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Comment by cmckn | Hacker News Reader

Needing to pee while on the road isn’t totally unique to Amazon drivers; and decades of anti-homeless policies mean there are very few places in many cities where you can just run in to use the bathroom. Many of these drivers operate in the suburbs, where door codes aren’t as common on bathrooms, but it still made me think.

(Obviously these drivers are being put under time crunches, hence the bottles, and that is a separate issue)

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I think you're right that this issue should be viewed both as an Amazon problem, and a public infrastructure problem.

Frankly, it's insane to me that we don't consider public bathrooms to be an important component of public infrastructure.

But that doesn't take away Amazon's role in the process either.

America Is Not Made for People Who Pee

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/06/opinion/sunday/public-toi...

I mean, it kinda does take away Amazon's role, no?

The way we've built out our cities means that literally anyone who drives around all day is gonna have a bad time when it comes to relieving themselves.

This has nothing to do with how Amazon operates their business and everything to do with a dearth of public restrooms.

It only takes away Amazon's role if you remove their agency for not scheduling people to such a packed degree where they can't go use a restroom.

A humanely run business takes these things into account. And given that we as a society allow corporations like Amazon to exist through the granting of special-rights charters for limited liability etc., we should be expecting that they operate humanely.

Sure, if Amazon didn’t have any resources to help mitigate the problem, didn’t have control over the schedule pressure they put on drivers, and didn’t tweet dishonestly about the problem then I could see letting them off the hook.

But, they’re a massive company with the resources such that they could address this problem. They could also reduce the schedule pressure on driver’s and allow them to take breaks long enough to use a restroom. And they tweeted dishonestly saying it wasn’t a problem. So, I’m not really ready to just let them off the hook. Amazon has agency, and could fix or seriously mitigate this problem if they wanted to. Instead, they chose to ignore it and equivocate about it until it turned into a PR black eye.

When I was in high school, I did bread deliveries for a bakery. There weren’t really restrooms I could use when I was on my route in the mornings, but I was told if I ever needed to use the restroom and had no other options I could always return to the bakery and use our restrooms. I never peed in a bottle doing that job. I also never got in trouble for being 20 minutes late for having had to use the restroom.

I recall the peeing in bottles narrative to have begun with a story three years ago regarding warehouse workers who allegedly didn't have time to go to the bathroom.[0] So when I saw the tweet about whether to "believe" the peeing in bottles thing, I assumed that the PR person was using an internally approved line of defense about that, and was simply too incompetent to realize that the conversation about delivery drivers is similar but not the same thing.

It seems pretty obvious to me that some Amazon drivers, like other drivers, are going to pee in bottles from time to time. This doesn't seem like a fate worse than death, IMO, at least not for male drivers. But I do think it's a reason why Amazon shouldn't put cameras in its delivery vehicles.

Still, you would think that Amazon could maintain a bathroom depot in its major delivery areas. Maybe even their own gas stations.

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/16/17243026/amazon-warehouse...

Yeah, and this lack of public restrooms affects everyone. Due to health reasons, sometimes I end up having to plan my trips in the city around places I know have easily accessible restrooms.

Not only that, our subway stations and trains reek of urine more often than not. It's unpleasant, but I can't blame homeless people for it too much when there are zero restrooms nearby.

Anti-homeless policies like this are shortsighted; homeless people aren't going away just because you remove public facilities. They still need to eat, sleep, and do their business like anyone else. Better to both help homeless people improve their situations and provide facilities for basic human needs for everyone.

The homeless aren't going away from society, but if I close my restroom, they go away from my area.

This isn't "shortsighted" at all for the individual restroom operator.

That's why there's a need for public bathrooms. We are de facto privatizing bathrooms in a way that ends up being an anti homeless policy.

Merchants understandably don't want to provide free bathrooms to the general public even where homelessness is not the driving concern. It costs them money while not making any money, so they limit bathroom access to paying customers if they provide bathroom facilities at all.

The way I'd solve this politically is allowing construction of vastly more new housing in cities.

Then the currently homeless can have an indoor toilet where they live.

This isn't actually a discussion of homelessness. It's a discussion of delivery drivers lacking bathroom access.

I'm all for more housing, but solving homelessness doesn't actually put a full stop to a need for public bathrooms.

But it does make public bathrooms much more manageable.

Solving homelessness would make a lot of things much more manageable for society generally while being a kind and compassionate response. There is substantial evidence that homelessness is very expensive, to the point where it's just cheaper to give people housing than to, say, keep treating them constantly in the ER.

https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-hospitals-hou...

Good luck getting them to stay there. No doubt there are those who are willing and good you housed them.

The rest of them will either get thrown out for drugs/mental illness or ruin the place they move into. And I need my neighbors to be quiet at night so that I can keep my job. That is hard when you need to have the TV on at max volume because you need it to drown out the voices in your head.

I'm thinking primarily from a local government perspective here. You can either provide for the basic human needs of your citizens, or you can hope businesses in the area do it for you. If you choose the latter and they don't, well...

That said, if you close your restroom, they only go away from your area if there are other restrooms nearby. If there aren't, you're just making it that more likely that you'll find urine and feces outside somewhere near your business, and that older people and people with medical conditions avoid the area (and thus don't spend money at your businesses, by the way). Classic coordination problem: while it may be in your selfish interest to close down your restroom and push people to your neighbors, if everyone does that you're all worse off.

...and that's the situation we're in right now.

If we're talking bigger picture, the important basic need here is housing.

Legalize housing in cities, and this problem mostly goes away, along with many others.

As DoreenMichele mentioned in a sibling thread, remember that the issue that spawned this discussion was about the lack of bathrooms for delivery drivers. Solving the problem for the homeless doesn't remove the need for public restrooms.

