Subway station toilets: a surprisingly accurate indicator of urban civilisation

I think part of the problem in the Bay Area is that BART runs across multiple counties and there's an awful lot of political buck-passing as a result. Although it has improved in recent years, I still hate riding it and I hate how crappy BART stations feel. In fairness they have tried to mitigate the restroom problem by setting up decent public toilets on the streets near the entrances, but those are still a bit sketchy.

By contrast, when I visit Los Angeles I enjoy riding the subway. It's clean, the signage is excellent, they don't fill up the speakers with random unhelpful public service announcements every 30 seconds, and there's a general air of competence.

I learned this (almost) the hard way when I needed to use the restroom and got off at Lake Merritt (or whichever underground station was in the East Bay) and asked the BART attendant where the restroom was. He told me unfortunately that they were not available to the public but then took pity on me by allowing me to use the employee restroom. I went in and saw what was probably the cleanest toilet I have seen in such a public place.

In regards to the article, I would say that Asian countries (sans China) are more free to allow public restrooms because culturally it is bad mannered to leave a toilet more dirty than you left it since they are more considerate of other's wellbeing (of not having to enter a dirty toilet). I would say it's impossible here in the States since most people won't give a second thought to peeing on the seat and leaving a turd smeared on the wall.

Finally, Airpnp is similar (if not the same to) Have2P, an app that YP/ATT made using it's business data back in ~2009. Not maintained anymore though.

Wow, I wrote a lot about peeing and toilets.

I've used them several times in Singapore, and 90% of the time they've been excellent - the other 10% of the time they were just heavily trafficked, but not "Dirty" - just puddles of water near the sinks, lots of paper towels in the garbage.

I do recall reading a front page story in the Straits Times about how the MRT had been hiring cleaning consultants to improve their already ridiculous (by my estimate) high levels of cleanliness.

I would love someone to do an analysis of all the horrible failures in San Francisco/Transit and compare them to Singapore, so we can understand why the heck one is doing so well, and the other one is so abysmal.

The nicest public toilets I've been are the toilets in the Taipei airport, which are uniformly fairly clean and functional. Narita airport is also quite nice.

http://i.imgur.com/GbtoUO3.jpg

It's filthy, but I've seen worse (and is still better than nothing at all cough London).

I wonder what the average maintenance cost is for a public bathroom. May be a good cost to make the city a bit more pleasant.

[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2015/03/12...

I've always thought it's ridiculously expensive, but at least the toilets are clean.

This is actually a giant pet-peeve of mine and that is how Americans in particular (and some other western countries) treat public or publicly accessible toilets (malls, stores, theaters, rest stops, gas stations).

Basically, at least in men's restrooms, they destroy them.

The #1 most common issue is aholes that pee standing up in the toilet. My fiction is they're embarrassed to show their junk so they use a stall. They don't lift the seat and they pee all over it. Once in a while I see someone use the stall when all the urinals are full but more often than not there are free urinals but the guy still wants to pee on the toilet. Giving him the benefit of the doubt he doesn't pick up the seat because he doesn't want to touch it. But that just seems symptomatic of the "me first" American culture. Screw everyone else.

The #2 most common issue is broken stalls. The stalls in the USA are almost universally poorly designed. They have an 8 inch gap at the bottom and often are hanging from the ceiling. They are exceedingly easy to break or bend and the locks for the stalls have at most 2mm of tolerance so any bending means they don't stay open. Worse (and it happens often) is when they barely stay closed so I get in, close, lock, pull down pants, sit on toilet in my most vulnerable moment and someone else closes a door in another stall and my door opens.

The #3 most common issue is stuffing / clogging the toilet. I can't tell if people do this by accident or on purpose. There are sometimes signs up that say "please don't put non TP in the toilet". Others that say if you have to use a lot of paper please flush the toilet often.

As far as I can tell American's take this stuff for granted. That's just how it is.

But it's not! In Scandinavia and areas near by I saw immaculate public restrooms. They might have cost $0.50 but they had full floor to ceiling doors with sturdy walls. Some even had their own private individual sink.

Japan public restrooms also almost always have doors that at least go all the way to the floor and usually aren't destroyed like USA ones. Subway restrooms in Japan in general are not the cleanest but they are usually functional which is not true, at least in my experience, of many USA public restrooms.

As for #1 I wish someone like Adam Sandberg would figure out a comic meme that made it un-macho for men to pee in stalls. I guess I assume if it was funny enough and popular enough then it would be more embarrassing to pee on a toilet than use the urinal and that would fix #1.

I have no idea how to fix #2 or #3 though.