Sad fact in San Francisco was that the public toilets in BART stations were noisome pits of filth that you would avoid going into unless you were truly desperate. After September 11 2001 the underground ones were closed for 'security reasons' - presumably because a bomb would do much worse structural damage - and there's little pressure to re-open them.

I think part of the problem in the Bay Area is that BART runs across multiple counties and there's an awful lot of political buck-passing as a result. Although it has improved in recent years, I still hate riding it and I hate how crappy BART stations feel. In fairness they have tried to mitigate the restroom problem by setting up decent public toilets on the streets near the entrances, but those are still a bit sketchy.

By contrast, when I visit Los Angeles I enjoy riding the subway. It's clean, the signage is excellent, they don't fill up the speakers with random unhelpful public service announcements every 30 seconds, and there's a general air of competence.

some people don't even know LA has a subway, or a light rail system, but it's been slowly built over the last 20 years and is already pretty extensive. LA is so huge millions of people take the train that nobody has ever heard of!! when i was younger, i took it every day for nearly 2 years from hollywood to pasadena, red line -> union station -> gold line.

when the expo line opens here in santa monica next year, it's going to raise some eyebrows. it's a major, major corridor (10 freeway from downtown to the beach) and combined with uber (or not) is basically going to open up the entire west side to public transit.

the wilshire subway will complete the system, but that's not for a while. maybe something that parallels the 405.

fwiw, the bus system in LA and sm is excellent, just slow because of traffic. it serves a huge customer base, but unfortunately it's only for people with more time than money, which in LA means the blue collar working class. however, it is extremely clean and efficient and air conditioned and comfortable and is used by normal, sane working people, it's basically the polar opposite of the SF MUNI. i lived in SF for 2 years and MUNI was so fucking awful i usually just took a cab for longer rides. if uber had existed back then i probably would have used it exclusively.

The fewer people that know, the less crowded the carriages XD It's a great system, arguably competitive with London's. I used to be snobby about LA but in recent years I've come to prefer it and will probably move down there before the decade is out. Also for the weather and I already work in film, but mainly I just really like the place.

i too prefer LA over the other major cities (sf,ny,chi) for a variety of reasons, but to be fair it's a lot better than it was even 10 years ago in terms of diversity, culture, food, transportation, entertainment, industry, etc. there is still a large polarity of wealth but it's not as bad as SF or NY in my opinion, just because there's more land to use.

Now people just use the fucking bart elevators.

Seriously. Puddles of standing piss in the elevators at 24th st bart when I had to use them because I was on crutches.

Disgusting doesn't even begin to cover it.

The lifts are awful. The escalators are just as bad. Apparently the nastiness the escalator maintenance crew deals with is pretty fetid stuff [1]. Well that's what you get with people who find the bottom of an escalator the coziest place to sleep. It's a shame for both the homeless and the system. But yeah, dont touch any surface within the system unless you're prepared to wash thoroughly

[1]http://m.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Human-waste-shuts-down-B...

Interestingly, I have seen only one place where there is a sewer drain in an elevator (this is quite near where I live, in an administration centre of modernist concrete design). Judging by the smell, it's very necessary.

Never thought how it works, but I presume the elevator needs to have a storage tank underneath the cage, and that needs to be emptied regularly.

All _underground_ stations on the BART system don't have any bathrooms available to the general public.

I learned this (almost) the hard way when I needed to use the restroom and got off at Lake Merritt (or whichever underground station was in the East Bay) and asked the BART attendant where the restroom was. He told me unfortunately that they were not available to the public but then took pity on me by allowing me to use the employee restroom. I went in and saw what was probably the cleanest toilet I have seen in such a public place.

In regards to the article, I would say that Asian countries (sans China) are more free to allow public restrooms because culturally it is bad mannered to leave a toilet more dirty than you left it since they are more considerate of other's wellbeing (of not having to enter a dirty toilet). I would say it's impossible here in the States since most people won't give a second thought to peeing on the seat and leaving a turd smeared on the wall.

