<story><title>Public toilets are vanishing and that&apos;s a civic catastrophe</title><url>https://psyche.co/ideas/public-toilets-are-vanishing-and-thats-a-civic-catastrophe</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>egypturnash</author><text>In the US, we have the Committee To End Pay Toilets In America to thank for this state of affairs. It was an organization started as a joke back in the seventies, when pay toilets were very common in public spaces; it succeeded all too well. Pay toilets are banned across many states but there has been absolutely no work put into replacing them with public, free toilets. Nobody is willing to pay to maintain these, so if you can’t pay the much higher tax of going into a coffee shop and buying a $10 drink, you are largely fucked. Large banks of pay toilets in places like bus stations, where everyone can take a dump for the minuscule cost of a coin, are long gone.&lt;p&gt;IF you look sufficiently affluent, you can slip into a hotel or a department store (assuming your city’s downtown still has those) and take a free dump in some pretty luxurious surroundings. But if you’re at a point where that $10 drink for bathroom access is a big stretch then you’re probably not going to make it through there without a run-in with security.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Committee_to_End_Pay_Toilets_in_America&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Committee_to_End_Pay_Toilets...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>autoexec</author><text>&amp;gt; Pay toilets are banned across many states but there has been absolutely no work put into replacing them with public, free toilets. Nobody is willing to pay to maintain these&lt;p&gt;They&amp;#x27;ll be willing to maintain them as soon as we start to demand that they do. Right now, our government is more concerned with funneling tax money into their own pockets and those of their &amp;quot;friends&amp;quot; than they are about providing services to the people. If we put a stop to that, there would be more than enough money available to maintain public toilets.&lt;p&gt;We see the same thing happening with every other public amenity and accommodation that used to be commonplace. Drinking fountains and public pools are disappearing, public parks and playgrounds go underfunded&amp;#x2F;neglected, and the public spaces that remain are increasingly filled with hostile architecture.&lt;p&gt;The Committee To End Pay Toilets did a great thing for this country. You can be certain that if they hadn&amp;#x27;t worked to stop the greedy people who wanted to profit from the necessity of our own basic bodily functions back then, today we would still have people priced out of being able to use a bathroom in public while the rest of us would still be stuck paying $10 to use the facilities only without also getting the sugared coffee to help expedite the process.</text></comment>
<story><title>Public toilets are vanishing and that&apos;s a civic catastrophe</title><url>https://psyche.co/ideas/public-toilets-are-vanishing-and-thats-a-civic-catastrophe</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>egypturnash</author><text>In the US, we have the Committee To End Pay Toilets In America to thank for this state of affairs. It was an organization started as a joke back in the seventies, when pay toilets were very common in public spaces; it succeeded all too well. Pay toilets are banned across many states but there has been absolutely no work put into replacing them with public, free toilets. Nobody is willing to pay to maintain these, so if you can’t pay the much higher tax of going into a coffee shop and buying a $10 drink, you are largely fucked. Large banks of pay toilets in places like bus stations, where everyone can take a dump for the minuscule cost of a coin, are long gone.&lt;p&gt;IF you look sufficiently affluent, you can slip into a hotel or a department store (assuming your city’s downtown still has those) and take a free dump in some pretty luxurious surroundings. But if you’re at a point where that $10 drink for bathroom access is a big stretch then you’re probably not going to make it through there without a run-in with security.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Committee_to_End_Pay_Toilets_in_America&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Committee_to_End_Pay_Toilets...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>joshuanapoli</author><text>The situation varies from state to state. In Florida, many businesses are required to have public restrooms. So you should be able to do your business without being coerced into buying that $10 drink.</text></comment>