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San Francisco is spending $1.7M on one public toilet
171–180 of 832 posts
Re: San Francisco is spending $1.7M on one public toilet
#172I would never step foot into a public SF toliet. Last time I went in there the homeless shit all over the floor and toliet and walls. I went in and nearly threw up. A homeless person pointed and laughed at me. Fuck that.
For years I felt this way. But with a 3 year old child you go into lots of public toilets all over the city. Nearly all toilets near playgrounds for children have been fine. Basic but fine.
Thinking through this more. SF Parks and Recs managed toilets have all been fine from a sample size of about 20 uniques and maybe 80 visits. About 75% of those visits are weekend days in the mornings.
Re: San Francisco is spending $1.7M on one public toilet
#173Related: $2M bathroom in New York https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfAE5emMCs8
Re: San Francisco is spending $1.7M on one public toilet
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
Red tape and nimbyism is hard to imagine from what I see of SFO in books, it seems like the most anti-diversity thing you can do. Can anybody from SFO relate their experience? Hard to tell these days what is editorial bias or sensationalism and what is true.
Born and raised in SF. NIMBYism is indeed a huge problem. It’s the hidden underbelly of a city with otherwise modern and diverse thinking. I’ve since moved to Seattle and it’s crazy to see shit can actually get done here.
Thanks for the explanation. I'm a simple kind of person in a small town, so to us here this is all kind of crazy. Is a city as big as SFO still governed by politicians who live in it, or at that size does local government take people from other areas? I always read a lot about SFO as being on the cutting edge of progressive initiatives usually toward humane goals. Is this common?
This gives everything I've been told or heard about SFO somewhat of a 'superficial' veneer (forgive me for lack of better words, I do not mean offense) based on the assumption that a city governed by its constituents ought to resemble them, but I'm seeing stuff like this where the words and intentions are right, but the actions and results are incongruent. Is this a mismatch between the politicians and residents or is this a "yes, but do it over there" thing?
p.s. congrats on the move! in your opinion, what makes Seattle different? I've been there before, it was a beautiful and welcoming experience. People are friendly like here in the sticks, but there's just a lot more folks.
Re: San Francisco is spending $1.7M on one public toilet
#175“the committee evaluates each project’s design, scale and massing for accessibility, safety and aesthetic merit.” The review process “ensures that each project’s design is appropriate to its context in the urban environment, and that structures of the highest design quality reflect their civic stature.” This is a perfect example of why you codify requirements and any review for permitting is as objective as possible.…
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Re: San Francisco is spending $1.7M on one public toilet
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
Public toilets aren't really for you, they're for the people who have nowhere else.
It's shocking that this is a normal opinion. Taipei is a much bigger city than SF. There are public restrooms everywhere. Every single metro station has clean, indoor restrooms. Not just "available" restrooms, I mean clean, like cleaner than most gas station restrooms in the US. Parks also have restrooms. Failing that, you can probably find a private one at 7/11. I really can't believe how shitty major US cities are,…
I'm not saying "every public bathroom is for homeless people". I'm saying in San Francisco that is the problem being addressed. I have traveled to many countries with public toilets that do not have these issues, I am aware of what is possible.
Re: San Francisco is spending $1.7M on one public toilet
#177I do not believe this type of public theft is due to incompetence, I believe it is corruption and grift
> I do not believe this type of public theft is due to incompetence, I believe it is corruption and grift
A lot of the money is presumably going into the extremely long public comment process mentioned in the article that building any sort of public works take in the US and which usually ends up resulting in paying to have projects redesigned multiple times when anyone complains. That seems more like incompetence or a failure in the political process than corruption/grift to me. Really the only people that benefit are the planners who end up redesigning stuff multiple times (but who probably don't necessarily really want to have to do that) and the NIMBYs who are able to effectively destroy any project if they're persistent and vocal enough. The politicians or local government officials don't really benefit because their projects end up getting effectively killed. While it's tempting to assume everything is due to intentional corruption, it's actually hard to point to anyone who's really successfully pulling off a "grift" here.
Actually building anything also costs more in the US than pretty much anywhere else, which could be attributed to "grift" but it's so diffuse and systemic that it also seems to fall under "incompetence" as a result of the complete lack of any process that successfully keeps the prices in check or looks at how other countries are doing things better.
Also, it seems like even other countries that have more outright bribery are more successful at actually getting stuff like this built than the US, so even if corruption is a factor it might not even be the biggest problem.
Re: San Francisco is spending $1.7M on one public toilet
#178In contrast the tiny city of Zürich Switzerland has 106 public toilet facilities. [1] Some are staffed, some cost money to use and some are open 247. Does my tax money pay for this, yes, I have used them and I am glad they exist. The maintenance of these 106 facilities cost around 6,895,000 CHF (~USD) per year. Around 40% of that is staffing costs and 23% is rent to 3rd parties. Yearly investment in upgrades etc. is…
SF has something like 67 public toilets, 49 of them staffed, according to an article written two years ago. And the population of the city is about 50% greater than Zürich.
Re: San Francisco is spending $1.7M on one public toilet
#179Quoted post unavailable.
Kinda sounds like the spending is stupid, not the taxation.
Re: San Francisco is spending $1.7M on one public toilet
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
We have an access road that was sized for utility trucks. We had to widen it slightly because of obscure California regulations. Widening it didn’t cost $1.7M. However, the cost per linear foot was within a factor of two of buying a line of Tesla Model 3s. This is in an unincorporated (rural) area, on a farm. The work lasted one rainstorm before needing extensive repairs. I’m completely unsurprised that building a hu…
Too many bureaucrats and construction profiteers, not enough good laborers.
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