
Subway station toilets: a surprisingly accurate indicator of urban civilisation - bane
http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/apr/10/subway-station-toilets-indicator-urban-civilisation
======
anigbrowl
Sad fact in San Francisco was that the public toilets in BART stations were
noisome pits of filth that you would avoid going into unless you were truly
desperate. After September 11 2001 the underground ones were closed for
'security reasons' \- presumably because a bomb would do much worse structural
damage - and there's little pressure to re-open them.

I think part of the problem in the Bay Area is that BART runs across multiple
counties and there's an awful lot of political buck-passing as a result.
Although it has improved in recent years, I still hate riding it and I hate
how crappy BART stations feel. In fairness they have tried to mitigate the
restroom problem by setting up decent public toilets on the streets near the
entrances, but those are still a bit sketchy.

By contrast, when I visit Los Angeles I _enjoy_ riding the subway. It's clean,
the signage is excellent, they don't fill up the speakers with random
unhelpful public service announcements every 30 seconds, and there's a general
air of competence.

~~~
x0x0
Now people just use the fucking bart elevators.

Seriously. Puddles of standing piss in the elevators at 24th st bart when I
had to use them because I was on crutches.

Disgusting doesn't even begin to cover it.

~~~
mc32
The lifts are awful. The escalators are just as bad. Apparently the nastiness
the escalator maintenance crew deals with is pretty fetid stuff [1]. Well
that's what you get with people who find the bottom of an escalator the
coziest place to sleep. It's a shame for both the homeless and the system. But
yeah, dont touch any surface within the system unless you're prepared to wash
thoroughly

[1][http://m.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Human-waste-shuts-
down-B...](http://m.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Human-waste-shuts-down-BART-
escalators-3735981.php)

------
swang
All _underground_ stations on the BART system don't have any bathrooms
available to the general public.

I learned this (almost) the hard way when I needed to use the restroom and got
off at Lake Merritt (or whichever underground station was in the East Bay) and
asked the BART attendant where the restroom was. He told me unfortunately that
they were not available to the public but then took pity on me by allowing me
to use the employee restroom. I went in and saw what was probably the cleanest
toilet I have seen in such a public place.

In regards to the article, I would say that Asian countries (sans China) are
more free to allow public restrooms because culturally it is bad mannered to
leave a toilet more dirty than you left it since they are more considerate of
other's wellbeing (of not having to enter a dirty toilet). I would say it's
impossible here in the States since most people won't give a second thought to
peeing on the seat and leaving a turd smeared on the wall.

Finally, Airpnp is similar (if not the same to) Have2P, an app that YP/ATT
made using it's business data back in ~2009. Not maintained anymore though.

Wow, I wrote a lot about peeing and toilets.

------
ghshephard
The Singapore MRT and Bus System was one of the primary reasons inspiring me
to relocate to Singapore. I used to live at Lake Merrit in Oakland on 17th,
from 1996-1997, used the Bart almost every day - I don't recall ever using the
public washrooms - don't recall how available they were.

I've used them several times in Singapore, and 90% of the time they've been
excellent - the other 10% of the time they were just heavily trafficked, but
not "Dirty" \- just puddles of water near the sinks, lots of paper towels in
the garbage.

I do recall reading a _front page story_ in the Straits Times about how the
MRT had been hiring _cleaning consultants_ to improve their already ridiculous
(by my estimate) high levels of cleanliness.

I would love someone to do an analysis of all the horrible failures in San
Francisco/Transit and compare them to Singapore, so we can understand why the
heck one is doing so well, and the other one is so abysmal.

~~~
ozmbie
Singapore's public restrooms are clean because they can afford to hire armies
of 60 year old cleaners with no minimum wage.

I'd argue they are actually TOO clean. Because half the time I want to use
them, they are being cleaned! It's a bunch of busywork to employee the
otherwise unemployable. They clean bathrooms and sweep up leaves over and over
again.

~~~
rwmj
I'm having a hard time understanding what's bad about this. If they are
otherwise unemployable, then it's good that they are doing this isn't it?

~~~
lmm
If they're not doing anything actually productive, wouldn't it be better to
pay them the money and let them spend the time on something they enjoy?

