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D.C.-area startup wants to solve the public bathroom problem

washingtonian.com

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Re: D.C.-area startup wants to solve the public bathroom problem

#31

Post by teddyh »

RHSeeger wrote: post #21
eyelidlessness wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m tired of people being denied basic and non-scarce resources because some people presuppose they’re yucky (even while making people yucky with those presuppositions). If we’re banning anyone from public services, I’d start with those who want to deny those services to people who most need them, in the way most likely to reinforce their biases by denying them access.

From my point of view, it's not about being "yucky", it's about ruining it for others. If a bathroom is provided, and you convert it to a state that it cannot reasonably be used by others, then you don't get to use the next one. If free food is provided for people and you come in and take it all to sell it elsewhere, then you don't get to partake anymore. There is no way to provide things in a way that people cannot…

The only acceptable short-term solution I can think of at the moment is simply to increase the cleaning until the bathrooms are always acceptable. There are some things which could be done to turn this from prohibitively expensive to simply very expensive one: One idea mentioned in the article is to turn a tradidional timer-based activity to a level-based trigger; i.e. if you have two bathrooms at the same location, and a reporting function so that every time someone sees an unacceptable bathroom, it is promptly cleaned while the other bathroom provides redundancy. This way, it only gets cleaned when necessary instead of periodically.

This is, of course, only papering over the problem in the short run. Which is why the real solution must be to improve society.

Ostracizing people who behave badly will only make society worse.

Re: D.C.-area startup wants to solve the public bathroom problem

#32

Post by rdtwo »

xyzzy123 wrote: post #15
bparsons wrote: post #5

Every six months, some startup guy invents public transit, or some other amenity that has existed for over a 100 years.

A lot of amenities "worked" before because of aggressive social norm enforcement. For example, people experiencing persistent mental health issues would literally be locked up "for the common good". I think what we are seeing is people trying to use technology to replace earlier (primarily social) technologies of control like shaming, religious instruction, tighter communities, aggressive policing etc. It's not the a…

Yeah everyone is just trying to thread the needle off social Justice by using technology discriminate in ways that are not socially acceptable in highly liberal areas.

Re: D.C.-area startup wants to solve the public bathroom problem

#34

Post by rdtwo »

eru wrote: post #10
bparsons wrote: post #5

Every six months, some startup guy invents public transit, or some other amenity that has existed for over a 100 years.

Paid public toilets are banned in large parts of the US.

Yeah it’s unfortunate, post covid a lot of previously accessible bathrooms are no longer available and with no public options is a huge inconvenience

Re: D.C.-area startup wants to solve the public bathroom problem

#35

Post by BitwiseFool »

teddyh wrote: post #11
MonkeyMalarky wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously though, accountability is the missing thing. If getting banned for consistently making a mess is what it takes to get public bathrooms back, then so be it. There's no excuse for the shit I've seen. I'm tired of being denied amenities because of other peoples' degenerate behaviour.

Some people think that a dictatorship is OK as long as the trains all run on time. The right way to solve the problem is not to harden the gatekeeping, but to improve society so that gatekeeping becomes unnecessary. But that’s hard, and has no obvious point where someone can extract money.

>"but to improve society so that gatekeeping becomes unnecessary."

I understand the sentiment but I ultimately find such a stance unhelpful and counterproductive because it is essentially saying the problems we face would go away if we only just created a utopia. Like, what's stopping us?

Trying to create better public restrooms with a new system seems far more achievable than implementing a new socioeconomic system where no one feels like trashing public bathrooms and common areas.

Re: D.C.-area startup wants to solve the public bathroom problem

#36

Post by solatic »

teddyh wrote: post #11
MonkeyMalarky wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously though, accountability is the missing thing. If getting banned for consistently making a mess is what it takes to get public bathrooms back, then so be it. There's no excuse for the shit I've seen. I'm tired of being denied amenities because of other peoples' degenerate behaviour.

Some people think that a dictatorship is OK as long as the trains all run on time. The right way to solve the problem is not to harden the gatekeeping, but to improve society so that gatekeeping becomes unnecessary. But that’s hard, and has no obvious point where someone can extract money.

> gatekeeping becomes unnecessary

This is pure fantasy. Society will always need prisons. Sure, there is much that society can and ought to do in order to reduce what may be judged as tragic or unnecessary incarcerations, but the incarceration rate will never be literally zero. Having prisons doesn't make society a "dictatorship".

Re: D.C.-area startup wants to solve the public bathroom problem

#37

Post by imgabe »

I don't know why cities don't offer a tax break to businesses to make their bathrooms publicly available. Make it enough that they can hire an extra employee to make sure there's someone to check the bathroom periodically and do some random checks to make sure businesses aren't cheating. It would have to be cheaper than operating separate public bathrooms.

I live in Hong Kong and am still a little amazed at the ubiquitous, free, clean public restrooms. They're not luxurious usually, but they're available and never a disaster. As far as I can tell, the city employs a pretty large staff to check and clean them throughout the day. But then there's also no massive homeless and drug problem like there is in the US.

Re: D.C.-area startup wants to solve the public bathroom problem

#39

Post by timuralp »

eyelidlessness wrote: post #14

> QR code Um, solve the public restrooms problem for whom? Granted I’ve been living far from DC for 20 years, but I spent a large chunk of this summer there. Access to public restrooms was the same as it is here in Seattle: only a problem if you’re a street critter. People who can scan QR codes already have plenty of access to restrooms, they just need to at least suggest they’ll buy something. Homeless people and pe…

As a Seattle dweller and an active person, finding a bathroom during a long run or a bike ride is difficult. There are large swaths of the city with no bathrooms. In commercial areas, having to meander through a store to use a restroom is bad for the person trying to use it and the other store customers. Seattle is failing in this regard for all its citizens, not just "street critters".

Agreed that everyone should have access to functional bathrooms and scanning QR codes to do so is silly.

Re: D.C.-area startup wants to solve the public bathroom problem

#40

Post by vsskanth »

I spent a lot of time traveling in Europe and the public toilets were top notch and clean.

The big difference ? I usually had to pay a nominal amount - 1 euro, to use it. Totally worth it IMO.

Although I found it odd they sometimes had a person with a white lab coat outside. Why the lab coat ?

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