Public toilets are vanishing and that's a civic catastrophe
psyche.co
psyche.co
IF you look sufficiently affluent, you can slip into a hotel or a department store (assuming your city’s downtown still has those) and take a free dump in some pretty luxurious surroundings. But if you’re at a point where that $10 drink for bathroom access is a big stretch then you’re probably not going to make it through there without a run-in with security.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_to_End_Pay_Toilets...
There is no state law that forces restaurants to allow people to use those restrooms.
Restaurants can refuse access to non-customers.
And many do, because of the repeated experiences of non-customers destroying the restrooms. They aren't doing it just to be dicks to people who need to pee but don't want to buy something.
This is why we can't have nice things.
there are plenty of roboloos that clean themselves now though, so that's not really an excuse anymore.
https://www.flrules.org/gateway/readFile.asp?sid=0&tid=27562...
You read it and might think guests applies to non paying customers. I read it and see it only applying to their guests, i.e. patrons of their restaurant. 3rd person might interpret as simply meaning the restaurant determines who is a guest and it can swing either way. 4th person is a lawyer and thinks some random other part of this document or other law or court case defines guest therefore his interpretation is correct. 5th person is like, we don't care, public access to toilets is a human right and proclaims the first 4 are bigots and such restaurants are to be sued. 6th person starts an organization to catalog all misbehaving restaurants and labels them discrimatory. And so it goes, and will go on till the end of time.
nicest places? good signage, no need to even interact with a human, restrooms that look like the Taj Mahal.
middling places? restrooms exist, but you might have to ask
bad places? restrooms are hidden, maybe if the clerk is nice you can use theirs, or you have to buy something
horrible places? restrooms that do exist look like something from a horror movie, they're locked stronger than Fort Knox, and even then you have to buy, beg just to borrow the key
We need to do a better job scrutinizing cause-effect for things, not just make decisions on a knee jerk "that sounds well intentioned"
Obviously, there is more to the story. People are not that dumb. Somebody wanted it that way for a reason.
A good proxy for misgovernment at the state level. Sound, publicly beneficial policy would be to leave the pay toilets be, but subsidize local municipality's public toilet efforts. But that would cost real money, whereas yanking business permits is nearly free, as far as the state's balance sheet shows.
We really have amazon to thank. Major book sellers ( Barnes and Nobles, Borders, Waldenbooks, etc ) were a major source of clean bathrooms. If you needed to use a bathroom, you could visit a bookstore, use the bathroom, browse for some books you might like to buy and go home and order it on amazon tax-free that night. Unfortunately, amazon did to bookstores what the asteroid did to dinosaurs and we are all worse off for it.
Bookstores struggled not just because of Amazon but because they insisted on selling everything at full MSRP, so just like you, people went and bought it for 30% less on Amazon because they were willing to have smaller margins (and it's not like BN and Borders didn't have the buying volume across all their stores).
I did that walking in downtown Paris near the Place Vendome. I walked into a huge luxury hotel and asked where the restaurant was. I used their toilet and left. It helped I wore a dress shirt and was without sac à dos.
They'll be willing to maintain them as soon as we start to demand that they do. Right now, our government is more concerned with funneling tax money into their own pockets and those of their "friends" than they are about providing services to the people. If we put a stop to that, there would be more than enough money available to maintain public toilets.
We see the same thing happening with every other public amenity and accommodation that used to be commonplace. Drinking fountains and public pools are disappearing, public parks and playgrounds go underfunded/neglected, and the public spaces that remain are increasingly filled with hostile architecture.
The Committee To End Pay Toilets did a great thing for this country. You can be certain that if they hadn't worked to stop the greedy people who wanted to profit from the necessity of our own basic bodily functions back then, today we would still have people priced out of being able to use a bathroom in public while the rest of us would still be stuck paying $10 to use the facilities only without also getting the sugared coffee to help expedite the process.
> For instance, data collected in the United Kingdom in 2018 showed that the number of public toilets had dropped by 39 per cent over the previous two decades.
From what I read, there is a growing homeless population in the US, many of which I assume won't even have a dollar to pay for a toilet. So if the only feasible options are "pay-per-use toilet" or "no toilet at all", then are you saying it's fundamentally impossible to provide any kind of restroom that would be accessible to those people?
