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Comment by jamestimmins | Hacker News Reader

Somewhat amusing bc American bathrooms would be so much nicer if they all had paid attendants in them and requirement payment to use.

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However public toilets have multiple objectives. The more accessible they are, the less likely you are to smell or step in excrement, which also makes being in a city a nicer experience.

That wasn’t my experience in Europe, where pay toilets are common. First, they’re not all attended. Second, the nastiest toilet I’ve ever seen was a pay toilet at a train station in Norway.

Although I prefer the floor-to-ceiling stalls of Europe, I find it much easier to find a usable bathroom in the US.

To be fair, there's something about the Scandinavian diet that makes any kind of toilet you encounter literally the most disgusting experience possible.

well, at least it wasn't The Worst Toilet in Scotland

Or worse, The Worst Toilet in Scotland, but Covered in Bullet Ants.

Yeah, the actual outcome is now that many businesses close their bathrooms to the public unless you’re buying something.

Or they just say that they are out of order

I have only seen this happen in big cities. Outside of big cities this just doesn't happen.

Yet somehow Japan achieves both free and clean bathrooms... In the biggest city in the world, no less!

The new Wim Wenders movie, Perfect Days, is an account of how that's done (the story is about a toilet cleaning man in Tokyo who is paid by the city)

Except the thing is… if you put Japanese officials in charge of the policies of any other city, the toilets would be as bad or likely worse.

The example isn’t just one thing, it’s a ton of things with the side effect of a strong culture of responsibility.

Yeah, considering it would be most coveted job and best of the best in town would be falling over each other to be a toilet attendant. It naturally would lead to some of the finest toilet experience one can have.

I think that's a definition of "nice" that undermines the utility of public bathrooms, which I think is a lot more essential to the public good.

Unless clean free toilets are a big part of their advertising. See: Buc-ee's locations.

In my experience, public pay toilets in southern Peru are worse than any public toilet I have ever seen in the USA.

It is extremely common that in most of Mexico, the pay toilets have such bad plumbing that everyone knows to not flush any toilet paper at all, it all goes in the bin no matter how dirty it is.

I prefer USA toilets.

Pretty fascinating to hear the counter-examples here.

Admittedly, I based this comment on my recent experience in Munich, and it definitely sounds like it wasn't as representative as I assumed.

I’ve been in Europe a lot recently, and the running joke has been how much worse the toilets in Europe are than in the US. Even worse, the pay toilets seem to be of consistently worse quality than the free toilets in Europe!

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