When peeing in public in this German city, beware walls that pee back | Hacker News Reader

When peeing in public in this German city, beware walls that pee back

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Anyone will discover in a fraction of a second that all they have to do to avoid the reflected stream is aim diagonally at the wall.

At $117 per square meter of this paint, complete with a suspiciously well-produced video to sell it to the public, it's hard to believe this isn't just a slick packaged scam to get the taxpayer's money into someone else's pockets.

As others have pointed out, with the insane amount of money that would go into this, they could just add public toilets here and there instead.

> all they have to do to avoid the reflected stream is aim diagonally at the wall

Or, not aim at the wall at all and urinate downwind...

Why there aren't more public toilets in major towns is a mystery to me. Here in Paris there are a few, but not enough by a long shot, and for some (puritanical?) reason they close automatically at 10pm, so if you're coming out of a bar or a restaurant late at night, you're out of luck.

What's the problem with public toilets????

Wow, that's the opposite of Amsterdam, where the public toilets only appear at night:

http://www.citymetric.com/horizons/toilets-are-popping-city-...

This may sound dismissive of drug addicts, but I know in Portland, OR, USA, we shut down all our public bathrooms at night because homeless/junkies use them as places to sleep, vandalize them, do drugs in them, etc... They became more of a liability than a public benefit.

Unfortunately a case of treating the symptoms instead of the cause. Mind you, it's a bit easier to lock toilets than solve systemic inequality.

a bit

> What's the problem with public toilets????

The Public.

>.. aim diagonally at the wall.

Although Germans had some of the best tanks in WW2 they still hadn't figured simple trick of slope armor... (I am sorry I couldn't resist)

I wonder why they don't just make more public toilets. If there are no toilets around, I don't wonder myself why people who drank a liter of beer start pissing on things that are surrounding them.

In Germany, sometimes there's this weird tendency to patronize people just for the sake of it. So, instead of going for the obvious, reasonable solution that's beneficial for everyone involved an inferior and more expensive 'solution' is implemented that doesn't really solve the issue but merely punishes undesirable behaviour. While the streets will still smell like piss at least people can gloat over the wrongdoers having got their comeuppance.

Presumably, they don't want to spend the money on maintaining lots of public bathrooms, but instead want to see if putting enough constraints on people's solution-space will somehow incentivize someone else (e.g. businesses) to do so.

It's not just German.

See: homeless spikes vs homeless shelters.

Homeless spikes are an individual versus communal issue. Homelessness is a societal problem, but once society has failed and there are homeless people about, individual landlords don't want them sleeping around their buildings so they install spikes.

The bathroom situation in some parts of Europe does seem like something that could be addressed. When I'm wandering around a European city and find myself with a full bladder, I'm always relieved to find an outpost of American corporate imperialism such as a Starbucks or a McDonald's because---regardless of anything else they bring---at least they bring clean well-maintained public bathrooms.

Installing anti-homeless spikes is still a choice for punishment over viable positive alternatives such as planting a nice bush where you don't want people to lay down.

> When I'm wandering around a European city and find myself with a full bladder, I'm always relieved to find a Starbucks or a McDonald's

In the UK, walk into any pub and ask if you can please use the loo.

Cf. Greece.

Public urinals like these are all over Amsterdam: http://goo.gl/LbWxd4 you're rarely more than a couple of blocks away from one.

They're male-only, and just a metal spiral leading to a cement wall that you pee on, and a drain below that wall.

They're very simple & easy to maintain, and all you need to clean them is a pressure washer. Public urination is practically unknown with these around.

The canals also help a lot.

In my over four years in Amsterdam I've never seen anyone pee into the canals outside of queen's day (a day-long city-wide parade/giant party, for those who don't live here).

German cities are full of public urinals such as the ones you describe. The problem is that they are quickly soiled making them unappealing, even for the most drunk revellers. The only way the behaviour can be curbed is with big fines - it works in the UK for the most part.

Or maybe they could come up with an efficient way to clean the public urinals instead.

That is true but then your average drunk would still choose the path of least resistance which is usually the nearest bush, wall or tree. We are genetically wired to look for the easiest solution which would of course be peeing wherever we are when nature calls. The only thing that stops us from exhibiting this behaviour when sober is inhibition. When alcohol numbs our inhibitions and sense of risk we revert to our most primal selves and in some cases that means we piss in places we should not piss in.

Initial cost, liability, maintenance, abuse, cleanliness, oh the list can go on and on. Far too many people are pigs when its not their property.

