Please don't pay to use a pay toilet
stallman.orgWhen I was in Paris, circa 2000, I came across some interesting pay toilets that were kind of like the Cadillacs of porto-potties. They were located on streets in nice shopping areas. You'd pay for the door to open. They had running water, but no water or fluid in the toilet bowl. Instead, the toilet was more like a concave shelf for peeing and/or pooping on.
When you were done, you'd leave through the door, which would lock behind you, and then for a minute or two, it would go through a self-cleaning cycle, making itself (putatively) spotless for the next customer.
They even had the same idea scaled up to entire motels. Near Lyon, I needed to catch 3 hours of zzz's before going to the airport. I found a motel called "Formule 1". It was a seemingly automated motel. You hardly ever saw an employee.
To park your car, you slid your credit card through a card reader at the parking lot gate, and it charged you $20 or so. You would be given a receipt with a combination number for the front door and for your room.
The bathrooms were down the hall from your room. They were somewhat similar to the fancy porto-poties. Though they also had showers in them. The shower was on a timer. When you left the bathroom, the door would lock behind you for a while, as it would go through its cleaning cycle.
France is strange!
I remember going on vacation as a child (lets say I was 7, not sure) to Spain with my parents and friends of us. We travelled by car using the Route du Soleil. Besides the highway there were parking stations where one could park the car for a break. There was also a building reminiscent of a large public bathroom. It contained toilets for men, toilets for females / doing a large delivery (duty), and even showers. I found the showers peculiar given it was on a highway. It was nowhere near as odd as my experience on the toilet though.
The toilets where one could go for a large delivery required a coin (IIRC 20 French Franc), and were on a timer. So as a child I was pressured to do my duty swiftly. While I was doing my duty, the door unlocked, because my time was apparently up. I found this very intimidating to my privacy, and it increased the stress I already had to quickly do my duty. I'm not sure if I did finish or not, but I do remember feeling very upset, and I also found the system ridiculous. Especially given nobody was waiting for me to finish my turn, and the toilets weren't clean either because the place smelled horrendous.
Nowadays, if I pay for a toilet, I want it to be clean. (Although as a man at least peeing is already free if you really have to. Without the need for additional tools.)
I did read a story on HN about German cities providing free (formerly paid) toilets. This increases happiness of tourists, increasing the chance tourists come (back) to these cities. The money is paid for by the local businesses. But this increases their profits because they sell more due to more/happier tourists.
Could have been an Exeloo, made by a company out of New Zealand. A guy I used to know was their US rep for a while, got a few installed in some subway systems in the US. I lost track of him and his toilet ventures, I wonder if they're still around...
SF had these minus the pay. Still disgusting inside. Paper rammed all over. Maybe the price was part of why it worked
very high cost of labor, due to expenditures of the state, makes automation look better
Most Americans under a certain age have probably never heard of a pay toilet:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_to_End_Pay_Toilets_i...
And now it's near impossible to find a toilet in Manhattan after sundown -- either you're sneaking into a bar toilet or you're paying some local business so they'll let you use their customer toilet.
Pay toilets seem like a very reasonable solution (although they installed some in NYC relatively recently with pretty poor results due to camped out homeless people and drug users).
Aren't these quite common in Europe still? I'm 25 and American and have paid for toilets several times (I even remember having to pay at a McDonalds in Washington, DC back when I was really little).
Common in Mexico too. Guy standing outside with TP collects the money. Well worth it over Mexican free toilets.
Still very common overseas (e.g. most public toilets in China are pay, even in large shopping malls).
I was in China a couple years ago and don't remember seeing any. Beijing in particular seemed to have abundant free public restrooms.
In my area of Germany, we have some places where public toilets are not available as desired. Instead of build new ones, which are expensive, the local responsible persons found a nice solution. They pay bars to let their toilets used. Bars and restaurants, who join this initiative get a sticker on the front door. So you don't have to sneak inside to use the restrooms.
Apparently they can make a decent amount of money, roughly 50% profit:
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/sep/07/train-statio...
It's quite interesting to see from those numbers how relatively infrequently the pay toilets are actually used: London Victoria has brought in £2,300,511 over 3 years; a quick Google suggests it has a footfall of ~137 million people a year [1]; at 30p a pop, that's really not a lot of people using those toilets as a proportion of the total number of people going through that station.
And, in fact, this tallies with my own experience: I've been through Paddington and Liverpool Street hundreds of times and have only used the toilets on a handful of occasions, usually with moderate cursing at having to find the appropriate change. And they never seem particularly busy.
