The best seat in town | Hacker News Reader

The best seat in town

torched.la

44 pointsNaOH17 comments

"JCDeaux basically invented the idea of Street furniture"

That is a fairly strong claim on the surface and the company's website has a slightly different one:

"In 1964, Jean-Claude Decaux invented advertising street furniture."

Such a fundamental mistake in the opening paragraph. Made me realize I could not trust whatever was written afterwards.

Public restrooms are a sign of advanced civilizations. It's a pity that they have to be built to withstand damage from hooligans.

The restroom building provides more utility than most buildings do to a hooligan. Unclear why it is an enemy.

Any "private" space in a public place becomes valuable with more density. It's basic scarcity incentives. It unfortunately incentivizes hooligans to make the restroom appear even more disheveled and unsafe to increase the privacy (less people want to go in it)

You're reading way too far into it. Private spaces are simply easier targets.

So the solution is obviously https://juxthpose.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/m...

Vandalism scales linearly with [accessible, visible, unsupervised].

Uncorrelated with the usefulness of the building after controlling for other factors

The existence of well maintained and clean public restrooms and hooligans is a shibboleth for culture. Some cultures are simply superior.

I’m currently travelling in China and the total absence of graffiti and the wide availability of public toilets as well as the general cleanliness of the place is a stark contrast to London. I am somewhat dreading that part when I return.

You haven't gone away from touristy track. A friend of mine did last year and the stuff I heard was pretty bad

touristy track is covered by cctvs and they are used to get people for anything including public urination or graffiti so of course it's clean

If by tourist track you mean several cities each with a population count greater than London then sure. :) But it is true I was there as a tourist to see a few places and China is an absolutely huge place.

I wish the touristy places in the UK were as clean though.

Also, writing this comment on a crowded, dirty and smelly train from Gatwick Airport, which has 2 carriages inaccessible because of broken doors and crawling due to signal failure on the line, I already miss the clean and comfortable Chinese trains I was taking from place to place.

That said I do get to work 945 here for more money so I am grateful for this for sure. :)

From my experience and what I heard in China you will get a super clean airport train and metro but if you go away from urban centers you encounter crazier and crazier stuff, the likes of which you would never see anywhere in UK or even US

I think it's kind of the opposite in non authocratic countries...

As an occasional visitor to Paris, I was quite astonished at how nice at least the central parts of the city have become under the 12-year tenure of Mayor Hidalgo (admittedly with the help of gobs of public funding for the Olympics). It's so much more green, clean, and biking/pedestrian friendly than it used to be.

I gather locals who drive are in violent disagreement with me on this, and Paris is a big place that extends well beyond the posh touristy arrondissements, but it's still remarkable -- especially given that the downtowns of most American big cities have gone downhill in the same time period.

JCDecaux famously charges everyone outside of France exorbitantly while charging nothing to Paris. For example, Paris pays as much (€6M/yr in 2006) for maintenance on its 420 sanisettes as SF does for its 24 ($13M/yr in 2022). You cannot seriously criticize LA for looking for alternatives. Even Berlin, after paying JCDecaux €250M to build a few hundred, realized that paying businesses to keep their bathrooms public and clean is simpler.

I don't really understand why the author is dumping on LA's toilets so much while praising how Parisian toilets are so useful for everyday people like commuters. The LA Metro program, which is expanding and seems to be very successful, has very different goals and challenges than the skid row public bathrooms.

Not sure why you're bringing subways into this, since the Paris Metro wipes the floor with the LA Metro. 16 lines and still growing, not including the even more rapidly expanding modern tram network.

The author actually brought up commuters! I thought the LA Metro bathrooms are more relevant for that use case, so it seems weird that the author ignores those while focusing on bathroom programs for the homeless (not that homeless people don't deserve bathrooms, but the picture they paint of regular every day folks in Paris is not comparable to the skid row bathroom users)

LA Metro has a mere 120 miles of track vs Paris's 150 miles, but in our defense they had a 90 year head start :)

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