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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

#121

Post by imgabe »

DubiousPusher wrote: post #83
imgabe wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Train/Bus stations, shopping malls, libraries, homeless shelters, fast food restaurants, gas stations, hotel lobbies, churches The destitute do also patronize businesses as well from time to time. You do nobody any favors by infantilizing them. Grown adults can find a place to relieve themselves without fouling the public space. If not, perhaps they need to be placed in a facility where they can receive the care and…

I'm not sure what it's like where you live but where I live it's like this. Train/Bus stations don't have bathrooms. Homeless shelters and the churches which do provide services make you leave during the day and do not let people back in under any circumstances until around 5 PM. Fast food restaurants, gas stations and hotel lobbies all lock their bathrooms and allow access to patrons only. Which leaves shopping mall…

Train stations / bus terminals in major cities absolutely do have bathrooms. Union Station in DC, Grand Central / Penn Station in New York, similar stations in other cities, all have bathrooms. They’re usually open 24/7 too.

Even places with locks on the bathrooms will usually let people use them if they ask. It is not unreasonable to imagine someone, no matter how destitute, getting something off the dollar menu at McDonald’s. Many do. Many certainly have no trouble finding enough money for drugs or alcohol so it’s not unreasonable to expect they can get a fast food meal and use the bathroom.

In the absolute worst case scenario, find a secluded place in a park and dig a hole, or get a plastic bag and throw it away. There’s no excuse for leaving feces on the sidewalk.

Sorry, but “don’t shit in the common area” has been table stakes for participating in human society since the beginning of time. Even in a hunter gatherer society someone taking a dump next to the campfire would be rightly ostracized.

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

#122

Post by sdwr »

eurasiantiger wrote: post #99
belorn wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The system could hook into the medical records if we wanted to hear the excuses. The stereotype of old people going to the bathroom with a news paper exist for reasons, and it not because the toilet is such a soft chair to sit for 15-30 minutes. The toilet could include sensors for how soft or hard the stool is, and detect bacteria, in which case it could just add it to the users profile. Sticky and stinky urine, in…

Have you noticed yourself sliding into fascist type thinking?

First they came for the long poopers, and I did not speak out...

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

#123

Post by derefr »

DubiousPusher wrote: post #86
derefr wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone still has to clean the horrible mess; and that costs money (a lot of money, in the case where someone has created what's basically a biohazard by "writing in brown pen" on the walls); and companies / municipalities don't want to pay that money... which leads to the current situation, where there are basically no public bathrooms. "Just accepting it" is something individuals might do, but it's not something ra…

Human civilization survived open sewers, massive public latrines and unseperated water supply and waste. Not something I'd like to go back to by any means. But with modern knowledge and technology, and call me crazy if you like, I believe we can sanitize a few dozen poop disasters a day without bringing on a typhoid plague or breaking the bank.

The more commonplace and universal something is, the less of a big deal people will feel it is to deal with. And vice versa.

The very fact that we don’t all live in filth now, means that you have to pay a high premium to get someone to choose to be the person whose job constantly exposes them to it.

See also: the profitability of electronics recycling (i.e. picking through piles of scrap for base metal to melt) in the developing vs. developed world. When people live in areas with mounds of trash piled all around them, they’ll dig through that trash for Pennie’s, because they already do thing like shoveling it out of the way every day. When people live in a nice house in a clean city, though, you’ll have to pay them a lot more to touch a scrap heap.

(Or, to put that another way: it’s “but I might get tetanus!” vs. “My base risk of getting tetanus is so high that this job won’t increase my risk by much in relative terms… so sure, why not.”)

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

#124

Post by belorn »

sdwr wrote: post #122
eurasiantiger wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you noticed yourself sliding into fascist type thinking?

First they came for the long poopers, and I did not speak out...

Give it a few decades and the probability of becoming one goes up significant.

If anyone here is an Terry Pratchett fan, there is this scene with Cohen the Barbarian. The quote goes: the three best things in life are hot water, good dentishtry and shoft lavatory paper. Its a joke with a bit of truth to it. Good teeth and good bowel movements are luxury objects that people tend to only notice when they lost them.

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

#125

Post by atoav »

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…

Also: we could have actual (clean) public restrooms everywhere if we were willing to put in the resources.

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

#126

Post by maxbond »

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?

> [T]hey were deemed sexist and banned

To expand on this, they were specifically coin operated _bathroom stalls_ - they didn't charge for _urinals_, and this put a disproportionate burden on women were charged for number one and number two.

Here's a Lockpicking Lawyer where he picks & demonstrates the coin operated lock: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0foSHWP7rc

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

#127

Post by DubiousPusher »

derefr wrote: post #123
DubiousPusher wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Human civilization survived open sewers, massive public latrines and unseperated water supply and waste. Not something I'd like to go back to by any means. But with modern knowledge and technology, and call me crazy if you like, I believe we can sanitize a few dozen poop disasters a day without bringing on a typhoid plague or breaking the bank.

The more commonplace and universal something is, the less of a big deal people will feel it is to deal with. And vice versa. The very fact that we don’t all live in filth now, means that you have to pay a high premium to get someone to choose to be the person whose job constantly exposes them to it. See also: the profitability of electronics recycling (i.e. picking through piles of scrap for base metal to melt) in th…

My job for a long time involved digging up people's septic tanks and fixing them. I know other people who pump them for a living. I know others who buy the waste and dry it. And people of all stripes buy it after it's treated and mixed with mulch and put it on their lawn. This problem is much more minor than you think. Lots of us are not afraid of poop.

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

#128

Post by atoav »

deltasevennine wrote: post #94
slumpt_ wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Nah even the dog walkers here don't give a shit. The dogs piss and shit all over the entire city and the rich SF owners don't care.

This is what living in a society where winning more than the next person is the only thing that counts will give you. Why should anybody fulfill their part of the unspoken contract with the rest of society, if solidarity only goes one way?

If people shall care about collective goods, there needs to be an actual collective spirit first. Places where this type of public infrastructure actually works are also places where people realized that you can't create a good society by letting the rich hoard their wealth and build walls while the homeless are beaten instead of helped.

SF is a truly dystopian place in a certain sense.

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

#130

Post by [deleted] »

BitwiseFool wrote: post #35
teddyh wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[deleted]
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