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Comment by adityapatadia | Hacker News Reader

I faced when I visited New York. I had to search Google Maps and it showed a public toilet in Rockefeller Center. I walked a few miles to reach but it was a real pain.

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Meanwhile you could probably have dropped into a Starbucks, bought something small, and used their bathroom. There have never been a lot of explicitly public bathrooms in cities like NYC.

something small costs 5 dollars in starbucks. thats some expensive pee

$5 coffee is cheaper than most pairs of pants.

Who is pissing their pants instead of just pissing outside someplace?

One is just embarrasing, the other might get you on a sex offender registry.

No one is pissing themselves over this. They just go somewhere discrete like behind a dumpster where there aren't any karens and piss. Even women do this if sufficiently desperate, the old squat and shake.

You’re also getting the thing you bought too. Maybe it’s more expensive than you would have paid for it otherwise but that difference is the cost of the pee, not $5

> You’re also getting the thing you bought too

No, it's not like you wanted it. You just wanted to pee, not a 500 kcal cookie.

The public toilet in NYC is called Starbucks. It doesn’t get easier than that.

And McD. And Shake Shack. And others.

(Yes you might need to buy something but seems like a small effort for it)

I can attest that Shake Shack have purchase-only bathrooms. And even after a purchase they seemed annoyed…

Having just spent the year in Manhattan, my experience was that most (every?) Starbucks there no longer have public bathrooms even with purchase. I was surprised to discover that the only free public bathrooms were at Sweet Green. It changed my perspective of them as a company- it’s a real commitment when the trend is going in the other direction and I want to support them financially as a result.

Yes, I figured out the Starbucks (or any other fast food chain) thing after staying there for a while. It's however really a sad scene where people deny visiting washrooms especially when you need it the most.

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!

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