Now I am waiting for someone to sue over damages to expensive shoes or clothing because of a building owner's use of the paint.

Still cheaper than Ultra Ever Dry on every wall. He coating dissipates due to weather and gravity after a month or ao anyway.

But it's a cool undercover advertisement for ultraever dry!

Undercover? I haven't seen such blatant advertising masquerading as news in years. The video in this article is clearly a commercial.

Yep. Pop up public toilets like these[1] are available during the night when this problem is the worst.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8iR3pgt37I

Does anyone know whether there actually aren't many public toilets or is the problem more that the kind of guys who will urinate in public also won't go very far out of their way to use a toilet?

As a pedestrian tourist with a frequent need to pee, in general there are very few public toilets in Western European cities. Bus stations and shopping malls are amongst the few reliable refuges.

Cost appears to be the reason. Plus presumably pursue from local businesses which feel they 'lose' custom if people can pee for free instead of having to pay for a coffee they don't want just to use the loo..

Where you can eat or drink, there are going to be toilets, you won't get a concession without them, besides for small snack bars. The issue is probably mostly caused by the way home, because outside of restaurants, bars and larger shops and malls there are indeed very few public toilets.

"Oy guys, I heard these walls got some kinda fancy piss-reflectin' paint on em!"

"Booollocks, ain't no such thing!"

"Well, let say we settle it then"

unzip

"Hey mate, I bet if I piss at an angle I can get it in that box there..."

"Five quid says you can't"

etc.

Now if you sold pants which were equally repellant could you set up a standing wave of pee between you and the wall?[1]

Waterless urinals are available, I'm surprised that more of them aren't out in areas where they are trying to avoid people peeing on walls.

[1] No of course not it would end up between your shoes and the wall

According to the author of Dirty Old London, these urine deflectors in Clifford's Inn Passage[1] are among the last of what was once a very common feature.

[1] http://catsmeatshop.blogspot.com/2013/07/urine-deflectors-in...

> so unaccomodating are the owners of doorways, passages and angles, that they seem to have exhausted invention in the ridiculous barricadoes and shelves, grooves, and one fixed above another, to conduct the stream into the shoes of the luckless wight who shall dare to profane the intrenchments.

Better title: "Beware walls that bounce pee back" I was expecting an active solution, like a saline water detector and a sprinkler.

Also, from the article:

> It costs about $700 to cover six square meters with urine-repelling paint, which has raised questions over the idea's efficiency. According to a WorldViews calculation, one could buy more than 1,500 bottles of normal German beer for the same price.

It's the wrong comparison, because the people that buy beer are not the wall owners. You should compare the paint price with normal paint, detergent and cleaners, and the nice surprise of a clean wall in the morning.

the physics don't really work, one can easily aim at a wider angle to the wall, not perpendicular..

from the title I was expecting some kind of sprinkler that would spray back :)

building toilets and enforcing the law through fines seems much more rational

> the physics don't really work, one can easily aim at a wider angle to the wall, not perpendicular..

You didn't factor in the confounding variable of drunkeness with regard to its effect on the ability to reason about angles and such :-)

I think it will only take getting yourself wet once to learn that when in doubt, you should pee at an angle. People will quickly adapt.

Now if someone would make a pee retroreflector coating, things could get more interesting...

:) true

but then again, if the guy is too drunk he might not even notice some drops on his shoes

> one can easily aim at a wider angle to the wall

You could of course urinate into the open air. The reason people urinate against walls is, ironically, to protect their modesty.

Remember kids, walk backwards while ya peeing.

Wouldn't it be cheaper than ~$85/sq meter to just have a motion-detecting camera on each wall that would record/broadcast the people peeing in all of their glory on a town website, and have signs on the walls indicating this and the URL where they can see themselves? A drunk person isn't going to care that they have to do laundry in the morning because the wall "peed back" on them. They might care that the entire town would see them doing it though.

CCTV in public places is illegal in Germany for privacy reasons.

I think this (or a less piss specific version of this) is an interesting idea anyway.

Public cameras in some town to prevent crime and bad behaviour with no police secrecy filters. Anyone could add their (legal) camera to the network and live stream their car park or whatever.

Put a motion-detecting camera near the coated wall, have it automatically mix in canned laughter and you can stream real-time comedy!

Victorian-era solution http://www.neatorama.com/2013/08/03/Urine-Deflectors/

it's interesting that it's not enforced as a law. I can imagine that raising the fine to $200 and spending 1 or 2 months ticketing everybody would change behavior overnight. But obviously the majority of Germans don't think that's warranted.