...and I also mentioned the lack of bathrooms being an issue for people with certain medical conditions. I mean sure, I have easy access to a bathroom while I'm at home, but a big appeal of living in the city is being able to walk or take public transit to get places. That also means you're potentially 30-45 minutes away from home, though, not to mention the 30-45 minutes that it took to get there; if you're like me and you don't know for sure that there will be a bathroom you can use somewhere along the route, it's a huge disincentive to go there.

Well, I think solving the homeless situation will open up a lot of of public restrooms that are now closed because they become overrun by desperate vagrants.

But I also agree that I'm sidetracking the discussion :)

The reason there's no(few) public bathrooms in the US is that we're not allowed to charge for them (with the noble goal of human rights) as opposed to the EU/UK.

So the first malcontent that spreads feces all over the walls and blocks up the toilet with a syringe gets the whole thing shut down.

http://psmag.com/economics/dont-pay-toilets-america-bathroom...

It's also worth noting there are plenty of council-run public toilets that are free, here in the UK. It might not be as clear cut as you think.

UK has the same problem with jerks ruining their public toilets causing them to close

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/10/closure-of-pub...

It varies quite a bit in the US also. My local park has public restrooms in several spots.

The 'downtown development authority' provides public bathrooms in the (run down) commercial district.

Highways in the state have relatively evenly spaced public rest stops.

rest stops tend to be far outside of cities, and are pretty remote. a delivery driver isn't going to be using one of these during the course of their day. very odd thing to bring up as an example in this context.

It's an example of public accommodation, I certainly didn't mean to imply that a delivery driver would navigate to one.

(in my region the nearest facility would pretty much always be a gas station, with people not getting worked up about it if you walk in just to use the toilet)

I think it depends on the council and the location itself. For instance,I live in, what could be called, reasonably managed borough with a central library that has toilets.. It's a huge facility that can accommodate hundreds of people. So instead, people were adviced to use the public toilet just meters away from it.. Then the toilet got closed and now Burger King is the target destination. In the same borough,some parks have toilets,while others don't,etc. There's not much logic in this at all.

I’ve actually thought about this a little too much. When I take my dog for long walks, there’s literally no where I can use the bathroom. I can’t even go into a McDonald’s (no dogs). I’m sure homeless people are denied this basic human right everywhere.

Our portable bathrooms don’t self clean well enough. We need to think about how to design a better one. I don’t know if that involves building in air vacuums that force pull in everything to avoid clogs, or if we need more high pressure water, or literal acid that floods the floor after someone leaves (self cleans the whole box, and automatically sprays disinfectant, vacuums down all the shit in 2 minutes, then unlocks the door). Maybe have one time plastic bags that seal up and then get flushed down (all automated). Some kind of hosing down of the whole thing with acid is still high on my list.

There’s got to be some tech we can make that would make rolling these out the most hygienic thing to do as a society.

I hate to say it, but universal ID and a deny-list would stop it easily. You let the bathroom verify your ID, and if you leave the place a mess the you no longer have bathroom privileges.

It would let you keep great public access, keep toilets simple, and only pass the "costs" of bad-behaviour to those that deserve it.

Having ID to take a piss is a bit weird however.

There are lots of advantages to universal ID cards, but that doesn't erase their considerable problems. [0]

Anyway, how would you identify who spoiled the bathroom?

[0] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/01/realid_costs_...

Have the ID scanner and camera be all in one - leaving your ID in it physically blocks the camera.

I'd guess the type of person who would trash a public restroom is also pretty likely to just relieve themselves in the street after being banned. not sure what problem this solves.

It solves the problem of excessive costs of cleaning and fixing bathrooms by decreasing the probability of someone destroying the bathroom.

Being able to use a bathroom should be a right, not a t that could be taken away.

If you hate to say it, then don't say it. Sure, it seems like everything would be so much simpler if we could merely sort everybody into two groups of good people and bad people, and punish the bad people. That's the tired old authoritarian fallacy.

In reality, you've got an endless supply of people who will make a mess once with your unpopular system and not care, good faith accidents unable to make amends, people that refuse to show IDs and piss on the reader on general principle, people unjustly blamed by your system for someone else's mess with no appeal, fake IDs, and inevitable tie in to other delusional top-down systems that multiply these problems.

Check out the Portland Loo. My city has one and it’s a very well designed public toilet.

Feces on the wall is actually a symptom of mental illness; I doubt that mentally sane people are doing that for fun in the majority of cases.

There is the possibility that someone has sudden intestinal distress and simply loses the foot race. There’s a moment between pants down and butt in place where this could happen. According to an anecdote told by the person who had been responsible for calling in the cleaner when it happened to our colleague years ago. So yes, crazy people may be doing this on purpose, but drivers might be finding themselves unintentionally in this position even when they readily find a restroom.

As a parent, I've had to deal with my children's explosive diahorea impromptu Jackson Pollock reductions on the bathroom wall.

We just clean it up.

Just ask the proprietor for some paper towels and some spray and get to work and nobody will care. Frankly, one remarked that we would always be welcome even after the disaster because we left it better than we found it.

You would be surprised what bored and borderline sociopath teenagers will do for shits and giggles.

In this case, quite literally.

>symptom of mental illness

>borderline sociopath teenagers

I don’t know what point you’re trying to make.

I've worked jobs where I was on the road a lot. Sometimes you just gotta pee in a bottle. I don't think my employer (not Amazon) was doing anything wrong, or that there was anything they should have been doing differently. When ya gotta go ya gotta go.

EWWWW what if you miss????

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