Western-style public toilets in Matsumoto City [2], a video released by Chiba Prefecture to promote better manners by users of public toilets [3], installation of a self-cleaning toilet in a park in Kamiamakusa City [4], and (timed to the tenth anniversary of the Fukushima disaster) local governments preparing emergency toilets for future disasters [5]. Most of these articles seem to be based on press releases from local governments.
I’ve always felt that the advantage of pay toilets wasn’t that they were clean, it was that they exist.
Walking around an American city trying to find a restroom can be extremely challenging, while in European cities I could almost always find a sign and a public restroom in short order (even outside the more touristy areas).
I don’t know if there are actually more public toilets in those cities - or if the culture just includes more prominent signage - but remembering to carry change is way better than going shop to shop begging to use the toilet.
My experience has be exactly the opposite. Never struggled to find a toilet in the US. In Europe, as a tourist, no public toilets and shops display prominent sign that it is for customers only. So often I had to buy $8 coke (served flat with half an ice-cube) for the privilege to use a toilet in the basement with space no bigger than the pot itself (and the pot has no toilet seat). Just sharing a counter experience.
On the east coast I've been able to find toilets just fine, especially with the wealth of subway stations and indoor malls and other places that typically have restrooms.
California is a hell hole though. You can walk miles across town and find zero restrooms, sometimes an occasional locked restroom, and maybe some restaurants and coffee shops whose restrooms are almost always for "customers only". It's a pity because the weather here is great for long walks. You can pee in random bushes I guess (?) but there's no place to poo.
What's wrong with asking to use a toilet? Is it so wrong to be part of a civilized society?
Along the lines of OP, my free market solution is to keep pooping in the street until the chamber of commerce decides building a restroom is good for business.
The author ignores or dismisses the many countries and cities in which publicly funded public toilets work very well. The problem with public services applied in the US is that it's often done piecemeal, and a lot of things only work when implemented and funded at scale. This is nothing but an ideological screed, without any substance.
So Cochrane claims that toilet “attendant” work is “well suited to new immigrants.” Really?
The rational for the claim is that immigrants “don't speak English, are not well attuned to American culture, and have little education or training.” Really?
I don’t disagree with the overall point about public potty markets but there is something off putting about claiming that “dirty” jobs are for people without skills and that immigrants are a class of people without skills when the larger portion of those I see are highly accomplished people who are chronically undervalued.
A posh-speaking student on walkabout takes a temp job explaining public toilets to urban Australian pedestrians.
A few iterations later, and I still find myself trying to think of ways to make the premise less offensive...live comedy must be ridiculously difficult these days.
It could make for solid comedy. I'm thinking something about the ick factor about assisting someone void, like an elderly person or a person with a movement disorder, as revulsion humor with a growing dawn of the human feeling that eventually we all become frail or incapable (if we are fortunate to live long enough, or survive an accident, or survive a life being born with an ability different), and that by serving others all benefit.
I was in a country that had pay toilets. What I observed during my trip was that every town had that one place where the coin mechanism just happened to be jammed, and the turnstile would give way with just a little push. I tended to pay anyway, but it seemed to be a practical solution. And that toilet tended to be a bit more dirty, probably because it was more crowded but cleaned on the same schedule as the rest.
The free toilets at freeway rest areas in my state are just fine.
Or a vocal minority cares a lot more about inserting capitalism everywhere, even when there are plenty of examples of places where toilets work fine without being paid.
The author clearly has never cleaned toilets for a living, yet waxes philosophical, completely missing the point on why public services are kneecapped in this country.
Public services are kneecapped in this country because non-white people use them.
Same reason why we defunded public universities (imposing the student loan system) just as agitation was enabling women and people of color equal access.
I don’t like public services because every time I have ever used public services, even extremely (excessively) overfunded ones in liberal coastal US cities, they have had mediocre to extremely shitty quality from the perspective of the consumer.
Services aren’t supposed to be jobs programs. I like privatization as a rule. It has nothing to do with racism, it has to do with an intense dislike of being fleeced by politicians.
I've seen plenty of shitty (sorry!) privatized toilets at various events and locations. They are rarely directly "paid" - more like the event holder rents them and provides them free of charge - but the privatization aspect hasn't guaranteed me some magical clean toilet experience.
Sometimes us Americans just reveal ourselves to be selfish and... again... shitty.
Maybe they should be. What's more demeaning, being told you're not good enough for any jobs so we'll pay you to stay out of the way, or being told you're not good enough for any other jobs but here's a job that still needs to be done and you can do it?
The thing that makes me pessimistic about anything free, is seeing chewing gum in the urinals. It’s obvious the gum can’t go down the drain. It’s also obvious that someone will have to take out the urine soaked gum and put it in the garbage. There is a trash can literally 5 feet away. But I still find chewing gum in the urinals.
If we as a culture can’t collectively get that right, I have doubts for anything more involved.
A lot of travelers swear by McDonalds near the highways. The restrooms are clean and I've never had an issue with using them before paying. Unlike the city, where the signs are either "no public restroom" or "restroom are for paying customers only".
In Portland there are a variety of restrooms built by the city but they're almost all permanently closed. Too many drug deals, drug use, sex acts, etc. The city government likes to bill Portland as "the city that works" and has spent several million dollars on automated toilets much like the one described in the article.
Recently the city has put a bunch of portable toilets in neighbhorhoods so that the homeless have access. Neighbors seem mostly tolerant if not happy about it. At first there were reports of a few of them being tipped over but I haven't heard much about it recently.
The portables aren't attractive but it's one way of handling the need.
The Portland Loo [1] is neither automated nor millions of dollars. They're $96,000 each, and 16 have been installed, for a total of $1.5 million. So either you're talking about something else or your information is incorrect.
