Rent-a-Potties, paired with some kind of mobile app, make good business sense to me. Especially if you can get some kind of network effect / critical density mass going in a given area.
A person is out and about town, and suddenly has to go, bad. They pull out the app and find their closest Rent-a-Potty. It appears on their map with a green dot - that means the last person to use it considered it reasonably clean, a good sign. (Everyone knows that people whose usage of the Rent-a-Potty is, ahem, strongly correlated with the state transition to an orange or red dot face price hikes, or possibly even expulsion from the app as a whole, so there's good reason to leave it at least as good as you found it.)
They tap the dot, hit "Reserve", and the timer begins. A 4 digit PIN code appears on the screen, your secret incantation to the hall of the porcelain throne. These things are not cheap - $1 per minute for the first 10 minutes of reservation, $2 past that. But they're emptied every night, the sink always has hot water, and the soap is always refilled.
Some people have tried to game the system by {your deviancy here}; the company has responded with {countermeasures you're smart enough to think of here}. Some enterprising souls could theoretically {countercountermeasure}, but honestly, implementing {countercountercountermeasure} isn't a huge concern for Rent-a-Potty's C-suite, compared to the recent competition from new market entrants like Loolurker, AirPnP, and Pouber.
I've wondered if it would make sense for hotel/motel chains to offer a paid toilet service. Their locations already have a bunch of toilets (one in each guest room plus ones for the lobby and for meeting rooms) and already have cleaning people there to keep those clean.
Sell day passes that give you 24 hours access. If I were, say, going to drive from Seattle to Los Angeles I'd pay $20 to buy a pass that would let me pull into any Motel 6 along the way to use a clean bathroom.
Someone who can afford to pay $20/day for a bathroom pass is probably presentable enough that they can walk in and get permission to use the bathroom for free.
That use case is already covered by costco membership. Costco locations are nicely distributed near freeway exits across the nation. Plenty of parking, decent bathrooms, and you can get food of you need it.
95%+ of hotels/motels do not have 24 hour cleaning staff, and the guest service agents working the computer are not going to be wanting to clean bathrooms.
All those branded 80 to 120 room hotel/motels are trying to reduce the staffing outside of 7AM to 4PM, even to the point of having check in kiosks that video call you to someone in South Asia/Phillipines/South America.
Why does it suck? It's a negligible amount of money for the person using the toilet, but the revenue is enough to pay for people to maintain and clean the toilets regularly. Being able to use a clean toilet for what is essentially a rounding error in your budget at the end of the month seems like a worthwhile tradeoff.
Back in school when my allowance was 5 euros a week, even 50 cents was prohibitively expensive for me to go to the toilet. Even today I refuse to use the two euro toilets and I'm not the only person walking up, seeing the price, and turning around.
This stuff is not priced to be a reasonable convenience, but to be a better alternative to soiling yourself in public. The most insulting part is paying 2 euros to pee into a smelly urinal and getting a 50 cent discount code for the nearby fast food stand as a courtesy, because I haven't spent enough apparently.
I remember as a poor student, having to pay the equivalent of 50 cents felt like robbery. Today with a steady income I’m happy to pay a dollar, or even two, to be able to use a clean restroom.
I think the general problem is interesting: how do we price necessities when our ability to pay is so different?
The ideal answer is, of course, that we shouldn’t put prices on most necessities, and the primary reason that we do is to threaten people into demeaning jobs.
Out of curiosity, where is it a full €2? I visited various places with pay toilets in 2022, and while it was more than I'd prefer, it was still only something like 1 or 1.25
It sucks when your credit card isn't accepted and the machine won't read your coins correctly or missed one and you are thus just 10 cents short of being allowed to use the washroom and now the three people waiting behind you are just like "wtaf is taking so long".
Experienced this a while back in a shopping mall in France. Like, a mall has to be one of the most profitable places in a modern city, pretty sure they can afford to staff a couple washroom staff during business hours while everyone is pouring money into all the mall vendors.
Well, we're talking about Western Europe here. You either live there, or you're a tourist. Even if you don't have an Euro, you can just ask a random person and chances are they'll give one to you.
If that got me a reasonably clean and reasonably available location, that's money well spent.
Cleaning and maintaining a restroom isn't free, and something needs to pay for it. Highway rest stops are usually pretty clean, but they are paid for with tolls/very high gas taxes.
