When a visiting friend asked me if I wanted to go running in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, I did a lot of planning. Not just our route, but where to go to the bathroom. It was not fruitful.
I took the PATCO Speedline train, which doesn’t have bathrooms. The station I left from in New Jersey didn’t have one, nor did the one I arrived at in Philadelphia. At my friend’s hotel, the lobby bathrooms were locked.
Luckily, I was able to get in behind a woman with a bathroom access code. Relying on luck was my only option because the United States—and much of the world—has a public bathroom problem.
On average, the United States has only eight public bathrooms per 100,000 inhabitants, reports the Public Toilet Index, a 2021 report from the British company QS Bathrooms Supplies. That’s far behind Iceland, the country with the highest density of public toilets: 56 per 100,000 inhabitants.
“Demand for public toilets far exceeds supply”said Steven Soifer, president of the American Restroom Association, which advocates for better public restrooms. “This gets into, who is responsible for providing public restrooms?”
In 2022, Berlin completed an expansion of public restrooms, increasing the number of bathrooms from 256 to 418. The city looked at its existing bathrooms and identified where they were needed — then partnered with Wall GmbH, a street furniture company that builds structures such as bus shelters. and kiosks. But there is a catch: using the toilets costs 50 cents.
In Tokyo’s Shibuya neighborhood, the Nippon Foundation sponsored the redesign of 17 bathrooms, which now have a striking white hemisphere and glass walls that turn from transparent to opaque when the bathroom door is closed. They will be cleaned and maintained through partnerships with the foundation, the Shibuya City Government and the Shibuya City Tourism Association.
In the United States, municipal governments have been testing a patchwork of solutions. In 2008, New York City purchased 20 self-cleaning toilets that cost 25 cents per use. But the effort has stalled as the city works to identify suitable locations, which must meet an extensive list of requirements.
Five are operational and the city is accepting location suggestions for the others.
Public restrooms in Portland, Oregon are available 24 hours a day. The Portland Loo is a single-stall, single-sex, wheelchair-accessible bathroom that costs $100,000 per unit.
The units are lit blue, making it difficult to find the veins and therefore discouraging drug use, said Evan Madden, sales manager at Portland Loo. And the vents provide enough privacy for bathing purposes, but not enough for sleeping or sex work.
Across North America, 180 Portland Loos have been installed. Soifer believes the problem in the United States needs to be addressed at the national level. His group has met with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in hopes of getting it to take care of the public bathrooms, but to no avail.
“Since this really is a public health problem, someone has to take responsibility” he said, “and no one is doing it.”
JEN A. MILLER. THE NEW YORK TIMES
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6654085, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-04-10 21:10:06
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