A person is out and about town, and suddenly has to go, bad. They pull out the app and find their closest Rent-a-Potty. It appears on their map with a green dot - that means the last person to use it considered it reasonably clean, a good sign. (Everyone knows that people whose usage of the Rent-a-Potty is, ahem, strongly correlated with the state transition to an orange or red dot face price hikes, or possibly even expulsion from the app as a whole, so there's good reason to leave it at least as good as you found it.)
They tap the dot, hit "Reserve", and the timer begins. A 4 digit PIN code appears on the screen, your secret incantation to the hall of the porcelain throne. These things are not cheap - $1 per minute for the first 10 minutes of reservation, $2 past that. But they're emptied every night, the sink always has hot water, and the soap is always refilled.
Some people have tried to game the system by {your deviancy here}; the company has responded with {countermeasures you're smart enough to think of here}. Some enterprising souls could theoretically {countercountermeasure}, but honestly, implementing {countercountercountermeasure} isn't a huge concern for Rent-a-Potty's C-suite, compared to the recent competition from new market entrants like Loolurker, AirPnP, and Pouber.
There is no place for “business”.
It’s the literal definition of a public good and such the role of the government.
EBT is a pretty good program. Government grocery stores would almost certainly be an abomination (just ask your local public school cafeteria or military base mess hall).
Edit: adgjlsfhk1 is correct that “generally terrible” is overstated and simplistic. Hopefully better take downthread.
Military bases run PXs and commissaries and these stores have reasonable (mid to high mid) quality goods.
The PXs are pretty good but are priced comparably or higher than free-market stores off-base, and even still are subsidized by base funds. The Class Six is very well done and potentially profitable, though that's just a guess.
The commissaries are much more expensive than off-base stores and likewise are subsidized by base funds. For the most part only the officer's and senior NCO's families can afford to shop at the Commissary.
Disclaimer: I left active duty in the late 00s so things might have changed since then
It’s not that governments literally cannot provide good services — it’s that when government appoints itself as a monopolist, outcomes and accountability become effectively disconnected, unless the service is so high-stakes and the quality is so abysmal that it rises to “vote the bastards out” territory.
It largely comes down to who is running the thing, and do they care? With private sector, they are forced to care because otherwise it will affect revenue and brand value, which will get the leader fired. The consumer is empowered with ability to spend their $ elsewhere, which rewards the better service and punishes the worse (note that this is becoming much less true in the age of giant corps, especially big tech). With government services, (particularly in monopolistic situations like the DMV), the consumer is largely powerless. They have no choice but to use the system given, and if they aren't happy they can complain but that complaint won't have any teeth (unless they happen to be politically connected of course).
tldr: I most agree, but it depends on how you define "bad"
They are only as good as the people in a jurisdiction let them be. Also, the governments you have experienced are far from generally representative.
I would honestly pay for rent a potty even if public toilets were (and they should be!) available and convenient.
I don't really understand why it should be illegal to pay someone for a vital human need
Second order effects? Please. Those aren’t on the ballot, and are hard to stuff into a sound bite.
Voting against pay toilets makes you a foolish and counterproductive person that thinks you're a good person.
Examples include clean air, national defense, and public parks.
This isn't to say they shouldn't be provided by the government, but they're definitely not a public good
If you’re looking for a role for government here, I could see budgeting in some tax breaks for local businesses that make their restrooms publicly accessible. The infrastructure is already there, no need for a complicated business model.
People significantly underestimate the cost of maintaining clean public restrooms in urban areas.
When restrooms are used properly, maintenance costs are reasonable and predictable. But that is not what happens.
Restrooms contain private areas, and that reality invites other uses, like drug use, prostitution, and sleeping. And those uses come at a steep cost.
Separately, in my experience, many businesses do make their restrooms available to people who look presentable and who ask politely. They just don’t advertise it, and they may even advertise the opposite.
So while you do have to keep a few coins on you, unlike cities like NYC or SF you can actually go to the toilet when you want and it isn’t a stress inducing nightmare wondering what sort of hell you are going to run across if you do actually find a toilet.
Places with ‘free water’ almost always have terrible water availability and quality. Same problem.
Cleaning and maintaining a restroom isn't free, and something needs to pay for it. Highway rest stops are usually pretty clean, but they are paid for with tolls/very high gas taxes.
When it comes to restrooms, some people can not help not help themselves and leave it in a significantly worse state, or use it for other purposes (like drug use). Maintaining restrooms is, on average, thankless responsibility, even though people would be thankful to find one.