[1] https://www.networkrail.co.uk/FootfallBreakdownForEachStatio... (not sure of the year)
Paddington has a change machine right by the turnstile.
I guess many people have just got off a train, or are about to get on a train, and so made other arrangements.
The toilets in Victoria are some of the foulest smelling around.
And they're also 50p now.
Having run into many public toilets and restrooms which were unusable because they were covered in feces or urine or had crazy homeless people in them harassing people (most recently, in December in Oxford, whose homeless are even worse than SF's, if you can believe it), I often wish I could pay to use a pay toilet. People value more what they pay for, it keeps out people who only want to trash them, and it can pay for amenities like automated washing.
> Having run into many public toilets and restrooms which were unusable because they were covered in feces or urine or had crazy homeless people in them harassing people [...]
As a matter of course- because really the issue of pay toilets is just one small protuberance from the much larger social problem, which is that currently society doesn't provide remotely appropriate care for a large segment of the mentally ill. That a tourist taking a piss in Manhattan entails thorny socioethical issues is surprising yet direct result.
The same problem repeats itself all over urban life. It's why the bus stop shelter doesn't keep you dry, why park benches are uncomfortable, and why you're likely to hear an ambulance siren at least once in an ordinary day. Someday society will realize that the underlying problem isn't a necessary truth, and everything will suddenly seem so much nicer.
I would have thought that the UK had better support services...
When traveling in Germany, pay toilets were one of the things I liked. I don't like going into some place of business to use their toilet without buying something. It was actually cheaper for me to use a pay toilet. Furthermore, they were easy to find, clean, and well maintained.
am german, i also don't mind using a pay toilet, because they are mostly super, super clean. Sometimes they are really expensive (it's like parking space), but mostly they take a few cents and you really get something in return.
This framing is ridiculous. The water, power, toilet paper, fixtures, etc., cost money to provide. Someone is always paying for the toilet.
Cleaning up excrement from public areas also costs money and in the meantime makes it less pleasant for everyone. You can pay for one or the other.
Then the post should advocate building publicly-funded toilets. All I see is the suggestion that we shift this cost off to someone else. Maybe the "great lengths" implies paying for some good or service in order to use a business's toilet, but that would undermine the premise.
yeah, but if we _all_ pitch in then these costs are marginal, and we can help provide some feeling of humanity to those in need--that's worth a lot more!
That goes along with what I'm saying. RMS doesn't acknowledge that there is a cost. There's a lot of value in ensuring that people have access to a toilet when they need it, but that doesn't negate the fact that someone has to pay to facilitate that.
As with any ideology, I don't think this is one size fits all. The alternative to a paid bathroom isn't free bathrooms, it's no bathrooms. I think anyone who's lived a city that smells like piss, or anyone who's needed to take a piss when everything was closed, would love there to be paid bathrooms.
I am very curious to know if the alternative toilets he uses are equally accessible to the poorer people he is advocating on behalf of. I know I can walk into any good hotel and be taken for a guest and probably directed to a bathroom, and I know that many others, especially homeless people, couldn't do so.
In NL and BE, there are often public urinals during festivals like this:
http://toilet-guru.com/pictures/amsterdam-street-dscf3952-tn...
But generally, in Europe, there are about zero free public toilets and just a few public pay ones.
You can use the toilets of any publicly available official building (city hall for instance, or a university).
Pay toilets are super annoying, and very common in Europe. Still, even if you are in NYC, it's hard to find a "free" toilet. Most of the time you have to go to a restaurant, buy something, and then you'll get the key.
That's exactly the tradeoff. Pay toilets are pretty nice when your alternative is either having to patronize a business purely in order to use their bathroom, or drop trou outside somewhere.
Sure, in theory there could be wonderful tax-funded public toilets everywhere, but it's a hard sell to taxpayers: most of the time, locals aren't the ones getting caught in need of a bathroom. (I mean, how many times in your typical day do you use a public toilet? Probably not often; it's a thing you use when traveling, or as a tourist in a different city.) And thus they're understandably reluctant to divert tax money to pay for them, and they get to make the call.
So many starbucks espressos...
It's probably too late for this comment to be seen and make a difference - it will sink to the bottom of the thread without a trace, but in case anyone is interested in reading more HN comments about this, it has been submitted again and is being discussed over here:
I'm in the US, and I haven't seen a pay toilet since I was a little kid in the late 80s. What I have seen a lot especially in New York City are bathrooms for customers only. There are large areas of the city where public bathrooms are very scarce, and the only available ones are inside of businesses that require you to buy something before you can use the bathroom.