This is anecdotal but in my experience the restrooms still suck and are poorly maintained (This was my experience in Hamburg and Amsterdam in 2023). What is even worse is that there seems to be a little recourse to correct it in the short term. There isn't a "Free market" of toilet companies because the same firm seems to capture all the toilets in a given area. So you have the worst of all worlds, you have to pay to use a poorly maintained restroom and there is little you can do about it...at least as a traveler not familiar with the local customs. Maybe locals can enact some improvement.
Tragedy of the Commons Ruins Everything Around Me.
When it comes to restrooms, some people can not help not help themselves and leave it in a significantly worse state, or use it for other purposes (like drug use). Maintaining restrooms is, on average, thankless responsibility, even though people would be thankful to find one.
Thats fine but if you are paying to have the restrooms maintained then the expectation should be different. Don't excuse a private company charging money to patrons and then providing poor service. If I want bad restrooms, I can have the government maintain it like in many places in the US.
Germany has very high taxes and seems yet unable to maintain clean free restrooms. I can relate for countries with income taxes around 10%, but for taxes much higher than that free restrooms should be affordable. I currently visit Australia and it seems to be no problem here almost as good as Japan.
Alternate take - the toilets in Europe, while a euro or two, are actually nice and relatively well maintained. And relatively common.
So while you do have to keep a few coins on you, unlike cities like NYC or SF you can actually go to the toilet when you want and it isn’t a stress inducing nightmare wondering what sort of hell you are going to run across if you do actually find a toilet.
Places with ‘free water’ almost always have terrible water availability and quality. Same problem.
In Germany I can choose between two kinds of public toilets. Piss everywhere and paying some money, while I don't like the later, it is clearly the price to pay for not having the former.
“Let’s take something people will have to do, and make it so the most desperate among them will pay us to do it.” is a distillation of capitalism, but I wouldn’t use the word beauty to describe it.
It’s also a tragedy of the commons thing: you offer free toilets but don’t fund maintaining them every half hour so they are only usable by a few before they become completely thrashed and unusable. Or they are used as drug/prostitution dens and are never available anyways except for whoever got lucky to grab and squat them. A free resources that isn’t available isn’t very useful when you need to go.
King county just pulled the plug on a pilot for public restrooms at a couple of transit stations because with maintenance and, more significantly, security the cost was $77/use [1], we simply can’t afford that. Seattle famously bought five multi million dollar self cleaning toilets that only lasted a few years [2].
I was wondering how far I would have to go to see King County come up. Not very far!
We simply can't have nice things here. At least not in the Seattle city core. Everyone says "just have free bathrooms bro" but no one saying that actually has had to pay for and maintain a free bathroom in downtown Seattle. Discussing exactly why this is the case tends cause a flamewar, but the fact that we can't be honest about the cause means we'll never have the nice things.
I’ve lived in lots of cities, I don’t think the dynamics are very different. Yes, crappy people mean we can’t have nice things, but that is as true in Lausanne. The problem is the way Seattle/King county mis identify or lie about the problem and then give a fake shocked pikachu face when their fixes for the wrong problem don’t work.
This was the argument that let NYC to ban coin based toilets in decades past, with the assumption that people should not need to pay and businesses/govt should provide restrooms for free. But no replacement was ever provided.
Come to NYC, walk around busy areas for a while you will not infrequently see less fortunate people urinating in the subway stations, on the sidewalk, on walls and buildings, by trash cans, and sometimes (if the mood strikes them) right in the middle of the street.
Some place in Switzerland offered two classes of bathroom. Paid clean ones that are maintained and a very simple free one with squats, not maintained hourly and only sprayed down a few times a day. Still much cleaner than I expected.
My wallet feels as essential as my keys when leaving my home. Are you just making the point for people who forget their wallet, or do you think there is good reason to intentionally not carry your wallet?
I can exist without carrying things. Practically, if I'm walking around a city, I probably want to have ID and some way of paying for things (and to get back into my home which is presumably locked). If I just take a stroll on the river path from my house I often don't carry anything but mostly I do.
Some people these days just carry a couple cards with their phone but that's still functionally a wallet. And a lot of things are headed towards contactless payment with phones or smart watches though I'd have trouble wanting to depend on that.
Many do take credit cards. In The Netherlands and Belgium, the pay toilets in train stations allow tap to pay with a NFC card or your phone. Toilets in the airports are always free, though.
I don't ever carry my wallet or keys when I go for a walk, which is usually once a week when it's nice out. I do carry my phone, for podcasts. My door has a keypad to get in.
It's not uncommon to give subsidies for folks that can't afford modern conveniences (free phones, food, housing). I could imagine one could give out tokens, or pay cards that are only usable for bathrooms to those who can't afford to pay for it themselves.