~~~
otterley
Cleaning toilets isn't productive labor?

~~~
lmm
Not if they're already cleaned plenty often enough and it's just busy-work,
which was what I understood the parent comment to be claiming.

------
autarch
I was _not_ impressed by the toilets in the Tokyo city rail system. The one or
two I tried to use were not very clean, though maybe not quite as gross as
some toilets I've seen in the US.

The nicest public toilets I've been are the toilets in the Taipei airport,
which are uniformly fairly clean and functional. Narita airport is also quite
nice.

~~~
rocky1138
Which Taipei airport: Songshan or Taoyuan?

~~~
autarch
Taoyuan

------
crdoconnor
In case anybody's curious, this is the toilet in a North Korean subway
station:

[http://i.imgur.com/GbtoUO3.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/GbtoUO3.jpg)

It's filthy, but I've seen worse (and is still better than nothing at all
_cough_ London).

~~~
Symbiote
London Underground toilet map:
[https://www.tfl.gov.uk/cdn/static/cms/documents/toilets-
map....](https://www.tfl.gov.uk/cdn/static/cms/documents/toilets-map.pdf)

They are usually very clean, probably because people assume they don't exist.

~~~
lmm
Most of the central ones there are "cheating" by counting the toilets of the
attached National Rail station. Aside from that there are hardly any in the
middle. I must admit I was unaware of those at Piccadilly Circus and Green
Park though - that will come in handy.

------
jakejake
The expression "this is why we can't have nice things" comes to mind when I
think about public toilets in Chicago. There's always some idiot that wipes
shit all over the stall or vomits on the floor or blows up the toilet with an
M80.

~~~
cmurf
Humans frequently have gastric distress. With large enough volume of people,
it's not if, but when, someone is going to have an uncontained event.

I once thought about how the world would be different if we were like rodents
and essentially lacked bladder and sphincter control, if we'd have to all wear
diapers all the time (think of the landfill waste so probably we'd have
figured out something else but what) and what ballgames would be like.
Probably holes in the seats. Because how else could we have a functioning
society? We'd actually probably be a lot better at sewage control because
otherwise it'd always be everywhere.

~~~
vacri
There's still the matter of cleaning up after yourself. The toilet doesn't
have to sparkle like an advert, it just needs to be usable by the next person.
I have gastric distress as often as the next person, but I'm going to clean up
a seat that I make filthy.

~~~
cmurf
Yeah most people don't do that. They don't care that someone else has to clean
up after them. Happens all the time in many other contexts of pure greed and
self-interest and simply not getting caught and told off about how they're
pissing in the pool.

Seriously, people need a lot more Pei Mei in their life.

------
xasos
In Hamburg, Germany, it's pretty popular to pee on walls. Since most people
don't want to pay to use the restroom, they resort to peeing on walls outdoor.
[1]

I wonder what the average maintenance cost is for a public bathroom. May be a
good cost to make the city a bit more pleasant.