Finally, Airpnp is similar (if not the same to) Have2P, an app that YP/ATT made using it's business data back in ~2009. Not maintained anymore though.

Wow, I wrote a lot about peeing and toilets.

The Singapore MRT and Bus System was one of the primary reasons inspiring me to relocate to Singapore. I used to live at Lake Merrit in Oakland on 17th, from 1996-1997, used the Bart almost every day - I don't recall ever using the public washrooms - don't recall how available they were.

I've used them several times in Singapore, and 90% of the time they've been excellent - the other 10% of the time they were just heavily trafficked, but not "Dirty" - just puddles of water near the sinks, lots of paper towels in the garbage.

I do recall reading a front page story in the Straits Times about how the MRT had been hiring cleaning consultants to improve their already ridiculous (by my estimate) high levels of cleanliness.

I would love someone to do an analysis of all the horrible failures in San Francisco/Transit and compare them to Singapore, so we can understand why the heck one is doing so well, and the other one is so abysmal.

Singapore's public restrooms are clean because they can afford to hire armies of 60 year old cleaners with no minimum wage.

I'd argue they are actually TOO clean. Because half the time I want to use them, they are being cleaned! It's a bunch of busywork to employee the otherwise unemployable. They clean bathrooms and sweep up leaves over and over again.

I'm having a hard time understanding what's bad about this. If they are otherwise unemployable, then it's good that they are doing this isn't it?

What's bad is that they are often nearly disabled, and if they don't do this, they starve.

No social security for the elderly in Singapore.

If they're not doing anything actually productive, wouldn't it be better to pay them the money and let them spend the time on something they enjoy?

Singapore Cleanliness is a huge mental relief after having to deal with the disgusting mess that various parts of San Francisco are. Keeping this city/state clean is incredibly productive. There is a reason why a story regarding hiring cleaning consultants makes the front page news, and people are fined $15,000 for throwing out cigarette butts - singaporeans take cleanliness very, very seriously.

Cleaning toilets isn't productive labor?

Not if they're already cleaned plenty often enough and it's just busy-work, which was what I understood the parent comment to be claiming.

Without basic income, that's the closest you can get.

Half the time? Are we perhaps engaging in a bit of hyperbole here? I can't recall the last time I recall a public washroom being cleaned that I wanted to visit - starting at Labrador Park (which actually can get kind of messy), and moving up through One North, Bishan, and Orchard. Occasional visits to Bugis - I'll try and visit them every day for a week or so, and see if they are every being actively cleaned.

Well, with regards to what "Westeners" nowadays consider civilized - Singapore is lagging behind SF I'd care to argue. Just consider gay rights and expressing affection in public - so in that respect there is rather an anti-correlation between cleanliness of public facilities and cultural development.

Public Displays of affection, beyond holding hands, doesn't have any rock solid claim on being "civilized" in my books - so, I'll call that more a question of currently fashionable behavior, much akin to public nudity (the recognizing of which probably has a better claim to being civilized in my books). As far as gay rights, agreed - Singapore is behind the curve on officially recognizing gay marriage. With that said, it's not as though Singapore is actually enforcing any of these laws - Singapore has a pretty active gay community/nightlife: http://blog.happymassage.com/the-gay-bars-guidance-in-singap...

> Public Displays of affection, beyond holding hands, doesn't have any rock solid claim on being "civilized" in my books - so, I'll call that more a question of currently fashionable behavior, much akin to public nudity (the recognizing of which probably has a better claim to being civilized in my books).

The civilized definition of being civilized is not to accept things depending on your personal opinion of what is civilized and what is not, but rather to not criminalize things that have no rational reason to be criminalized.

Public displays of affection, just like public nudity, gay marriage or chewing gum, are simply not reasonable things to make illegal.

I was not impressed by the toilets in the Tokyo city rail system. The one or two I tried to use were not very clean, though maybe not quite as gross as some toilets I've seen in the US.

