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> Pay toilets are banned across many states but there has been absolutely no work put into replacing them with public, free toilets. Nobody is willing to pay to maintain these

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.

> ... bans in New York, New Jersey, Minnesota, California, Florida, and Ohio.

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.

The situation varies from state to state. In Florida, many businesses are required to have public restrooms. So you should be able to do your business without being coerced into buying that $10 drink.

Florida’s Building Code requires restaurants to have one or more public restrooms.

There is no state law that forces restaurants to allow people to use those restrooms.

Restaurants can refuse access to non-customers.

> 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.

would it help if there were mass shit-ins? say at council offices, outside the governor's office, etc.

It would help if people didn't literally smear shit on the walls of public bathrooms when they use them.

This is why we can't have nice things.

I imagine these people have mental illness that we decided to "treat in the community", i.e. closed the mental health facilities and simply sent them on their way.

there are plenty of roboloos that clean themselves now though, so that's not really an excuse anymore.

bombcar's guide to determining if you're a nice part of town - how easy it is to get to a restroom

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

Florida Administrative Code Chapter 61C-1.004 2.a requires at least one bathroom for "its employees and guests". It is not clear to me if that means one is required to consider non-customers as "guests". But there is more law than the Florida Building Code.

https://www.flrules.org/gateway/readFile.asp?sid=0&tid=27562...

Ahh, good old ambiguous laws strike again.

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.

Sounds like until someone sue restaurant for denying access to toilet, and this go through appellate court, they do what they want to do?

The main statistic cited in the article is for the UK, where paid toilets are common:

> 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.

Interesting thank you, I had never heard of this! It is unfortunate how sometimes the Law of Unintended Consequences bites activists in the ass. You see a worthy cause and want to improve the situation, only to end up making things worse.

This might fall in the category of Unconsidered Consequences. One can't merely oppose a thing and not support a replacement and have the fallout be "oh well, we tried". It's not like all the pay toilets disappeared all at once leaving no free ones, the group was 'making progress' in their myopic goal all the while.

It's rent control but for toilets. Obviously the problem is that toilet landlords got greedy, and it'll be fine when they stop being greedy /s

This is also what I would call "the road to hell is paved with good intentions"

We need to do a better job scrutinizing cause-effect for things, not just make decisions on a knee jerk "that sounds well intentioned"

"unintended"? -- what is the most obvious thing that can happen if paid toilets are outlawed and there is no money (never is) for public toilets?

Obviously, there is more to the story. People are not that dumb. Somebody wanted it that way for a reason.

>IF you look sufficiently affluent, you can slip into a hotel

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.

I've regularly done the same despite having long hairs, a relatively well grown beard and wearing shorts and sandals (but at least I wear a polo).

> Pay toilets are banned across many states but there has been absolutely no work put into replacing them with public, free toilets. Nobody is willing to pay to maintain these [...]

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?

Surely $10 is like triple what you'd actually be in for

> In the US, we have the Committee To End Pay Toilets In America to thank for this state of affairs.

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.

Sounds like we have you to thank, using your strange version of logic.

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).

What a strange take