One of the toilets I paid for didn’t even have a seat.
This stuff is not priced to be a reasonable convenience, but to be a better alternative to soiling yourself in public. The most insulting part is paying 2 euros to pee into a smelly urinal and getting a 50 cent discount code for the nearby fast food stand as a courtesy, because I haven't spent enough apparently.
I think the general problem is interesting: how do we price necessities when our ability to pay is so different?
Spoken with the voice of privilege.
Experienced this a while back in a shopping mall in France. Like, a mall has to be one of the most profitable places in a modern city, pretty sure they can afford to staff a couple washroom staff during business hours while everyone is pouring money into all the mall vendors.
Explain what's evil, please.
Toilets are a scarce resource (economically speaking), and thus there must be some rationing method in place. If it's not monetary, it will be something else. In a perfect world there would be plentiful bathrooms and everyone would diligently clean up after themselves and take the trash out when full, so operating costs would be minimal (power and water bill and occassional maintenance). In the real world though, people don't do that, meaning you have to hire people to clean. Some people will also vandalize, which gets expensive in a hurry. Public (government-run) restrooms tend to be even worse because they aren't actively monitored, and for whatever reason people like to trash them.
In some places, like Phoenix, the situation is currently so bad that even paying customers cannot use the restroom in some smaller shops, due to the large homeless population. Having any option at all, whatever the cost, would be a far better alternative.
Maybe "Quid Poo Quo"?
King county just pulled the plug on a pilot for public restrooms at a couple of transit stations because with maintenance and, more significantly, security the cost was $77/use [1], we simply can’t afford that. Seattle famously bought five multi million dollar self cleaning toilets that only lasted a few years [2].
[1] https://www.theurbanist.org/2024/07/17/king-county-to-close-...
[2] https://portlandloo.com/seattles-failed-experiment-with-sub-...
We simply can't have nice things here. At least not in the Seattle city core. Everyone says "just have free bathrooms bro" but no one saying that actually has had to pay for and maintain a free bathroom in downtown Seattle. Discussing exactly why this is the case tends cause a flamewar, but the fact that we can't be honest about the cause means we'll never have the nice things.
Come to NYC, walk around busy areas for a while you will not infrequently see less fortunate people urinating in the subway stations, on the sidewalk, on walls and buildings, by trash cans, and sometimes (if the mood strikes them) right in the middle of the street.
Although it pains me to sat this .. maybe there's a need for a disposable potty, with sanatary wipes, that can go in the trash.
Maybe these should be given free to street sleepers?
Not to mention a lot of us "pay it forward". I used to pay for the people behind me when crossing the Bay Bridge, or for the next person that was buying a coffee.
Sell day passes that give you 24 hours access. If I were, say, going to drive from Seattle to Los Angeles I'd pay $20 to buy a pass that would let me pull into any Motel 6 along the way to use a clean bathroom.
All those branded 80 to 120 room hotel/motels are trying to reduce the staffing outside of 7AM to 4PM, even to the point of having check in kiosks that video call you to someone in South Asia/Phillipines/South America.
Top off your tank if it makes you feel better, but realistically no one there is getting paid enough to cross reference gas buyers with poopers.
https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/05/this-app-lets-cafes-and-co....
Just take quarters and give poor people some cash so they can shit too. Please please please
But it finds things like mall bathrooms and park bathrooms but not gas station bathrooms, at least the first time I tried it.
The real problem is when you're in an unfamiliar area and don't know the local secrets about where restrooms can be found.
This seems very susceptible to abuse. You (not you personally, but someone malicious) go into the restroom, mark it in a poor state, do whatever awful thing people do to get restrooms in the state in which they're so often found, and leave. Now it's the last person, who left it in a perfectly good state, who gets the blame.
this is so dumb lol likely will just continue with starbucks and gas stations
If we really want to take it up a notch, we have ways to do so. Deviancy, countermeasure, arms race all over again - but few such arms races are actually worth the hassle.
I live in the UK. I use the “Radar Key Scheme” for both my son and myself. The Radar Key opens handicapped toilets around the country that are otherwise locked. I asked my GP about a referral for this and they knew nothing about it. In the end I just bought one online. Bizarre. I have a disability that’s not visible, I’m otherwise healthy and relatively privileged, but being unable to find a toilet to use when my bladder feels like it is going to explode makes me feel like a wild animal - unable to fulfill the most base need in a culturally acceptable way - terrible feeling.