[1]
[http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2015/03/12...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2015/03/12/when-
peeing-in-public-in-this-german-city-beware-walls-that-pee-back/)

~~~
cmurf
Denver is discussing this now. The only thing on the table so far are the
self-contained toilets. There's no discussion of having a sort of self
cleaning wall. I mean why not, people do that already and in the wrong place
and it's not self-cleaning? And by people, I mean men. Takes a desperate woman
to take a leak in public, but the two I've seen do it? They had the bravery,
courtesy, and drunkenness to do it in the street gutter. I have never seen a
man do that.

And then what about the public urinals in Amsterdam? Not under discussion in
Denver either. It is admittedly sexist, but it's also mainly a dude problem.

------
aprdm
I recently went to Tokyo and to London. Tokyo is a really great example, there
are nice, clean, free and tech toilets everywhere. While in London I couldn't
find many station equipped with toilets.

------
pavlov
Here in Finland public toilets at stations and malls tend to cost 1 € (about
$1.05 US).

I've always thought it's ridiculously expensive, but at least the toilets are
clean.

------
greggman
Caution, entering rant mode...

This is actually a giant pet-peeve of mine and that is how Americans in
particular (and some other western countries) treat public or publicly
accessible toilets (malls, stores, theaters, rest stops, gas stations).

Basically, at least in men's restrooms, they destroy them.

The #1 most common issue is aholes that pee standing up in the toilet. My
fiction is they're embarrassed to show their junk so they use a stall. They
don't lift the seat and they pee all over it. Once in a while I see someone
use the stall when all the urinals are full but more often than not there are
free urinals but the guy still wants to pee on the toilet. Giving him the
benefit of the doubt he doesn't pick up the seat because he doesn't want to
touch it. But that just seems symptomatic of the "me first" American culture.
Screw everyone else.

The #2 most common issue is broken stalls. The stalls in the USA are almost
universally poorly designed. They have an 8 inch gap at the bottom and often
are hanging from the ceiling. They are exceedingly easy to break or bend and
the locks for the stalls have at most 2mm of tolerance so any bending means
they don't stay open. Worse (and it happens often) is when they barely stay
closed so I get in, close, lock, pull down pants, sit on toilet in my most
vulnerable moment and someone else closes a door in another stall and my door
opens.

The #3 most common issue is stuffing / clogging the toilet. I can't tell if
people do this by accident or on purpose. There are sometimes signs up that
say "please don't put non TP in the toilet". Others that say if you have to
use a lot of paper please flush the toilet often.

As far as I can tell American's take this stuff for granted. That's just how
it is.

But it's not! In Scandinavia and areas near by I saw immaculate public
restrooms. They might have cost $0.50 but they had full floor to ceiling doors
with sturdy walls. Some even had their own private individual sink.

Japan public restrooms also almost always have doors that at least go all the
way to the floor and usually aren't destroyed like USA ones. Subway restrooms
in Japan in general are not the cleanest but they are usually functional which
is not true, at least in my experience, of many USA public restrooms.

As for #1 I wish someone like Adam Sandberg would figure out a comic meme that
made it un-macho for men to pee in stalls. I guess I assume if it was funny
enough and popular enough then it would be more embarrassing to pee on a
toilet than use the urinal and that would fix #1.

I have no idea how to fix #2 or #3 though.

------
cmurf
There are subway stations in NYC with toilette? Huh, lived in Manhattan 4
years and haven't seen one. I'm excluding Penn and Grand Central because they
have piles of people waiting for trains, and they have restaurants, so they'd
have to have toilets.

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contex23
There is an app for that. Paris is terrible for this, Vienna rocks (Y)

------
scarmig
Public toilets in BART stations, by contrast, are highly functional places to
shoot up.

~~~
smoyer
I ride BART when I visit San Francisco and would _NEVER_ think about entering
the restrooms! There are enough "characters" hanging out at the Powell Street
station that I tend to keep myself in public, populated areas. Are my
impressions correct?

~~~
omgbear
I didn't think BART had any restrooms, at least in SF. In the Market Subway,
they send you to the Westfield Mall at Powell.

~~~
jordanthoms
They have them in the underground stations, but my understanding is that they
have all been closed since 9/11.

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a8da6b0c91d
I'm sure it won't be popular to point out this unpleasant truth, but cruising
gays are a huge factor on this front as far as urban centers in America are
concerned. Remember Senator Larry Craig? Do you know why the police force felt
it necessary to be running sting operations in airport bathrooms? The public
restrooms by the beach in Santa Monica have huge signs on them warning about
legal repercussions for sexual activity. That's where George Michael got
arrested.

~~~
anigbrowl
Unwelcome sexual propositions are a very distant fourth on my list of worries
behind blood-covered syringes, blocked toilets, and misplaced human waste, all
of which I've had the misfortune to encounter as both a consumer and as a
cleaner when I worked in a cheap restaurant.

By contrast, telling the occasional gay dude that his advances were unwelcome
has been a very minor annoyance. I can see how it would be more
offensive/unnerving to other people, but it strikes me as much less of an
immediate health hazard.