Not to mention a lot of us "pay it forward". I used to pay for the people behind me when crossing the Bay Bridge, or for the next person that was buying a coffee.
> Everyone knows that people whose usage of the Rent-a-Potty is, ahem, strongly correlated with the state transition to an orange or red dot face price hikes, or possibly even expulsion from the app as a whole, so there's good reason to leave it at least as good as you found it.
This seems very susceptible to abuse. You (not you personally, but someone malicious) go into the restroom, mark it in a poor state, do whatever awful thing people do to get restrooms in the state in which they're so often found, and leave. Now it's the last person, who left it in a perfectly good state, who gets the blame.
The kind of person who would do that once would probably be the kind of person who would do that many times, thinking it's a clever way to bypass the system. However, being the operation who marks every toilet they see as red 100% of the time is just as if not more suspicious as the person who other people mark red after the fact 100% of the time.
If we really want to take it up a notch, we have ways to do so. Deviancy, countermeasure, arms race all over again - but few such arms races are actually worth the hassle.
you could have customer profile rating like uber does, manual or algorithmic ones (based on what happened after you went). Then, if you get framed by a weirdo like that once or twice, it will be compensated for by the majority of your good behavior.
this is so dumb lol likely will just continue with starbucks and gas stations
I was thinking, Uber of toilets. You can order mobile toilet driven to you and then you are charged reasonable rate for distance and travel time it did. Plus ofc, standard fee. And time you spend inside.
A public good is a commodity or service that is non-excludable (no one can be effectively excluded from using it) and non-rivalrous (one person's use of the good does not reduce its availability to others)
Examples include clean air, national defense, and public parks.
This isn't to say they shouldn't be provided by the government, but they're definitely not a public good
There’s a substantial difference between governments trying to provide a service (which they are generally terrible at) and paying for a service on behalf of those who cannot afford it (which they tend to be reasonably competent at).
EBT is a pretty good program. Government grocery stores would almost certainly be an abomination (just ask your local public school cafeteria or military base mess hall).
Edit: adgjlsfhk1 is correct that “generally terrible” is overstated and simplistic. Hopefully better take downthread.
the idea that the government is inherently bad at providing services is just very silly. roads, postal service, and national parks are all really great services that the government provides. the idea that the government only does things well by paying private companies to do them just doesn't have basis in reality.
I take back “generally terrible”. How about “often spotty and rarely held accountable in practice”?
It’s not that governments literally cannot provide good services — it’s that when government appoints itself as a monopolist, outcomes and accountability become effectively disconnected, unless the service is so high-stakes and the quality is so abysmal that it rises to “vote the bastards out” territory.
Agreed that the government isn't inherently bad at providing services, but I do think it's important to define how we measure "bad." For example, does "bad" mean the UX is bad? If so, then government isn't inherently bad at it (though can be, see next paragraph). If we define "bad" as "less economical (i.e. more expensive/wasteful of resources) then it does have a general tendency toward bad.
It largely comes down to who is running the thing, and do they care? With private sector, they are forced to care because otherwise it will affect revenue and brand value, which will get the leader fired. The consumer is empowered with ability to spend their $ elsewhere, which rewards the better service and punishes the worse (note that this is becoming much less true in the age of giant corps, especially big tech). With government services, (particularly in monopolistic situations like the DMV), the consumer is largely powerless. They have no choice but to use the system given, and if they aren't happy they can complain but that complaint won't have any teeth (unless they happen to be politically connected of course).
tldr: I most agree, but it depends on how you define "bad"
> Military bases run PXs and commissaries and these stores have reasonable (mid to high mid) quality goods.
The PXs are pretty good but are priced comparably or higher than free-market stores off-base, and even still are subsidized by base funds. The Class Six is very well done and potentially profitable, though that's just a guess.
The commissaries are much more expensive than off-base stores and likewise are subsidized by base funds. For the most part only the officer's and senior NCO's families can afford to shop at the Commissary.
Disclaimer: I left active duty in the late 00s so things might have changed since then
I'm not very well traveled, but I think I've used a pay toilet in every country I've been to other than the US (and the little bit of Canada I've seen) They're illegal in many US cities (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_to_End_Pay_Toilets...), and American taxpayers don't like footing the bill. So we end up with Starbucks and Dunkin as de facto pay toilets, where you have to buy a pastry or drink to take a pee.
