The funny thing is a huge number public-facing businesses in SF are already legally required to have toilets and make them available to the public, but every single one of them is supposedly in a perpetual state of "the pipe just broke an hour ago" or other such excuses 24/7.
San Francisco is spending $1.7M on one public toilet
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Re: San Francisco is spending $1.7M on one public toilet
#252Earlier 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.
Actually, the construction workers found multiple issues with the plans, and were on the hook for some of the repairs.
The profiteers were the engineers that designed the system. Each time they screwed up, they got to bill us more hours. Also, the contract with them stipulates zero liability for their incompetence.
The state licensing board should be fired for allowing that.
Also, we wanted to put in a more environmentally friendly, cheaper, and more reliable road technology (specifically, a permeable road), but the county blocked us, then made us pay to put in drainage to mitigate the effects of the obsolete thing they stipulated. Both the mandated obsolete road technology and the drain design immediately failed. The state regularly uses the disallowed permeable technology in this area.
Since then, the county has approved similarly flawed designs at other sites, and the construction firm flat-out refuses to install them.
Re: San Francisco is spending $1.7M on one public toilet
#253Re: San Francisco is spending $1.7M on one public toilet
#254One of the reasons this toilet is so expensive no doubt, is that the new SF public toilets are self cleaning and will have attendants on duty to try to prevent this. The one on golden gate park and Haight closes after each visitor to spray the inside down like a dishwasher, and has an attendant on duty to make sure no one is inside while it does that (and to generally discourage people from shady stuff). It's not per…
They have to pay an attendant hourly just to be sure no one is in there while the self clean runs? Why can't it operate based on a weight sensor?
Because no startup has made an AI for that purpose yet?
Re: San Francisco is spending $1.7M on one public toilet
#255Is the SF Bay Area the worst managed "successful" economic urban area in the world ? It performs pretty badly on public transport, safety, affordability & sanitation. All its pros seem to exist despite the management, and not because of it. (Universities, Jobs, Weather, Nature) I thought Greater Seattle was badly managed, but it has been funding light rail, missing middle-housing and recently started reversing the cr…
I think calling them "progressive in name only" is a bit of a "no-true-scotsman"
There is nothing progressive about literally stopping progress on housing affordability.
Re: San Francisco is spending $1.7M on one public toilet
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
SFO is the airport, not the city. We call it SF, or San Francisco.
People in tech companies with many offices tend to call cities by the nearest airport, cause that's what the local office (or datacenter) is called.
Yes, I worked in Moutain View, AKA MTV.
And the SF office of Google is SFO. But nobody calls the city SFO.
Re: San Francisco is spending $1.7M on one public toilet
#257[deleted]
Re: San Francisco is spending $1.7M on one public toilet
#258Why is it that the deepest blue areas of the country have some of the most abject inequity and poverty? It seems that there's a fine line between compassion and enablement when it comes to the deep blue municipalities of New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, etc. Sure the rustbelt, deep south, and Appalachia are areas with similar problems and mixed politics, but they also somehow feel different.
City vs rural have different challenges for one. Cities as a whole seem to lean left but it’s unclear if the policies are to blame or if it’s just a problem of unrelated political factors (eg bussing homeless into cities from red areas to “clean up your streets”)
NYC has started bussing people to my rural area in Upstate NY because there isn't enough section 8 housing available and they're on a waiting list.
Re: San Francisco is spending $1.7M on one public toilet
#259It just me or why can't the City just put a bunch of porta potty throughout the city and have a crew with trucks that replaces/clean them on a periodic basis. This is what construction sites and community events do all the time! It's a simple model.
That would need to be approved through the same channels
Re: San Francisco is spending $1.7M on one public toilet
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
You probably don’t want to step in SF ever. FTFY.
I had Paris syndrome for SF real bad because of how it was described by people and portrayed in movies and when I finally went there it was uhh.. not somewhere I would live forever. I'm sure it's amazing if you live in the rich areas but I got an apartment in the mission which was sold to me by some of my native friends as one of the good semi-affordable areas for young professionals and it was culture shock.
All the novels and biographies I've read that make SF out as a cool bohemian wonderland were all written in the 60s/70s and even then they were lamenting about the good old days being gone. It's remarkable to see a city living so long off a reputation it earned generations ago.