Mr. Stallman, I'd like to invite you to San Francisco for an adventurous quest in search of paid toilets, or any kind of restrooms in this case - paid our whatever. You can even wear flowers in your hair.
Honestly, he's right.
Maybe a good solution for those who can't pay is to make them pay by time. As example I don't want to wait so I pay as example one euro/dollar. Someone who can't pay, just waits 3-5 minutes or pushes a button 50 times. Sounds stupid, but this could work in my opinion. Anyone who has enough money can afford to pay, but is less likely to mess with a button or wait 5 mins. A homeless on the other hand, could at least wait instead of being denied the access at all.
What happens when another person wants to use the toilet? Two possible scenarios.
A) They have to wait 5 minutes (pointlessly) plus the duration of the next person's stay. B) They pay to bump the person behind in the queue.
Both scenarios are bad. In A, the toilet is not being used to its effective capacity. In B, paying customers can prevent non-paying customers from ever getting to use the toilet.
Toilets should be provided for free to customers by private businesses, and to the general public by cities. The alternative is alleys reeking of urine and feces. Toilets: a worthwhile public expense.
If there is just one toilet, then yes those scenarios are the worst case to the idea.
So if a toilet needs a queue, then the first in-first out method should be used to prevent someone from bumping the queue and prevent over excessive wait times for someone who can't pay.
Also if they want to pay for the toilet, they can always pay for who is in front of them.
To enforce such rules is always a problem, but so are all rules in our society.
The problem would be when a paying customer comes up while a non paying person is waiting. Does the paying customer cut in front of the waiting one? If so, the waiting time gets reset? Or do you just make the paying customer wait as well?
I don't know where pay toilets even exist, or if they're public or private. Wouldn't the alternatives be the absence of a given toilet or a tax-funded toilet? If the latter, the poor could pay disproportionately due to various tax dodging avenues available only to the rich.
Instead of pay toilets, how about a thumbprint or face scan. Take pics of the bathroom before and after every use. Everyone can use the toilet for free, until they are caught abusing it. Then they can pay a fine or take a personal responsibility class to get the privilege back.
Privacy implications? I.e. Taking a dump becomes another way to disclose your location and whereabouts. Kinda funny.
If privacy is an issue, maybe some kind of token or card disconnected to your identity to get in.
But I think the face pictures could be used in some kind of public shaming for people to treat the bathroom nicely.
> maybe some kind of token or card disconnected to your identity to get in.
Perhaps a circular metal disk would work well.
If you don't care about privacy, then world is your toilet
.. or when you don't have the change for a paid toilet and you really really have to do it
Don't get him started on free vs open source toilets. =P
I had no idea this was even a thing. Doesn't seem justifiable to me, it just seems cruel.
It's a thing even in places where it isn't explicit, such as in New York City. Many businesses reject people that just come to use a bathroom which will make desperate patrons pay for an item in order to gain access.
Here I sit broken hearted....
Yikes. Who pays for the free toilets, then?
I love pay toilets. Most of them are kept clean, and I don't consider finding a clean, available toilet to be a right.
I've paid for others to use toilets, and I'll keep doing so.
"Don't let people pay for things because poor people might not be able to afford it" is offensive to "poor" people.
Oh well. If it makes him feel like he's championing a cause...
>I don't consider finding a clean, available toilet to be a right.
Posit a reason why it is socially unacceptable for people to just crap in the street, then.
to clarify, I don't think people should be shitting in the street, but i instinctually bristle against a "right" that requires someone else to do something in service of the person who has that right.
(This is the difference between a negative and positive right)
If someone has a right to clean, available toilets at all times, then someone must pay to provide those services. I'm happy to donate to the cause, but I don't think the force of law should compel me to part with my money to buy someone a toilet.
Especially because PAY toilets solve this problem so elegantly.
For example, imagine a pay toilet that, when you pay, you have the option to buy access to the same toilet to someone who is unable to pay themselves. I'd do it. This is basically the same idea as the "leave a little, take a little" coin jar many shop vendors have.
If you need 20 cents for some reason, take it. I usually just dump my extra change into that jar. I would do the same in a pay toilet, and often have.
> "Don't let people pay for things because poor people might not be able to afford it" is offensive to "poor" people.
It's important to distinguish what kind of "things" you're talking about, though. There's a pretty big moral difference between not being able to afford consumer goods and not being able to find an appropriate place to perform basic bodily functions.