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Comment by sschueller | Hacker News Reader

In contrast the tiny city of Zürich Switzerland has 106 public toilet facilities. [1] Some are staffed, some cost money to use and some are open 247. Does my tax money pay for this, yes, I have used them and I am glad they exist.

The maintenance of these 106 facilities cost around 6,895,000 CHF (~USD) per year. Around 40% of that is staffing costs and 23% is rent to 3rd parties.

Yearly investment in upgrades etc. is around CHF 1,796,000

[1] https://www.stadt-zuerich.ch/gud/de/index/gesundheitsschutz/...

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Probably one of the best choices of my live was moving out of S.F to Switzerland five years ago, the culture here is a lot less focused on virtue signaling and way more focused on working, being respectful about no making a lot of noise on your house and public transport, actually having good incentives and culture about recycling and the washing machine, ultra safe place in general.

It only took me about a year of about 2 hours per day learning german as my third language to feel confident enough to apply for a job that was similar enough to what I got in S.F, I was hired in about a week at a financial institution as an applied data scientist in the fraud deparment. Could probably have tried earlier but wanted to be able to integrated decently into the swiss society without feeling I was leeching too much.

Is German or French more common?

I knew someone in S.F. who married a woman from Switzerland roughly 5 years ago and moved out there...did you work at a software consulting company in S.F.?

Hi,

Is German or French more common? >

It depends base on the canton, but in the overall swiss german is more spoken than french.

I knew someone in S.F. who married a woman from Switzerland roughly 5 years ago and moved out there...did you work at a software consulting company in S.F.? >

Can't be me, I'm a female ^^.

Depends where you go in Switzerland, my understanding is that the country is sort of divided into two parts depending on language. Same as in Belgium.

3 parts: German-speaking, French-speaking, Italian-speaking

The ~west speaks French (we call the region Romandie), south-east speaks Italian (canton of Ticino), the rest speaks (Swiss-)German.

SF has something like 67 public toilets, 49 of them staffed, according to an article written two years ago. And the population of the city is about 50% greater than Zürich.

Based on a quick search Zurich has some 440K inhabitants while SF has some 880K inhabitants which is roughly double (or 100% greater)

I remember finding the Zurich public toilets strange - they use the toilet bowl as the sink as well (notice in the photo how the water to wash your hands falls into the same bowl). It was a strange surprise, but seemed pretty efficient: https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2F3...

Only some are like that.

But construction costs are non-negligible, between 300,000 and 350,000 CHF, according to the city:

https://www.stadt-zuerich.ch/hbd/de/index/immobilien-bewirts...

Building a public toilet that remains reasonably appealing over its lifecycle (Zürich plans for a 20 year lifetime) is a non-trivial problem and has a non-trivial cost.

Berlin just doubled the number of public toilets: https://www.themayor.eu/en/a/view/berlin-s-public-toilets-th...

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