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San Francisco is spending $1.7M on one public toilet

sfchronicle.com

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Re: San Francisco is spending $1.7M on one public toilet

#331

Post by didibus »

aliqot wrote: post #174
glacials wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I've only visited San Francisco, but I think one thing to consider is actually that it's a really small city with just too much going for its size.

It's only 46 square mile and has over 800k inhabitants. It's the second densest city after New York.

The surrounding Bay area adds 6.7 million more people, a large amount of who regularly go into the city for entertainment or work. I think it's an estimated 160k additional people that come in to the city per day from the outer areas. And there is an average of 131k tourist in the city each day as well.

So you have almost 1.1 million people in a 46 square mile area.

The city is fully built as well, there's no lots left, everything has a building on it with no room to grow, nowhere to expand out.

You could only expand up, but that would require destroying and rebuilding. The landscape is also all hills and valleys, huge slopes, it's not the easiest to work around.

The mayor is born and raised and still lives in San Francisco.

All in all, I just think running a city like that, of that size and yet so populous, that also has so much wealth at the top, a relatively strong middle, but also large lows, it's got a lot of all classes of things, it's just a harder problem because of the sheer scale and density of it all.

Seattle is twice the size at 84 square mile, and has a smaller population at 740k. The city has developed more recently as well, and a lot of the newer development are big tall skyscraper, there's still a little bit of building too small in some places, but it still hasn't reached anywhere the sheer density of San Francisco.

Re: San Francisco is spending $1.7M on one public toilet

#332

Post by Forgeties79 »

glacials wrote: post #137
aliqot wrote: post #82

Earlier 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.

What’s that old onion headline? “78% of Americans support public transit for everyone else”?

Re: San Francisco is spending $1.7M on one public toilet

#333

Post by Arrath »

melony wrote: post #225
hotpotamus wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

> The public toilet will be built by union workers who will “earn a living wage and benefits,” San Francisco doesn't owe anything to the tradespeople. When you share a border with Mexico, there is absolutely no reason not to outsource. Almost every city that can rapidly scale up infrastructure have access to some type of cheap labour. The rapid construction in the middle east and asia didn't happen by using union lab…

No post body was provided.

Re: San Francisco is spending $1.7M on one public toilet

#334

Post by colpabar »

melony wrote: post #225
hotpotamus wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

> The public toilet will be built by union workers who will “earn a living wage and benefits,” San Francisco doesn't owe anything to the tradespeople. When you share a border with Mexico, there is absolutely no reason not to outsource. Almost every city that can rapidly scale up infrastructure have access to some type of cheap labour. The rapid construction in the middle east and asia didn't happen by using union lab…

Agreed. They should honestly just use prison labor.

Re: San Francisco is spending $1.7M on one public toilet

#335

Post by mattnewton »

mrits wrote: post #272
lr4444lr wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I think I'd take my chances with the sidewalk than risk a startups new self cleaning censor. Literally a shit storm

It's not some startups self cleaning sensor, this is old technology that is in several other cities without attendants, and is basically idiot proof. The attendant hopefully makes it american-idiot proof too.

Re: San Francisco is spending $1.7M on one public toilet

#336

Post by strikelaserclaw »

misiti3780 wrote: post #281

If you're NOT super rich and work in tech (aka can leave), I do not know how you sleep at night paying those ridiculous taxes knowing they are getting pissed away on projects like this.

there are a lot of people who basically save nothing but they don't think about tomorrow.

Re: San Francisco is spending $1.7M on one public toilet

#337

Post by ryandrake »

maeln wrote: post #241
tristor wrote: post #53

Paris has automatically self-cleaning public toilets all around and they cost around $200k each to build and install. There’s no way this is a remotely reasonable cost and is clearly a grift.

If you read the article, the main reason why it cost so much is not because of the cost of the toilet and the installation per-se, but because there is many, many red tape around doing anything in SF. So it is not necessarily a "grift" ( although many are profiting from it and are probably more than happy about the situation being the way it is ) but the result of decades of laws to regulate public work and spending…

I’d love to see an itemized break down of “red tape” that actually adds up to $1.7M. We too often accept officials obfuscating costs on these projects into opaque buckets like “studies” and “reviews”. “We’ll of course it’s expensive! It all goes to uh… RED TAPE! Yea that’s where it goes obviously!”

Re: San Francisco is spending $1.7M on one public toilet

#338

Post by savingsPossible »

aliqot wrote: post #296
TeeMassive wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Replace "right" with "those who doesn't want to do the right thing" and most political speech kinda makes more sense. The Left/Right split of viewing politics is a false dichotomy that made sense only about a century after the French Revolution, in France.

>Replace "right" with "those who doesn't want to do the right thing" and most political speech kinda makes more sense. >The Left/Right split of viewing politics is a false dichotomy that made sense only about a century after the French Revolution, in France. I don't think that's a fair characterization. I don't think people affiliate with a certain party seeking to "not do the right thing". Saying it is a false dicho…

It is not meant (I'd guess) as a characterization for people, but as a way to explain/read the words left and right, especially when one is criticizing the right

(i.e.: right is used mostly as a synonym for bad, for some people)

Re: San Francisco is spending $1.7M on one public toilet

#339

Post by jayzalowitz »

epistasis wrote: post #152
aliqot wrote: post #82

Earlier 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.

Here's a quote of the city planners' process to remove parking from in front of bus stops, a sevev year effort worn bearing doe every single stop: > We can't just paint 1,200 curbs, it's going to be a longer process. https://twitter.com/aarieff/status/1582408966163660802?s=46&... This is the method for any change. SF thinks it peaked in the 80s or 90s and any change requires community consensus lest the 50 people tha…

This one is stupid, you can walk in between cars.

Re: San Francisco is spending $1.7M on one public toilet

#340

Post by stephencoyner »

hot_gril wrote: post #228

I've lived and worked in SF. Thankful that I'll probably never have another work-related reason to go back. SF is marked deprecated in my eyes.

It’s easy to pile onto articles that highlight some of the city’s mismanagement, but San Francisco is one of the most naturally beautiful places in the country. If you’re out on the west side by Golden Gate Park, Baker Beach or the Presidio it feels like you’re in a nature movie.

Even with all of its problems, I will always love that city.

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