It’s also a tragedy of the commons thing: you offer free toilets but don’t fund maintaining them every half hour so they are only usable by a few before they become completely thrashed and unusable. Or they are used as drug/prostitution dens and are never available anyways except for whoever got lucky to grab and squat them. A free resources that isn’t available isn’t very useful when you need to go.

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-...

I was wondering how far I would have to go to see King County come up. Not very far!

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.

I’ve lived in lots of cities, I don’t think the dynamics are very different. Yes, crappy people mean we can’t have nice things, but that is as true in Lausanne. The problem is the way Seattle/King county mis identify or lie about the problem and then give a fake shocked pikachu face when their fixes for the wrong problem don’t work.

A quid pro poo situation, if you will ...

I like it, but quo and poo are a bit too different to work.

Maybe "Quid Poo Quo"?

Yes .. better!