Sell day passes that give you 24 hours access. If I were, say, going to drive from Seattle to Los Angeles I'd pay $20 to buy a pass that would let me pull into any Motel 6 along the way to use a clean bathroom.
Top off your tank if it makes you feel better, but realistically no one there is getting paid enough to cross reference gas buyers with poopers.
All those branded 80 to 120 room hotel/motels are trying to reduce the staffing outside of 7AM to 4PM, even to the point of having check in kiosks that video call you to someone in South Asia/Phillipines/South America.
This stuff is not priced to be a reasonable convenience, but to be a better alternative to soiling yourself in public. The most insulting part is paying 2 euros to pee into a smelly urinal and getting a 50 cent discount code for the nearby fast food stand as a courtesy, because I haven't spent enough apparently.
I think the general problem is interesting: how do we price necessities when our ability to pay is so different?
One of the toilets I paid for didn’t even have a seat.
Spoken with the voice of privilege.
That all was in the 1970s so a lot of us don't know and take public toilets for granted since we never knew otherwise. Some MIT // Harvard math Phd genius guy apparently started it all when he was like 11 years old and pooped his pants at a math convention, and whereas I view an elite mathematician as required to be a bit goofy and quirky, having ended pay toilets in the US is a wonderful quirky fun fact: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ira_Gessel
Ira Gessel won the Tony P. Robbins prize for his inverted lattice manifold proof pertaining to coprime powers of 7, and the Taco Bell reward for ameliorating the sufferings of people who ate too much taco bell.
Experienced this a while back in a shopping mall in France. Like, a mall has to be one of the most profitable places in a modern city, pretty sure they can afford to staff a couple washroom staff during business hours while everyone is pouring money into all the mall vendors.
Cleaning and maintaining a restroom isn't free, and something needs to pay for it. Highway rest stops are usually pretty clean, but they are paid for with tolls/very high gas taxes.
When it comes to restrooms, some people can not help not help themselves and leave it in a significantly worse state, or use it for other purposes (like drug use). Maintaining restrooms is, on average, thankless responsibility, even though people would be thankful to find one.
So while you do have to keep a few coins on you, unlike cities like NYC or SF you can actually go to the toilet when you want and it isn’t a stress inducing nightmare wondering what sort of hell you are going to run across if you do actually find a toilet.
Places with ‘free water’ almost always have terrible water availability and quality. Same problem.
Not to mention a lot of us "pay it forward". I used to pay for the people behind me when crossing the Bay Bridge, or for the next person that was buying a coffee.
King county just pulled the plug on a pilot for public restrooms at a couple of transit stations because with maintenance and, more significantly, security the cost was $77/use [1], we simply can’t afford that. Seattle famously bought five multi million dollar self cleaning toilets that only lasted a few years [2].
[1] https://www.theurbanist.org/2024/07/17/king-county-to-close-...
[2] https://portlandloo.com/seattles-failed-experiment-with-sub-...
We simply can't have nice things here. At least not in the Seattle city core. Everyone says "just have free bathrooms bro" but no one saying that actually has had to pay for and maintain a free bathroom in downtown Seattle. Discussing exactly why this is the case tends cause a flamewar, but the fact that we can't be honest about the cause means we'll never have the nice things.
Maybe "Quid Poo Quo"?
Come to NYC, walk around busy areas for a while you will not infrequently see less fortunate people urinating in the subway stations, on the sidewalk, on walls and buildings, by trash cans, and sometimes (if the mood strikes them) right in the middle of the street.
Although it pains me to sat this .. maybe there's a need for a disposable potty, with sanatary wipes, that can go in the trash.
Maybe these should be given free to street sleepers?
https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/05/this-app-lets-cafes-and-co....
There is no place for “business”.
It’s the literal definition of a public good and such the role of the government.
Examples include clean air, national defense, and public parks.
This isn't to say they shouldn't be provided by the government, but they're definitely not a public good
EBT is a pretty good program. Government grocery stores would almost certainly be an abomination (just ask your local public school cafeteria or military base mess hall).
Edit: adgjlsfhk1 is correct that “generally terrible” is overstated and simplistic. Hopefully better take downthread.
It’s not that governments literally cannot provide good services — it’s that when government appoints itself as a monopolist, outcomes and accountability become effectively disconnected, unless the service is so high-stakes and the quality is so abysmal that it rises to “vote the bastards out” territory.
