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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

#71

Post by [deleted] »

hot_gril wrote: post #61
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…

> only a problem if you’re a street critter In parts of the Bay Area, sometimes you can't find a restroom no matter who you are. The UC Berkeley campus during school breaks is one such place. The campus has 0, and the businesses in the surrounding city have very few restrooms, even for paying customers. The subway has restrooms, but they're nearly always closed. You pretty much have to go to a sit-down restaurant (go…

[deleted]

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

#72

Post by baron816 »

MonkeyMalarky wrote: post #7
teddyh wrote: post #3

> User IDs are part of Throne’s accountability system: After you use a restroom, you’re asked to rate its cleanliness. Meanwhile, each user gets a “Throne score,” similar to Uber, and repeat offenders who abuse the restroom will be blocked. Weight sensors also track if someone’s been in the bathroom too long. “Very few people create issues in [public] bathrooms, don’t respect that amenity, and then ruin it for the ma…

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.

This is a good summary for what it’s like to live in SF. There are lots of people around who are completely immune from any accountability and thus treat the whole city as a literal public toilet (and land fill).

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

#73

Post by derefr »

teddyh wrote: post #26
ravel-bar-foo wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the options to "improve society" so people don't make a mess in shared bathrooms? PSAs? Public shaming? Collateral put down to use bathrooms? Do you have any better and specific ideas? I can't think of much more gentle and more likely to motivate people to change behavior than a public accountability system, although it is regrettable that it must be run through a for-profit entity and look like a social cre…

Who makes a mess? People who don’t care, or who hate other people. How do we, as a society, make less of those? By investing in social programs, getting people out of poverty and drugs, civic education. Increasing the minimum wage. Eliminating wage theft. UBI. Will any of these work? I don’t know. But this is the way. Not stricter and stricter gatekeeping.

People who have all the privileges in the world still do horrible things to bathrooms. Ask any janitor working in a corporate office building.

People who have nothing have no reason to care what others think; but people who have everything, and who never experience consequences for what they do, can be just as detached.

Also, if you think about it, this service is fundamentally not meant to serve (or rather, avoid serving) the sorts of people you're picturing. These washrooms likely aren't intended to be placed in low-economic-class areas of cities. Homeless/drug addicts/etc aren't the problem they're intending to filter out. (Why not? Because those groups of people are used to being cronically un-bathroomed, and so have become inured to just finding a corner outside to do their business. See: San Francisco. When things like open port-a-potties are placed in these areas, the homeless ignore those and continue to do what they do.)

Instead, I imagine that these bathrooms would be placed in generally bougie areas – the article cited public parks, but I imagine a major case would be "near food trucks in business districts." And the group they're trying to restrict access to, are "rich assholes who think society exists to serve them, and they owe nothing back."

Consider, after all, the premise: you scan a QR code on your smartphone in order to get access. Who even has a smartphone with an active data plan? Not homeless people. This service is designed to serve exactly the same target audience as e.g. e-bikes/e-scooter rental services.

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

#74

Post by hot_gril »

mxwsn wrote: post #4

From listening to a podcast or two, my impression is that the Public Bathroom Problem is an economic one. There were many paid public bathrooms in the past in the US, but they were deemed sexist and banned. Then cities didn't want to foot the bill, so they closed many of them. What's this startups' business model?

Price fixing, with price set to 0, and no subsidy. Yep.

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

#77

Post by slumpt_ »

baron816 wrote: post #72
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.

This is a good summary for what it’s like to live in SF. There are lots of people around who are completely immune from any accountability and thus treat the whole city as a literal public toilet (and land fill).

Such is the consequence of a housing crisis and the downstream homelessness, despair, and of course mental illness.

Don't give someone a roof and a toilet and they may just find any old place to go!

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

#78

Post by Teever »

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.

Dude, I've seen disgusting messes in work bathrooms where everyone is well paid and free from the kinds of stresses and destitution that you're suggesting are the sole cause of this kind of behavior.

Hell, I've seen a university professor walk out of a public bathroom without washing his hands after taking a shit.

To be completely blunt people are fucking animals and many of them do these kinds of disgusting things in private bathrooms because they can do it with impunity. They don't care about other people and they revel in knowing that their disgusting behaviour is detrimental to the rest of us.

Suggesting that we need to raise society up to some post-scarcity Star Trek utopia where all people are paragons of humanity before we can have clean public bathrooms is absurd.

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

#80

Post by DubiousPusher »

creato wrote: post #67
DubiousPusher wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. Creating a law which is impossible for some portion of the public to comply with is always wrong.

If you can’t comply with the law that says you can’t urinate or defecate in public, you should be institutionalized somehow (drug treatment, mental health treatment).

A sane person cam struggle to find a place to use the bathroom in downtown Seattle. I've had to hold it myself from Cherry street to the Issaquah Transit Center for lack of a place to go in-between. The facilities at Tibbets Creek Park have been quite a relief on more than one occasion. Though that's an expensive trip for someone who doesn't have much money. And quite out of the way for anyone not living in the suburbs.

And in case you didn't know, America gutted public mental health over the past 50 odd years.

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