The article has one good point: there’s diseases and conditions that cause people to need the bathroom, and even if you don’t have this upset stomachs are common enough that at some point it’ll impact you. Parents with young kids realize it too. So this is everyone’s problem.

However the article misses the point with statements like this.

    Quite simply, Lowe was right: there is often no place to go.

There are often many places to go, it just might not be a public toilet. There’s restaurants and coffee shop, gas stations, stores. Don’t confuse no public places to go with no places to go.

Public toilets are one of those things where all it takes is one person to mess up a good situation for everyone else.

There’s no incentive for people to treat them nicely. There’s an asymmetry, people want to use public toilets but who wants to clean public toilets? It’s always “someone else job.”

I see no problem having a little friction as a way to help control it. A small charge to use the bathroom or social capital of asking can be enough to remedy the problems of misuse.