It largely comes down to who is running the thing, and do they care? With private sector, they are forced to care because otherwise it will affect revenue and brand value, which will get the leader fired. The consumer is empowered with ability to spend their $ elsewhere, which rewards the better service and punishes the worse (note that this is becoming much less true in the age of giant corps, especially big tech). With government services, (particularly in monopolistic situations like the DMV), the consumer is largely powerless. They have no choice but to use the system given, and if they aren't happy they can complain but that complaint won't have any teeth (unless they happen to be politically connected of course).
tldr: I most agree, but it depends on how you define "bad"
Military bases run PXs and commissaries and these stores have reasonable (mid to high mid) quality goods.
The PXs are pretty good but are priced comparably or higher than free-market stores off-base, and even still are subsidized by base funds. The Class Six is very well done and potentially profitable, though that's just a guess.
The commissaries are much more expensive than off-base stores and likewise are subsidized by base funds. For the most part only the officer's and senior NCO's families can afford to shop at the Commissary.
Disclaimer: I left active duty in the late 00s so things might have changed since then
They are only as good as the people in a jurisdiction let them be. Also, the governments you have experienced are far from generally representative.
I don't really understand why it should be illegal to pay someone for a vital human need
Second order effects? Please. Those aren’t on the ballot, and are hard to stuff into a sound bite.
Voting against pay toilets makes you a foolish and counterproductive person that thinks you're a good person.
I would honestly pay for rent a potty even if public toilets were (and they should be!) available and convenient.
If you’re looking for a role for government here, I could see budgeting in some tax breaks for local businesses that make their restrooms publicly accessible. The infrastructure is already there, no need for a complicated business model.
People significantly underestimate the cost of maintaining clean public restrooms in urban areas.
When restrooms are used properly, maintenance costs are reasonable and predictable. But that is not what happens.
Restrooms contain private areas, and that reality invites other uses, like drug use, prostitution, and sleeping. And those uses come at a steep cost.
Separately, in my experience, many businesses do make their restrooms available to people who look presentable and who ask politely. They just don’t advertise it, and they may even advertise the opposite.
Toilets are a scarce resource (economically speaking), and thus there must be some rationing method in place. If it's not monetary, it will be something else. In a perfect world there would be plentiful bathrooms and everyone would diligently clean up after themselves and take the trash out when full, so operating costs would be minimal (power and water bill and occassional maintenance). In the real world though, people don't do that, meaning you have to hire people to clean. Some people will also vandalize, which gets expensive in a hurry. Public (government-run) restrooms tend to be even worse because they aren't actively monitored, and for whatever reason people like to trash them.
Explain what's evil, please.
In some places, like Phoenix, the situation is currently so bad that even paying customers cannot use the restroom in some smaller shops, due to the large homeless population. Having any option at all, whatever the cost, would be a far better alternative.
Just take quarters and give poor people some cash so they can shit too. Please please please
But it finds things like mall bathrooms and park bathrooms but not gas station bathrooms, at least the first time I tried it.
The real problem is when you're in an unfamiliar area and don't know the local secrets about where restrooms can be found.
This seems very susceptible to abuse. You (not you personally, but someone malicious) go into the restroom, mark it in a poor state, do whatever awful thing people do to get restrooms in the state in which they're so often found, and leave. Now it's the last person, who left it in a perfectly good state, who gets the blame.
this is so dumb lol likely will just continue with starbucks and gas stations
If we really want to take it up a notch, we have ways to do so. Deviancy, countermeasure, arms race all over again - but few such arms races are actually worth the hassle.
A person is out and about town, and suddenly has to go, bad. They pull out the app and find their closest Rent-a-Potty. It appears on their map with a green dot - that means the last person to use it considered it reasonably clean, a good sign. (Everyone knows that people whose usage of the Rent-a-Potty is, ahem, strongly correlated with the state transition to an orange or red dot face price hikes, or possibly even expulsion from the app as a whole, so there's good reason to leave it at least as good as you found it.)
They tap the dot, hit "Reserve", and the timer begins. A 4 digit PIN code appears on the screen, your secret incantation to the hall of the porcelain throne. These things are not cheap - $1 per minute for the first 10 minutes of reservation, $2 past that. But they're emptied every night, the sink always has hot water, and the soap is always refilled.
Some people have tried to game the system by {your deviancy here}; the company has responded with {countermeasures you're smart enough to think of here}. Some enterprising souls could theoretically {countercountermeasure}, but honestly, implementing {countercountercountermeasure} isn't a huge concern for Rent-a-Potty's C-suite, compared to the recent competition from new market entrants like Loolurker, AirPnP, and Pouber.