The nicest public toilets I've been are the toilets in the Taipei airport, which are uniformly fairly clean and functional. Narita airport is also quite nice.

Which Taipei airport: Songshan or Taoyuan?

Taoyuan

Singapore changi airport and the fly in the urinal...it is quite effective.

I completely misunderstood your comment, and then thought:

Why don't planes have urinal-only bathrooms and communal sinks? They could probably fit an extra seat in that way.

Bowl toilets are probably preferable on an airplane for splash reduction reasons.

In case anybody's curious, this is the toilet in a North Korean subway station:

http://i.imgur.com/GbtoUO3.jpg

It's filthy, but I've seen worse (and is still better than nothing at all cough London).

London Underground toilet map: https://www.tfl.gov.uk/cdn/static/cms/documents/toilets-map....

They are usually very clean, probably because people assume they don't exist.

Most of the central ones there are "cheating" by counting the toilets of the attached National Rail station. Aside from that there are hardly any in the middle. I must admit I was unaware of those at Piccadilly Circus and Green Park though - that will come in handy.

I lived in London for nearly 20 years and didn't know that any stations had toilets.

You should try the ones on the train from Mumbai to Panaji.

Otoh the food is amazing, just try not to imagine how the chef washes his hands.

To compare, smaller train stations in Italy also have squat plates. (Though the restrooms are satisfactorily clean.)

The expression "this is why we can't have nice things" comes to mind when I think about public toilets in Chicago. There's always some idiot that wipes shit all over the stall or vomits on the floor or blows up the toilet with an M80.

Humans frequently have gastric distress. With large enough volume of people, it's not if, but when, someone is going to have an uncontained event.

I once thought about how the world would be different if we were like rodents and essentially lacked bladder and sphincter control, if we'd have to all wear diapers all the time (think of the landfill waste so probably we'd have figured out something else but what) and what ballgames would be like. Probably holes in the seats. Because how else could we have a functioning society? We'd actually probably be a lot better at sewage control because otherwise it'd always be everywhere.

There's still the matter of cleaning up after yourself. The toilet doesn't have to sparkle like an advert, it just needs to be usable by the next person. I have gastric distress as often as the next person, but I'm going to clean up a seat that I make filthy.

Yeah most people don't do that. They don't care that someone else has to clean up after them. Happens all the time in many other contexts of pure greed and self-interest and simply not getting caught and told off about how they're pissing in the pool.

Seriously, people need a lot more Pei Mei in their life.

Vomit and feces happen with regularity in public toilets everywhere. M80's not so much.

In Hamburg, Germany, it's pretty popular to pee on walls. Since most people don't want to pay to use the restroom, they resort to peeing on walls outdoor. [1]

I wonder what the average maintenance cost is for a public bathroom. May be a good cost to make the city a bit more pleasant.

[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2015/03/12...

Denver is discussing this now. The only thing on the table so far are the self-contained toilets. There's no discussion of having a sort of self cleaning wall. I mean why not, people do that already and in the wrong place and it's not self-cleaning? And by people, I mean men. Takes a desperate woman to take a leak in public, but the two I've seen do it? They had the bravery, courtesy, and drunkenness to do it in the street gutter. I have never seen a man do that.

And then what about the public urinals in Amsterdam? Not under discussion in Denver either. It is admittedly sexist, but it's also mainly a dude problem.

You say "people" but do you mean "men" or does every female have a shewee?

http://www.shewee.com/

I recently went to Tokyo and to London. Tokyo is a really great example, there are nice, clean, free and tech toilets everywhere. While in London I couldn't find many station equipped with toilets.

Here in Finland public toilets at stations and malls tend to cost 1 € (about $1.05 US).

I've always thought it's ridiculously expensive, but at least the toilets are clean.

Caution, entering rant mode...

This is actually a giant pet-peeve of mine and that is how Americans in particular (and some other western countries) treat public or publicly accessible toilets (malls, stores, theaters, rest stops, gas stations).