I’ve never heard of this type of thing in the USA. Handicap stalls, if available, are just next to the rest of the stalls in any given location. They’re usually a bit bigger to accommodate a wheel chair, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a special entry mechanism.
Is the UK version a physical key or some RF tag?
Living in a country where it's the norm, the concept of (any) locked bathrooms is wild. When travelling I always always find restricted access (either by key, or payment) public facilities extremely jarring.
In London, it's socially acceptable to use the toilet of any venue like a pub. In Paris they have high tech public toilets that automatically clean themselves, in Turkey mosques usually operate public toilets for profit alongside with the facilities provided by the government, in Germany they have Sanifair which gives you voucher for your payment and you can use at any participating location to purchase stuff like coffee.
Also, they need to eat and the places they eat are probably also the places they use the WC.
As things are - other companies can make national headlines by caring about human needs of drivers:
https://www.today.com/food/news/chick-fil-a-break-room-rcna7...
In Turkey they really like putting formal structure to that kind of stuff and venues at the high street sometimes have a lock with a password which is printed on the receipt with your purchase. One particular McDonald's was a pioneer in this, as their location was at the most crowded and central place where people used to meet before the proliferation of cellphones.
The same idea exists in the US, and often bathrooms have a PIN code to enter or a special key only the shop owner has.
I’ve never been turned down when asking politely. Most people are rather sympathetic when someone needs to use the bathroom for legitimate purposes.
Business owners perceive the presence of homeless people as bad for business so they don't want to encourage homeless people to stick around. And they think homeless people will trash their bathrooms or use drugs inside which is dangerous for other customers and brings police presence.
So business owners lock up their bathrooms. Result: Even fewer places for homeless people to use the toilet.
These things aren’t just perceptions or thoughts. It’s a real problem that anyone who runs a business in a location with a homeless problem can attest to.
Businesses care about the first type because of the associated problems and are completely fine with the later.
A 8-table local run cafe? I wouldn't dare ask
If it’s a chain then you probably don’t have to buy anything.
If it’s a large establishment such as a supermarket then you don’t have to buy anything, nobody is keeping track.
And obviously toilets in public places like train stations are free for all nowadays.
The end result is that woods next to stops smell horribly and you have to be super careful where to step. Because, too many people stop there to piss and shit.
Starbucks would always have a sit down toilet in Beijing malls, which was useful if the alternative was a squat toilet. But availability is nice, so that sit down toilet wasn’t very available and the squat toilet in the mall was, so whatever. The old guys smoking in the bathroom was a pretty big problem. 20 years ago at least, even in the squats. I feel sorry for girls, though, a fancy mall in xidan would always have a huge line for the women’s restroom that made my bladder cringe, well past 2015.
The government has a limited attention span, so they'll start a 5 year plan to improve public restroom access, but then it is forgotten a year later. Things do gradually improve, but usually via the private sector (more places to wash up at restaurants and such). If you are living a normal life in a tier 1-3 city, you've already made all your adjustments and know what to expect. I'm less confident in less developed areas, and strike it as a win when I find something clean and sit down.
Meanwhile many comments here seem to be reflexively decrying the situation in the US. That makes no sense to me. Every business has to have a bathroom, and in the overwhelming majority of the country these bathrooms are not locked and nobody minds if you come inside and use one.
There are two exceptions, that most of us aren’t visiting very often:
(1) some of our city centers where there are concentrated disorder and mental health problems
(2) the most crowded tourist destinations
These places tend to keep bathrooms locked, but you can usually just ask and get the key or code. Many have signs saying you need to make a purchase but few try to enforce that.
These exceptions are indeed annoying, but I believe the solution is better mental health care and generally more effective community policing so that businesses in those locations could follow the norms of the rest of the country.
How does this work, then? Does everyone pay $500 to use the toilet, or not? If not, how does the toilet know who can afford it? Maybe it should be a function of one's income.
On the other hand, in Japan there are extremely few places with public trash cans. Those few that exist are typically associated with vending machines for beverages.
IIRC they removed them after a terrorist attack in the 90s.
I'd assume that these days the lack of desire is mostly a matter of funding. Possibly also something about reducing the number of crows/rats digging through trash.