I wouldn't be surprised if they're all shut down now, due to Covid, but prior to that, they've always been open when I tried them.
The other public toilets in Portland, that I'm aware of, are in the parks. They're typically in heavy brick buildings. I could see those costing millions in aggregate, but they also seem likely fairly standard "build it to last" park construction. They're not automated either. As relatively large brick buildings, I would expect them to be expensive.
Regarding the point of the article—I much prefer toilets in the US to toilets in Europe. I remember trying to find a toilet at a mall in Norway and being out of luck due to not having the appropriate coin in the local currency. That's not something that would happen in the US. (Although, when I finally got in, it was quite nice.)
Another pay toilet, at a train station, was worse than disgusting. I don't know who got my coin, but that was the only deposit I made... I couldn't stand to enter the place.
In general, I'm much more confident in my ability to find a spot to do my business in the US than in Europe. Maybe because I expect to be able to swan into any coffee shop, gas station, or fast food chain (as you mentioned) and use the facilities. Although I'll admit that the bathrooms in Europe do tend to be nicer, on average, and I particularly appreciate the floor-to-ceiling dividers.
Edit: Apparently, only 15 Portland Loos have been installed in Portland, and the city has received $362,323 in royalty payments for the design, for a net outlay of just over $1 million.
I feel like at the very least we could have some super basic open air toilets. No toilet paper, no roof, just a toilet with running water and a tap. Almost no maintenance, and people won't camp out inside, but objectively better than a tree or something. I suppose the lack of TP would be more ok for men than women though.
I live in Hong Kong now and coming from the US the ubiquity of public toilets never ceases to amaze me. They're everywhere, free, and relatively clean. Hong Kong does seem to have an abundance of "make work" government jobs for people to go around cleaning things.
I'm not sure why this is so difficult to implement in the US. A US solution I've heard somewhere that I think would work is that they city government should simply pay businesses to make a toilet publicly available. Make it a tax deduction enough to hire one extra employee on the condition that they have a toilet that is for the public to use without needing a key or password or whatever song and dance they make you do to use the bathroom. The stores and restaurants all have toilets they're maintaining anyway.
Los Angeles, as an example, has countless "no public restroom" and "restroom for customers only" signs because it's an exclusionary class thing that "those people" don't deserve to fulfill biological needs. I suggest they throw their excrement at such signs until they give in.
One example of a interesting model I haven't seen mentioned in the article or comments/discussion is the toilets at Bryant Park in NYC. They're publically accessible, maintained regularly, and staffed with attendants, but is paid for with private funds.
I said if I ever run for public office in the US, one of the first items on my agenda would be public toilets. In most cities, there aren't even paid public toilets, one has to rely on the goodness (and business interest) of Starbucks and the like.
I think there are all sorts of downsides to not having public toilets besides the obvious of people using the street for a toilet. The stress people have by having to hold it in, the hesitation to drink too much water and therefore dehydration of people, etc.
I think government should cater to some of the most basic needs of humans and I believe a sanctioned and sanitary place to relieve oneself should be high on that list.
I live in Australia, and we do have a few public toilets, but honestly 90% of the time if I need one when I'm out I'll use one in a food court or a department store or some other private enterprise which seems to have a financial incentive to provide good quality amenities.*
Does this not happen in the US? And if not, can anyone muse as to why? I would figure that the incentives would be the same.
* I expect that there's a legal requirement for many of these businesses to provide toilets, but the level to which they maintain them is without doubt over and above any requirement of law, certainly better than any public facilities.
The Left keeps referring to things as a “human right” (housing is a human right, healthcare is a human right, etc.). I don’t totally disagree, but they mean that if something is a human right, then the government should provide it to everyone.
The case for government providing healthcare to everyone is much stronger than it providing housing for everyone. Why? Because humans are much better at making decisions about where to live than about their medical treatment. That’s it. Rights are irrelevant.
A government option doesn't mean that it's the only option. No one suggesting the government provide housing is suggesting that it becomes the only provider of housing. One of the primary goals is to ensure a good supply of at cost housing stock that can give renters some security and act as a controlling factor on private rents and house prices.
The UK sold off much of it's public housing stock after the 1980s. The scheme was billed as a way to get poor families onto the property ladder but many of the homes were "resold" the same day to private landlords. The result is that housing is now massively unaffordable except for the highest earners and landlords. Private landlords drive up buying prices to the point that individuals cannot afford the deposit because they can extract the cost of the mortgage + profit in rent, the higher rents then make it more difficult for the individual to save the required deposit and the cycle repeats.
For this American, free toilets were a triumph of socialism. I have never had to pay for a toilet in my life. (At the age of 25 I was refused the use of a toilet in a Chicago storefront, and I was shocked.) Most companies and governments keep their toilets cleaner than my own bathroom. Just don't live in the big, overcrowded cities, and stop voting for immigration to overfill the ones that still work.
I've been to a few places on this earth, and while I know there are some Europeans who'll proudly talk about how paying for toilets helps keep them clean, I haven't noticed them being any better than gas station bathrooms in the US. Some are okay, some are total disaster sites. The only difference is someone or a machine standing at the door taking your money.
Meanwhile, in East Asia, I've never encountered a pay toilet. I've also really only encountered truly dirty toilets in the middle of very remote parks. Japan, Taiwan, and Korea all have excellent free toilets. Even China does pretty decently. Parks and urban areas across the country have toilets that are well maintained, and I noticed public bathrooms even in the middle of residential areas around Beijing that were hosed down a few times a day.
So no, I don't agree that the only way to fix things is to revert to literal nickel and diming. Learn from the countries that manage their systems better instead of giving up and saying it's impossible.