Basically, at least in men's restrooms, they destroy them.

The #1 most common issue is aholes that pee standing up in the toilet. My fiction is they're embarrassed to show their junk so they use a stall. They don't lift the seat and they pee all over it. Once in a while I see someone use the stall when all the urinals are full but more often than not there are free urinals but the guy still wants to pee on the toilet. Giving him the benefit of the doubt he doesn't pick up the seat because he doesn't want to touch it. But that just seems symptomatic of the "me first" American culture. Screw everyone else.

The #2 most common issue is broken stalls. The stalls in the USA are almost universally poorly designed. They have an 8 inch gap at the bottom and often are hanging from the ceiling. They are exceedingly easy to break or bend and the locks for the stalls have at most 2mm of tolerance so any bending means they don't stay open. Worse (and it happens often) is when they barely stay closed so I get in, close, lock, pull down pants, sit on toilet in my most vulnerable moment and someone else closes a door in another stall and my door opens.

The #3 most common issue is stuffing / clogging the toilet. I can't tell if people do this by accident or on purpose. There are sometimes signs up that say "please don't put non TP in the toilet". Others that say if you have to use a lot of paper please flush the toilet often.

As far as I can tell American's take this stuff for granted. That's just how it is.

But it's not! In Scandinavia and areas near by I saw immaculate public restrooms. They might have cost $0.50 but they had full floor to ceiling doors with sturdy walls. Some even had their own private individual sink.

Japan public restrooms also almost always have doors that at least go all the way to the floor and usually aren't destroyed like USA ones. Subway restrooms in Japan in general are not the cleanest but they are usually functional which is not true, at least in my experience, of many USA public restrooms.

As for #1 I wish someone like Adam Sandberg would figure out a comic meme that made it un-macho for men to pee in stalls. I guess I assume if it was funny enough and popular enough then it would be more embarrassing to pee on a toilet than use the urinal and that would fix #1.

I have no idea how to fix #2 or #3 though.

There are subway stations in NYC with toilette? Huh, lived in Manhattan 4 years and haven't seen one. I'm excluding Penn and Grand Central because they have piles of people waiting for trains, and they have restaurants, so they'd have to have toilets.

There is an app for that. Paris is terrible for this, Vienna rocks (Y)

Public toilets in BART stations, by contrast, are highly functional places to shoot up.

I think that mentality is a little bit part of the problem. It's the fear (and sometimes rightfully so) that they will be used for nefarious means rather than being .. what they are meant to be.

Korea and Japan have drug problems as well, but it seems that's not necessarily shaping public restrooms.

Then maybe we need to be creating safe and clean and hygenic places to shoot up where people have access to clean needles?

I ride BART when I visit San Francisco and would NEVER think about entering the restrooms! There are enough "characters" hanging out at the Powell Street station that I tend to keep myself in public, populated areas. Are my impressions correct?

The Market Street restrooms have been closed for years. But in general your observations are correct-BART restrooms are really nasty. See also BART elevators.

I didn't think BART had any restrooms, at least in SF. In the Market Subway, they send you to the Westfield Mall at Powell.

They have them in the underground stations, but my understanding is that they have all been closed since 9/11.

I'm sure it won't be popular to point out this unpleasant truth, but cruising gays are a huge factor on this front as far as urban centers in America are concerned. Remember Senator Larry Craig? Do you know why the police force felt it necessary to be running sting operations in airport bathrooms? The public restrooms by the beach in Santa Monica have huge signs on them warning about legal repercussions for sexual activity. That's where George Michael got arrested.

Unwelcome sexual propositions are a very distant fourth on my list of worries behind blood-covered syringes, blocked toilets, and misplaced human waste, all of which I've had the misfortune to encounter as both a consumer and as a cleaner when I worked in a cheap restaurant.

By contrast, telling the occasional gay dude that his advances were unwelcome has been a very minor annoyance. I can see how it would be more offensive/unnerving to other people, but it strikes me as much less of an immediate health hazard.