Japan also has a rather strict trash sorting system, and not having public trash cans might serve as a forcing function to sort things properly (since if you get it wrong things will be attributed to you). Similarly it's possible that under some circumstances, under-serviced public trash cans could end up increasing the amount of litter on streets: people may be more likely to stuff things into an overflowing trash can (or dump stuff next to it) rather than carrying it with them.
It was a good time for Japan, but unfortunately there was a horrible side effect.
No one could get a hold of the cans, to empty them.
Soon trash overflowed the cans, just as you said! Admitting defeat, the cans were eventually blown to pieces. This explains why Japan has trash on the streets, and why Japan had overflowing trash cans.
But this is all fixed now. As you know, Japan has no litter, and no one would ever stoop so low as to liter on purpose.
As for trash cans, many train stations I use have bins located near the entry/exit gate where you can put it in the correct slot (burnable, plastic, bottle, etc).
Old geezer perspective: The withering availability of public toilets is just another symptom of the massive decline in social trust over the past half-century or so. I might suggest that the author talk to people on the "supply side" - especially long-time small business owners - about the expenses and miseries of being on their end of the stick...but the author seems so focused on the rights & well-being of the "user" population that I can't imagine him actually caring about "their sort".
He was told not to come into the hotel anymore, but he did anyway. Any other solution would have taken too long to implement compared to just changing the locks on the doors and making the housekeepers happy, who you kind of need to operate the business.
You have then opened yourself up to a bunch of risks.
Much less risky to shut down access for everyone.
Some people won’t be deterred by anything short of someone who is able to intimidate or harm them. It’s a no-win situation because allowing employees to hit people with clubs isn’t a good idea. :(
https://support.strava.com/hc/en-us/articles/6525900339725-S...
You can search for „drinking“ to find mapped fountains/drinking water: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:amenity%3Ddrinking_w...
I understand the arguments of drugs and sex, but architecturally, socially, and civically we can mitigate that and should towards the common goal.
Public latrines are the most basic of public goods.
IMO it’s more about drugs and sex than capitalism but yea I agree the state of public toilet availability is a disgrace in Germany
Might be different in another neighbourhood here.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QzZBbX5A1FA
I know the synopsis doesn’t do it justice, but really, go watch it. One the best movies I’ve seen in a while.
The real civil catastrophe is the enablement of this behavior. How come we can't figure this out in 2024 but for 1000s of years it was the absolute bare minimum that was expected from a society?
Yeah fast food places are hit and miss, and post-COVID most are not open past 10pm or so.
(Yes you might need to buy something but seems like a small effort for it)
Plus it paints a wrong picture of a country because it's technically people asking you a few bucks for a basic necessity and the government has failed.
This is in stark contrast with developed countries like Singapore (where I visit a lot). Singapore makes sure a public toilet is available within a few hundred meters and boy are those clean!
No, it's not like you wanted it. You just wanted to pee, not a 500 kcal cookie.
Otherwise, the more stores that withdraw from offering free public toilets, the more burden it places on everyone else.
If it causes a slight increase in labor cost, at least it the cost will be borne equally by all, and benefit will be borne most by the most vulnerable.
These are the small things that add up to make people irritated. Having to shlep a block to throw out a few dirty napkins sitting in my car.
The few fast food places that do not let me go without complaint get a complaint to corporate and they lose my business for a few months.
I don’t want to live in a world where I have to hold it, so I vote with my feet. And I assure you, that is the one thing that business owners pay attention to. If you want to make it clear you can post your reasoning on their yelp page.
I would prefer a model like Germany has where instead of paying $50M for a public toilet and then service contracts, the government pays businesses to keep their bathrooms open. $50M goes a long way at $15/hr. Businesses add slightly more staff and bathroom maintenance is just part of the job.
Sadly I am not in a position to make this policy dream a reality so I must push the upkeep cost onto the business owner.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/19/business/starbucks-mobile-ord...
It doesn't look like the linked article mentions restaurant bathrooms but it can't be a coincidence. This all strikes me as a passive-aggressive reaction to FUD about homelessness and "out of control cities".
Not every instance of fear is FUD, sometimes the danger is real.
Or to simply retain employees.
If you had your choice between two fast food jobs with similar pay but one of them requires employees to take rotations cleaning the public bathroom throughout the day, which one are you going to pick?
