It’s something always drove me nuts in NYC. In the rest of the United States every gas station and fast food place and store will let you use a restroom. But other than Starbucks and a couple bookstores, almost no place in NY does. The per capita expense people are willing to spend on these sort of quality of life things is abysmal. A couple other examples I’ve noticed. Gas stations in NYC almost never have the complimentary windshield squeegees that every other place has. Also I am baffled at how the tiny 250 person town i grew up in has their own post office employee who is bored almost all day. And yet the post offices in NYC will have like two people working in a post office that serves probably hundreds of thousands of people. Like seriously you cant hire 2 or 3 more counter service employees so you don’t have to wait in line for an hour to mail a package or pick up your mail?
And yeah, living in NY I did learn where the hidden bathrooms are. Not always obvious but there are some places that have them. Sometimes a pizza place will have a dirty one near the back or you can sneak into a bar. Ha. but nothing like the convenience of other less populated places.
And yeah of course in a densely populated city there will be individuals that will trash a public service. But I’d contend that it has more to do with someone not wanting to pay someone to deal with it. and if you kept on top of it and cleaned it up when those things happen, it would happen less. if your foot traffic is high enough that this is a thing that happens you probably are also making enough money (as a business or as a city) to deal with it. people probably trash Starbucks restrooms too but they manage to keep restrooms relatively clean and they don’t seem to be going out of business because of that maintenance. (Not to give them too much praise - you may remember they only opened their restrooms this much begrudgingly when they got some bad press over it.)
If you don’t like dealing with the mess a person leaves when they are provided with a public restroom I can all but guarantee you won’t like dealing with the mess a person leaves when they don’t have access to a public restroom.
For example, cities that have a lot of homeless people and few to no public restrooms often have human feces in sidewalks, streets and gutters. One way or another we all end up paying the pooper’s bill.
I heard when Disneyland first opened they had “nicer” restrooms that you had to pay for. There’s an anecdote that this was done by someone other than walt because it was a normal thing then, and when walt found out he demanded that all the bathrooms be free. Seems weird now cuz pay toilets are pretty rare.
As goes the Post Office. That is the Federal Government.
And for the most part no they can’t.
The Post Office is saddled with some onerous staffing and funding requirements that makes hiring up any sort permanent workers complicated. The big one is the old saw about how they need to pre-fund retirements for not just all employees but all potential employees for 75 years in the future.
So their hiring levels are set way before whatever situation they’d be hiring for, and creates all sorts of epic weird.
Well no. Because as long as their is regular, ongoing maintenance, problems caused by individuals will get sorted out sooner and will be less likely to be an ongoing issue. I think the REAL difference is that in Japan, there is public infrastructure that the government actively maintains, where here in America, we think it’s a waste of money to provide almost ANY public resources. The problem is that we have our priorities fucked up.
It’s definitely not tragedy of the commons (which itself is a racist myth). In fact, calling things like this a tragedy of the commons is one of the deliberate strategies used by neoliberals to systematically dismantle public services and infrastructures.
Even calling it “neglect” (as suggested by @SpunkyTWS) doesn’t cut it. It’s a deliberate and systematic destruction of the very idea of public services, to ensure all services can privatized for profit-taking, without any regard for the impact on the poor and marginalized. Not surprisingly, the strategy goes glove in hand with eugenicist thinking and white supremacy.
One of the things I dislike about L.A. is that there are lots of these little strip malls that have 3 or 4 small restaurants or donut shops. And none have a restroom. Ask in one place and they say dunno try that other place. It’s frustrating when you drove a couple three hours and stop for a meal and… I’ve never had to use it but I keep a bottle in the car for those trips because it’s been close. And I walk out and don’t buy food from those places because I’ll be fucked if I’m going to support that nonsense. I expect a restroom with my overpriced lunch, thankyouverymuch.
Exactly. There are municipalities that bring up lack of funding when it comes to public restrooms, yet manage to find the money for “defensive” or “hostile” architecture projects to discourage people from sitting or sleeping on benches.
If you want to be specific it’s an example of antagonistic design in urban planning. Like those spikes on park benches.
Rendering the public space inconvenient to functionally useless to spite certain “types”.
The idea is heavily rooted in broken windows policy and policing tactics.
Often this is the results of real estate issues and health and fire codes. Particularly in strip malls, but it’s also why the typical NYC microscopic store front is often without bathroom. Even when it’s a fast food chain.
If the only bathroom is in a back room or in/past food prep and storage areas. The regulations often do not allow customers through to use them. Where a business is renting, which is pretty default in strip malls. And just about default in expensive cities like NYC. They may not be able to add a bathroom without permission from the Land Lord. Or be able to afford to add one without the Land Lord ponying up.
Which of course they won’t do.
If they don’t have a customer bathroom. It’s usually because it’s out of their hands. I’ve even run into a few spots that didn’t have a bathroom for employees. Making do with a porta john out back, or sending people down the block to Starbucks.
In most cases they really aren’t supposed to let you use an employees only bathroom.
Maintaining a bathroom in a dense city actually is an logistical conundrum above the paygrade of government officials. I have read several articles about US cities flying consultants in from Europe to teach them how to clean their public toilets.
Keeping public amenties clean and functional is the most visible part of running a government so politicians love to talk about this stuff, but the unsexy part of funding it requires more than just good ideas.
I worked for a big store with a public bathroom and you would not believe how hard I had to advocate to try and elevate the cleaning standard to “no visible feces”.
I’m not sure why. While friends who have worked at Starbucks clean their own bathrooms, other friends are contract bathroom cleaners for other businesses like gas stations. Buc-ee’s is well known for spacious, clean, bathrooms. Why is it any harder for the city to contract out or have city employees do it?
I do think bathroom design is important. The public bathrooms/changing rooms on Venice beach look a lot more like the the bathrooms in Europe than they do the bathrooms in a Target or Starbucks. There’s nothing you can rip off, little if nothing to refill, and you can mostly hose it down.
In addition to the societal ethos that you should clean up after yourself, Japanese public restrooms are always well stocked with toilet paper and have toilets that automatically wash and dry your ass. So there is very little reason for a bathroom to be dirty.
I was wondering the other day about why American restrooms keep using the undersized, hinge-gapped stall doors when no-one thinks they improve the user experience. I suspect it is because someone is concerned about what folks might get up to in there. Since America loves to make any problem a moral failing, people too poor to afford a toilet of their own must deserve to have no where to go. In some communities in Mumbai when building public toilets they built a two story building and put a community center for women on the second floor. That way sexual assault was greatly reduced. No one was going to try raping a girl when a bunch of auntie was within shouting distance.
Government officials can and do maintain all kinds of things, including nuclear arsenals.
Public restrooms aren’t some crazy unsolvable problem. They are a merely a problem that requires attention and resources that many communities are unwilling to dedicate to solving.