Lastly if a young male who is drunk pees on your house and his pee bounces back onto him potentially embarrassing him in front of his male friends or his companion how long till a brick goes through your window as you're sleeping?

They should just follow America's lead, and force everyone caught urinating in public to register as a sex offender. I mean, it works here, right?

Right?

Well in America if 100 men pee up against a wall one will get shot by the homeowner fearing a break-in. So even drunk young males will say to each other "Dude don't go into that garden/alley to pee against the wall you never know if the guy in there has a gun"

> how long till a brick goes through your window as you're sleeping?

Going from answering nature's call in a somewhat uncouth, unthinking manner to outright vandalism is a bit of a leap.

I guess I'm thinking humiliated drunk young males can be problematic.

"Why did you break into my house and destroy everything in your path?"

"I tried to pee on your wall and it bounced off. So I got so mad I decided it was time to do some real damage."

> I can imagine that raising the fine to $200 and spending 1 or 2 months ticketing everybody would change behavior overnight.

Not in St. Pauli, it's Hamburg's party district, home of the Reeperbahn, so it'd be a continual stream (if you pardon the pun) of very drunk people, many of whom aren't from Hamburg, getting ticketed.

In many German cities, you're fined for peeing on public property ($50 to $200, depending on the city and the circumstances).

>spending 1 or 2 months ticketing everybody would change behavior overnight.

$700 for 6 sq meters of paint? I'm gonna make a wild prediction and say this won't catch on.

Seeing as there is little sense applying it above let's say 1.2m, that means 5m of house front that's now safe.

If you had a store in an area notorious for drunks peeing against everything, investing less than $2k to completely cover yourself from damages, wouldn't you do it? This'll pay off after 4 weeks!

That sounds similar to the cost of a no-flush urinal. (Actually, I haven't looked into it too deeply, but I'd wager you could buy, install, and maintain a no-flush urinal for over a year at a cost of $2k.)

SO the solution to people pissing on your wall is to turn your wall into a proper toilet?

Until people learn to pee at an angle. Then you have an expensive solution that doesn't work.

According to another commenter, the paint only stays effective for a month or so.

I wonder if it would be a better investment to build more public restrooms instead of spraying walls.

Or demand will drive down the cost.

Perhaps it would still be effective out of a spraycan.

Of course the simple way to deal with this is to piss sideways.

On the other hand, as a resident of a neighbouring derby city, I don't personally have a problem with Hamburg football fans pissing on themselves!

I have a better solution: electrified paint.

Would look cool during rain.

Come to think of it, this anti-pee coating could also be cool during rain - nothing like getting splashed by an oncoming car from both sides.

Actually yeah, I really would like to see how a whole street of hydrophobic buildings would look in pouring rain. Would there seem to be almost a lumpy force-shield around them from the radius of all the deflected raindrops? Where would they all go after hitting the buildings? Etc. (Good use for a physics simulation; a "rain-tracer", so to speak.)

Now I'm wondering, though, whether you could mix hydrophobic oils into tarmac in a way where all the water on a road would "slick off" toward the nearest ditch, without impacting car tire grippage.

Mythbusters proved that this won't work--- the pee separates into droplets and doesn't form a continuous stream. Nevertheless, irish storeowners are trying this method anyway.

Also, why you gotta punish natural human behavior? God wouldn't have given us penises if he didn't want to piss on walls.

Presumably they're just spraying the walls in something like that Neverwet spray (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZrjXSsfxMQ). I wonder if they realize that it breaks down in sunlight and won't work after a few weeks.

>>> Public urination is quite common in Germany

This is surprising. I thought it is only a third world problem and Germany is very clean.

What are other developed countries where public urination is common?

Almost anywhere in Europe and the US. If people are out at night drinking and there aren't easily accessible public toilets, then there really isn't much of an option for non-public urination.

> This is surprising.

It's not when you go to Germany and the public toilets you find cost money to use.

Mind you, at least you get clean,working toilets for your money, I was rather disgruntled in Brussels when I paid a euro to use the toilet and there was urine all over the floors and half the urinals were out of order.

What are other developed countries where public urination is common?

You don't drink alcohol, do you?

England - public toilets close in the evenings. Young men urinate in shop doorways or alleyways.

Glastobury music festival "fines" people who don't use the official toilets because there are so many people that the urine is detecable in rivers.

Listening to Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me?

we definitely need this in san francisco

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