The issues with drug users are also very real depending on the city and location. Having to have cops or emergency medical people show up to your location a couple times for no other reason than you offered public restrooms is a quick way to make a company decide to no longer offer them.
Protect employees in order to retain them, yeah. You're welcome to impute for-profit motive here, but either way I fully agree that I wouldn't want to be responsible for maintaining a public restroom in a city center.
No, it is just that very, very few people want to clean and repair bathrooms.
I would rather work at a restaurant that has no public bathrooms, so that I never have to clean them. Hence I am willing to work for less compared to a place with public bathrooms, hence my employer has lower labor costs.
Pretty sure that goes for all the keyboard warriors too. It’s pretty well known that almost any job where you have to deal with the general public is worse than a job where you don’t.
Of course nowadays, I bet it’s not a dedicated job, and they make the single person working alone in the store do everything…
Anyone who has ever worked in retail or food service could tell you that nobody wants to have to deal with the public restrooms. They need to be cleaned frequently and it’s not a fun job.
It’s not just homeless people or FUD. It’s because the general public has enough outliers who cause problems that when 100 people use your bathroom every day, you’re guaranteed to get a couple who create some sort of mess.
However the article misses the point with statements like this.
Quite simply, Lowe was right: there is often no place to go.
Public toilets are one of those things where all it takes is one person to mess up a good situation for everyone else.
There’s no incentive for people to treat them nicely. There’s an asymmetry, people want to use public toilets but who wants to clean public toilets? It’s always “someone else job.”
I see no problem having a little friction as a way to help control it. A small charge to use the bathroom or social capital of asking can be enough to remedy the problems of misuse.
This just makes me think of America and the bizarrely huge gaps between the hinges and gaps at the bottom and top of the cubicles, even in very wealthy contexts, like at big tech companies. WHY? Such a strange example of embedded inertias of design in ostensibly innovative contexts.
Yes, it sounds stupid as an European, where somehow we survive without this.
For first responder access, I have seen a hospital requirement for outswinging doors for one-holers with privacy locks. This allows the door to be opened when a person is collapsed against the door.
(1) “In general” because there are almost certainly niche regulations that require it. For example the construction standards of a state prison bureau, local board of education, etc.
This was invented after having a foreman check that you pissed or shat in the toilet like they did on a ford assembly line was deemed to expensive.
I find it funny when people see conspiracies in such mundane things.
Those prefabricated kits are cheap and used in many bathrooms. The gaps at the bottom are there for easy cleaning.
You can’t have public bathrooms in a society filled with criminals and homeless drug addicts.
I live in San Francisco, where it now costs over $100,000 per year to operate a single toilet, because without it being under constant guard, people start living in them.
With my iPhone I can do almost anything while traveling: look up maps, pay, take pictures, browse the web. But what I _can't_ do with my iPhone is the most basic thing ...
I know there is a debate in the group that needs “fast toilets” whether they should be free. Well that debate is moot when there are near zero options. A coffee brings what €1 of margin? A toilet could cost €1, and still help those in need. I hate paying for dirty toilets (German and Belgian gas stops grmbl, learn from France). But a clean toilet can be a lifesaver.
If Apple cared about users they would work on problems that really mattered instead of giving us a 100MP camera where 50MP is already just fine.
What do you think that given their mission / expertise they're missing out on? It wouldn't good for the world if every company worked on curing cancer, or another similarly impactful achievement for humanity, but it's great that many are. But I think Apple's giving back a lot too.
Personal anecdote: my grandfather passed away in a nursing home unexpectedly with just my mother, an aunt, and I. Yet with Facetime being so accessible to everyday people, at least a dozen members of my family that couldn't have physically made it in time were there with us and he recognized all of them.
You don't need big tech for this: OpenStreetMap [1], a map (actually, a database) that works like Wikipedia, is there for all of us :-)
It has information about public restrooms, whether they are accessible, gratis, and toilets are only a very small part of OSM.
The more people contribute, the more awesome it becomes.
A sibling mentioned Organic Maps, it's one of the many apps out there to conveniently use OSM (and contribute).
That is why the government doesn’t provide them. If the government can’t be bothered to pick up that burden, no one else should be expected to.
Safer streets, longer lives, a fair environment for the physically weak, longer-lasting infrastructure, a better business environment, and - more crucially than all of the above - more trust.