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Comment by G3rn0ti | Hacker News Reader

Worked out very well in clearing the city of advertisements or in improving the quality of life of its people because they see less public advertisement?

In Berlin the largest bill board provider (Wall GmbH) also builds public toilets. Thanks to them they are much more plentiful around parks. Forcing them to go out of business would take those with them.

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Could Berlin not buy the public toilets from the billboard provider and pay to operate them? Why are we relying on an advertising business for public toilets? They’re…public?

Well, it could buy them. If they had money left to spend. But Berlin pays for a lot of public services already because it is operated by politicians who cater to the same public that favors removing bill boards. As a result e.g. they just bought all privately operated power plants for billions. They also heavily subsidize public transport tickets because it is popular. And they employ a large public staff in the city‘s administration but still cannot maintain a good quality of service despite all the billions spent (you wait weeks for appointments).

Berlin is a text book example of how turning everything into public goods and spending a lot of tax money is not necessarily in the interest of the citizens IMHO.

Germany actually has an extremely small public sector at 12.9% of all people in the workforce. Compare to neighboring countries like the Czech Republic (15.4%), Poland (23.6%) or Denmark (30.2%).

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_public_se...

Are you saying that Berlin is an outlier in Germany, then? My perception (looking from outside) has always been that their public sector is just completely understaffed.

Berlin has a work force of about 2.2 million people. 305k of those work for the public sector. That’s about 13.8% so above Germany’s average. However, it’s not only important how much people work for the government but also how much it pays them. And Berlin pays much better salaries than other eastern German states. 24 years ago salaries in Eastern Berlin were increased to match those payed to western Berlin employees (instead of meeting in between). So for many years the city payed waaay more than its surrounding German member state to its staff. This financial issue is amplified by the fact Berlin now has to pay much higher pensions on average for its retired personnel.

Not that I am saying your argument is wrong, but I'd be wary of comparing such vaguely defined stats across countries. What does and doesn't count as public sector is going to vary wildly and so will how much of publicly funded work is done by direct employees vs. contractors. Statistics can lie as easily as they can give you useful info.

»they just bought all privately operated power plants for billions«

No, Berlin brought only the previously privatized district heating (Fernwärme) back (https://www.rbb24.de/panorama/beitrag/2024/05/berlin-fernwae...). Because that is a monopoly and Berliners got ripped off by a private company.

All of Berlin‘s district heating plants provide heat AND electricity. So the government owns a huge share of all electricity producers in this city now, too (about 60 % of the total production capacity).

Whether this constitutes a monopoly is beside the point. Berlin paid 1.4 billions is does not really have (after it sold it 20 years ago when it had even less money and could not sustain a profitable business operation) and which does not solve a problem we really have. And now it will need to invest even more money to future-proof this acquisition.

Because they're expensive and Berlin doesn't have money. They were also coin operated and thus frequently broken into and out of service because of that. They mostly have contactless pay now, which has disadvantages as well because its less accessible (especially for children and senior people).

The capital of Germany with almost 3.85 million people (one of the EU’s most populous cities) and it cannot afford public toilets.

Thanks for sharing ground truth, despite it being exceptionally depressing.

Berlin’s economy is unique for a major capital. Berlin is one of the weaker states economically in Germany. Mostly an effect of the division when most major industry left towards a place where the Soviet Army is not 5 minutes away and the city might be cut off from supplies at any moment. It’s been getting better but only recently the GDP per capita of Berlin rose above that of Germany overall.

This was radically different before World War 2. In 1938 Berlin made up 10% of GDP (and Germany was bigger back then). Major companies like Lufthansa and Deutsche Bank were headquartered in Berlin. It was the center of the new Electrical industry being home of both Siemens and AEG.

Berlin has the disadvantage of historically being an enclave of Western Germany in the communist GDR, very hard/expensive to supply as a result and always at risk of the commies forcibly annexing it. No large (and thus: tax-paying) company wanted to set up its headquarters there for that reason, and additionally as it was an enclave there was no place for industry to set up production facilities.

Nowadays, Berlin has a shit ton of "startups" HQ'd there, but they pay barely any taxes compared to production industry heavyweights.

Berlin can afford to have free public toilets when significantly poorer cities can. And yes, not charging for use can actually reduce the overal operating cost more than what you would have gained from the fee.

Improve quality of life by removing cognitive load from people.

There is legislation to grant permission to place some ads in exchange of, say public toilets to use your example.

But removed billboards from buildings or external area weren't taxed or had any positive result to society.

In most first world countries, public toilets are a right not a privilege that people have to pay for.

Europe is so backwards on their public toilet investments.

Exactly: here in Japan, public toilets are all over the place: train stations, public parks, or frequently just random places in the city, on the street. And they're free, of course.

The bathrooms in Japan are crazy to me. Depending on where you are the toilet might be the most luxurious experience your ass has ever had, or sometimes it's a literal hole in the ground and not even toilet paper is provided.