I don't really understand why it should be illegal to pay someone for a vital human need
That might be ideal, but we don't live in an ideal world. The public government isn't providing this in nearly any large US city. A few that have tried have ended their attempts due to the cost. CTA provided restrooms at the stations till the 1970s, but ended access to those due to the costs and safety concerns. Having pay restrooms would be an alternative to have no option at all.
Yes, completely agree here. But that’s not mutually exclusive with the rent a potty idea. Public bathrooms in parks and such are often, by necessity, quite spartan. They have no toilet stall doors, don’t have the soap filled as often as necessary, have those weird metal mirrors rather than more useful mirrors.
I would honestly pay for rent a potty even if public toilets were (and they should be!) available and convenient.
Is there no room for grocery stores and restaurants too, since all humans need food?
If you’re looking for a role for government here, I could see budgeting in some tax breaks for local businesses that make their restrooms publicly accessible. The infrastructure is already there, no need for a complicated business model.
> I could see budgeting in some tax breaks for local businesses that make their restrooms publicly accessible.
People significantly underestimate the cost of maintaining clean public restrooms in urban areas.
When restrooms are used properly, maintenance costs are reasonable and predictable. But that is not what happens.
Restrooms contain private areas, and that reality invites other uses, like drug use, prostitution, and sleeping. And those uses come at a steep cost.
Separately, in my experience, many businesses do make their restrooms available to people who look presentable and who ask politely. They just don’t advertise it, and they may even advertise the opposite.
This. Absolutely spot on. The profitisation common services is absolutely disgusting. It is literally the reason we have governments to build and make available for the people.
This is so disgusting. The idea of milking maximum profit from such a basic human function really highlights the way extreme capitalism trends toward evil.
I agree very much in principle, but pragamatically (i.e. in the real world) this strikes me as utopian and impossible, at least until human nature changes.
Toilets are a scarce resource (economically speaking), and thus there must be some rationing method in place. If it's not monetary, it will be something else. In a perfect world there would be plentiful bathrooms and everyone would diligently clean up after themselves and take the trash out when full, so operating costs would be minimal (power and water bill and occassional maintenance). In the real world though, people don't do that, meaning you have to hire people to clean. Some people will also vandalize, which gets expensive in a hurry. Public (government-run) restrooms tend to be even worse because they aren't actively monitored, and for whatever reason people like to trash them.
It's a proposed alternative to having no option at all. Restrooms are too expensive to maintain and prone to misuse to justify maintaining free options, which is why public restrooms have become virtually non-existent in US cities, following the eradication of pay restrooms. It is a much more moral option than giving the public no option at all, other than to become a customer at a business in order to be granted access to the business's restrooms, which would typically be far more expensive.
In some places, like Phoenix, the situation is currently so bad that even paying customers cannot use the restroom in some smaller shops, due to the large homeless population. Having any option at all, whatever the cost, would be a far better alternative.
Maybe the "prone to misuse" bit is the problem, and we need to address the underlying issues there. In most of rural and suburban America, all public businesses have bathrooms freely available for the public (i.e., no asking for a key or whatever), and free, clean government-run public bathrooms exist in public spaces like parks or "downtown" areas. I see this slowly shifting, but obviously the problem is changing behaviors and not some feature of human nature.
I agree that it is largely an urban issue, but it is a serious issue, which likely exists in large part due to the greater density of urban homeless populations and drug related crime. Solving these problems is arguably far less trivial than re-establishing pay restrooms in the urban US.
A person is out and about town, and suddenly has to go, bad. They pull out the app and find their closest Rent-a-Potty. It appears on their map with a green dot - that means the last person to use it considered it reasonably clean, a good sign. (Everyone knows that people whose usage of the Rent-a-Potty is, ahem, strongly correlated with the state transition to an orange or red dot face price hikes, or possibly even expulsion from the app as a whole, so there's good reason to leave it at least as good as you found it.)
They tap the dot, hit "Reserve", and the timer begins. A 4 digit PIN code appears on the screen, your secret incantation to the hall of the porcelain throne. These things are not cheap - $1 per minute for the first 10 minutes of reservation, $2 past that. But they're emptied every night, the sink always has hot water, and the soap is always refilled.
Some people have tried to game the system by {your deviancy here}; the company has responded with {countermeasures you're smart enough to think of here}. Some enterprising souls could theoretically {countercountermeasure}, but honestly, implementing {countercountercountermeasure} isn't a huge concern for Rent-a-Potty's C-suite, compared to the recent competition from new market entrants like Loolurker, AirPnP, and Pouber.