This is very location dependant. In southern Europe there are places where most normal people actually would refill their water at the fountain when going through a town, and I have even faced small queues when the fountain is small but a slightly larger group is refilling bottles. In many small towns you don't even have a shop so buying bottles is not even an option. There's sometimes a local bar / restaurant but if you want to just get water that's a bit overkill.

Nah, it's just that 99% of people aren't so chronically online as to need a web service to find out how to freely drink water in a place with free water drinking infrastructure.

Well, maybe because I wasn't born there, but they're not always in the most obvious locations to me.

The extremely detailed mapping of drinking water on OSM that the OP alludes to, is more helpful than you assume. If you are cycling or hiking in baking-hot Southern Europe, or wandering through some picturesque villages, there are often springs hidden just off the trail that most people would never spot, if the map didn’t alert people to their presence. Also, with OSM one doesn’t need to be “chronically online” and use a “web service”, because various apps allow using OSM fully offline.

Agree with this. When I was cycling a lot, my summer workouts were planned around functional drinking fountains.

This is in the US even. Working drinking fountains are not as ubiquitous as you might think in a lot of areas.

It's because no one buys ads against water fountains.

>99%

please avoid writing random bullshit numbers, just say "the majority". If you ever went to a touristic place outside a metropolis you would have seen plenty of people refilling their bottles at public fountains.

I've been all around Europe, the US, and several other countries and continents besides.

Seeing "plenty of people refilling their bottles at public fountains" says nothing compared to the vast majority that doesn't, and doesn't even carry bottles.

Also, regarding "please avoid writing random bullshit numbers", please avoid being rude.

hurting people's intelligence by throwing around absolutely unsubstantiated and risible percentages is just a different form of being rude

People reading in good faith understand what 99% means (it, as well as 95% etc., are commonly used that way, to mean "overwhelming majority"). Besides, if I wanted to write the actual number, which I happen to have, I'd have written 92,768%.

In any case, you don't have to justify the rudeness, a simple "sorry" would have sufficed.

79.53% of statistics come from the nether region.

“99%” when used like this is essentially an expression in English, for “almost all” or “almost certain.” It is very hard to believe that they have the actual statistic or that it happens to be exactly 99%, so I wouldn’t worry about anybody getting mixed up.

Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

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