I've never had a problem finding a toilet there when I needed one, but I kept kleenex in my back pocket because I never knew what to expect.

I still prefer the holes in the ground to pay toilets.

You have to go to really rural places to find the squat toilets these days, or maybe some poorly-maintained park. All new bathrooms these days have western-style toilets.

One thing to watch out for, however, is that many bathrooms have no way to dry your hands, even in very nice bathrooms in fancy buildings, so you should bring a small towel with you. Some bathrooms don't even have soap, though this is pretty rare in my experience, but a lack of drying towels or hand dryers is somewhat common.

There also seem to be no public trash cans. How do people dispose of the utterly absurd amount of disposable packaging that everything comes with?

They generally throw it away in the place where they're opening it. Usually, you don't open stuff up until you get home, and I would hope you have a trash can there.

The big factor for foreigners is that people don't normally eat and drink while walking down the street; it's generally considered rude. If they stop and sit somewhere and eat or drink there, they keep their trash with them instead of throwing it on the ground like many other countries. If you're just getting stuff from a convenience store, you can usually throw stuff in the trash cans there.

Most stuff I've seen doesn't have an absurd amount of disposable packaging, but that is really common with the gift boxes of sweets that are commonly bought at stations and given as gifts. But these you don't normally eat in public.

You dispose of it where you bought it, or you don't open it until you get home, or you act like a good hiker who is out in the wilderness, and pack up your trash to bring home with you where you can properly dispose of it.

I always found it amazing that Japanese cities manage to stay so clean without public trash cans everywhere. It's a reminder that you have to solve the social and cultural problems first: if people think it's ok to throw trash on the ground, it doesn't matter how many public trash cans you have.

It's also useful to remember that the general lack of public trash bins isn't a long-standing part of Japanese culture: it only dates to the 1990s, when public trash bins were used for the infamous Sarin gas attack. After that, most bins in cities were removed. What's cultural is what happened later: the cities didn't turn into trash heaps, because people simply took their trash home or otherwise waited to find a suitable place to dispose of it.

I still prefer to have both: Considerate people and public infrastructure to make make sure good behavior does not conflict with convenience.

Consideration is free. Public Infra is not. Amazing how cheap not being a shitty human is

Neither is free. Both ideally pack back their cost in the long run.

Where "pay" is pretty much just a symbolic amount. Same reasoning why shopping carts often have a 1€ deposit. The price is close to zero but makes a big psychological difference to actually being zero.

Relatedly, offering stuff for free on ebay/craigslist/whatever turns up some incredibly entitled choosing beggars. Offering it for a token amount gives you very different results.

Yes, except governments should be a little bit better towards their citizens than Ebay or the grocery store.

ahahah that's beautiful. So it's all good because they built public toilets? Like when big companies have programs for the disabled, that makes it all good all of a sudden, we forget all about the other stuff? Damn...

You are laughing. But the city of Berlin was not able to provide this service. Spending a day in the park or on the playground with kids and needing a rest room meant either hiding in a bush, going home early or to the next restaurant where you had to pay a fee, usually (bc they provided a rest room to hundreds of people daily).

I see this public private partnership a win-win.

Yet many other cities are able to provide free public toilets, including ones much much poorer than Berlin. Perhaps it's not really a matter of Berlin not being able to do it themselves.

> the city of Berlin was not able to

> the city of Berlin was not willing to

Fixed that for you.

No, ads and toilets are separate in Berlin since 2019 [1]. Wall won the contract for the new Toilettenvertrag [2] by the city. The city says now what and where to build. Before that, toilets were only built where it was profitable for a billboard. Now the city can make the toilets even free [3] and the toilets are ad-free.

[1] https://taz.de/Toilettenvertrag-sorgt-fuer-Wirbel/!5431891/ [2] https://www.berlin.de/rbmskzl/aktuelles/pressemitteilungen/2... [3] https://www.rbb24.de/panorama/beitrag/2024/07/107-oeffentlic...

Well, however, it’s still the Wall GmbH building public toilets. So what’s your point?

São Paulo is ridden with crime, poverty and homelessness, the traffic is atrocious, the air is terrible, the public transport is built for a city 10% the size and the infrastructure is stuck in the '70s.

But I do enjoy the lack of billboards.

Didn't the city come close to running out of water? ... per ChatGPT: "The most notable crisis occurred between 2014 and 2016 when the Cantareira water system, one of the main sources of water for the metropolitan area, reached critically low levels."

Running low on water in São Paulo would be a huge disaster.

Places with billboard bans don't ban all ads, if the bathrooms aren't billboards they aren't banned. If the bathrooms are huge billboards next to parks then yeah, you'll have to find other bathrooms and that seems fine.

And I'm sure the mega rich also donate a lot (in absolute terms). That doesn't mean the current levels of wealth inequality are good for society. The term for this is whitewashing bad behavior with good deeds.

Allow ads on/in only the toilets themselves.

Problem solved.

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