I remember going on vacation as a child (lets say I was 7, not sure) to Spain with my parents and friends of us. We travelled by car using the Route du Soleil. Besides the highway there were parking stations where one could park the car for a break. There was also a building reminiscent of a large public bathroom. It contained toilets for men, toilets for females / doing a large delivery (duty), and even showers. I found the showers peculiar given it was on a highway. It was nowhere near as odd as my experience on the toilet though.

The toilets where one could go for a large delivery required a coin (IIRC 20 French Franc), and were on a timer. So as a child I was pressured to do my duty swiftly. While I was doing my duty, the door unlocked, because my time was apparently up. I found this very intimidating to my privacy, and it increased the stress I already had to quickly do my duty. I'm not sure if I did finish or not, but I do remember feeling very upset, and I also found the system ridiculous. Especially given nobody was waiting for me to finish my turn, and the toilets weren't clean either because the place smelled horrendous.

Nowadays, if I pay for a toilet, I want it to be clean. (Although as a man at least peeing is already free if you really have to. Without the need for additional tools.)

I did read a story on HN about German cities providing free (formerly paid) toilets. This increases happiness of tourists, increasing the chance tourists come (back) to these cities. The money is paid for by the local businesses. But this increases their profits because they sell more due to more/happier tourists.

Could have been an Exeloo, made by a company out of New Zealand. A guy I used to know was their US rep for a while, got a few installed in some subway systems in the US. I lost track of him and his toilet ventures, I wonder if they're still around...

http://www.exeloo.com/

SF had these minus the pay. Still disgusting inside. Paper rammed all over. Maybe the price was part of why it worked

very high cost of labor, due to expenditures of the state, makes automation look better

And now it's near impossible to find a toilet in Manhattan after sundown -- either you're sneaking into a bar toilet or you're paying some local business so they'll let you use their customer toilet.

Pay toilets seem like a very reasonable solution (although they installed some in NYC relatively recently with pretty poor results due to camped out homeless people and drug users).

Aren't these quite common in Europe still? I'm 25 and American and have paid for toilets several times (I even remember having to pay at a McDonalds in Washington, DC back when I was really little).

Still very common overseas (e.g. most public toilets in China are pay, even in large shopping malls).

It's quite interesting to see from those numbers how relatively infrequently the pay toilets are actually used: London Victoria has brought in £2,300,511 over 3 years; a quick Google suggests it has a footfall of ~137 million people a year [1]; at 30p a pop, that's really not a lot of people using those toilets as a proportion of the total number of people going through that station.

And, in fact, this tallies with my own experience: I've been through Paddington and Liverpool Street hundreds of times and have only used the toilets on a handful of occasions, usually with moderate cursing at having to find the appropriate change. And they never seem particularly busy.

[1] https://www.networkrail.co.uk/FootfallBreakdownForEachStatio... (not sure of the year)

> Having run into many public toilets and restrooms which were unusable because they were covered in feces or urine or had crazy homeless people in them harassing people [...]

As a matter of course- because really the issue of pay toilets is just one small protuberance from the much larger social problem, which is that currently society doesn't provide remotely appropriate care for a large segment of the mentally ill. That a tourist taking a piss in Manhattan entails thorny socioethical issues is surprising yet direct result.

The same problem repeats itself all over urban life. It's why the bus stop shelter doesn't keep you dry, why park benches are uncomfortable, and why you're likely to hear an ambulance siren at least once in an ordinary day. Someday society will realize that the underlying problem isn't a necessary truth, and everything will suddenly seem so much nicer.

I would have thought that the UK had better support services...

am german, i also don't mind using a pay toilet, because they are mostly super, super clean. Sometimes they are really expensive (it's like parking space), but mostly they take a few cents and you really get something in return.

Cleaning up excrement from public areas also costs money and in the meantime makes it less pleasant for everyone. You can pay for one or the other.

yeah, but if we _all_ pitch in then these costs are marginal, and we can help provide some feeling of humanity to those in need--that's worth a lot more!

You can use the toilets of any publicly available official building (city hall for instance, or a university).

That's exactly the tradeoff. Pay toilets are pretty nice when your alternative is either having to patronize a business purely in order to use their bathroom, or drop trou outside somewhere.

Sure, in theory there could be wonderful tax-funded public toilets everywhere, but it's a hard sell to taxpayers: most of the time, locals aren't the ones getting caught in need of a bathroom. (I mean, how many times in your typical day do you use a public toilet? Probably not often; it's a thing you use when traveling, or as a tourist in a different city.) And thus they're understandably reluctant to divert tax money to pay for them, and they get to make the call.

So many starbucks espressos...

What happens when another person wants to use the toilet? Two possible scenarios.

A) They have to wait 5 minutes (pointlessly) plus the duration of the next person's stay. B) They pay to bump the person behind in the queue.

Both scenarios are bad. In A, the toilet is not being used to its effective capacity. In B, paying customers can prevent non-paying customers from ever getting to use the toilet.

Toilets should be provided for free to customers by private businesses, and to the general public by cities. The alternative is alleys reeking of urine and feces. Toilets: a worthwhile public expense.

The problem would be when a paying customer comes up while a non paying person is waiting. Does the paying customer cut in front of the waiting one? If so, the waiting time gets reset? Or do you just make the paying customer wait as well?

Privacy implications? I.e. Taking a dump becomes another way to disclose your location and whereabouts. Kinda funny.

It's a thing even in places where it isn't explicit, such as in New York City. Many businesses reject people that just come to use a bathroom which will make desperate patrons pay for an item in order to gain access.

>I don't consider finding a clean, available toilet to be a right.

Posit a reason why it is socially unacceptable for people to just crap in the street, then.

> "Don't let people pay for things because poor people might not be able to afford it" is offensive to "poor" people.

It's important to distinguish what kind of "things" you're talking about, though. There's a pretty big moral difference between not being able to afford consumer goods and not being able to find an appropriate place to perform basic bodily functions.