Signal Boost: Why can’t we have decent toilet stalls?

[shy_magpie]

Via umadoshiSlate.com posted: y can’t we have decent toilet stalls?

Aside from the cleaning perks and cost benefits, flimsy partitions have been justified precisely because they offer no privacy. They make it easier to see if someone is, say, doing drugs or having sex in a stall, Besides offering an arguably more pleasant experience, the floor-to-ceiling design “provides more privacy for people who need to do more personal matters in the stalls,” Worsham points out, whether that be manage an insulin shot or change clothes. The design would make it possible for folks with pee shyness or bowel issues to use the toilet without fear of judgment. In Norén’s imagining, the ideal public bathroom would not only have floor-to-ceiling stalls but also a little shelf for things like phones and insulin syringes and the option to turn on some nice noise-covering sounds.

Comments

[fandomnumbergenerator]

Warnings for death, drug use, and bodily fluids. And me having too many thoughts about toilets.

The best solution for people dying in bathrooms is supervised injection facilities. Relying on employees (who have no emergency medical training) peering in through crappy bathroom barriers is not a good system.

For anyone’s who’s interested, there are two really good podcast episodes from the Harm Reduction Coalition that talk about specific techniques for reducing ODs in bathrooms: https://harmreduction.org/publication-type/podcast/eighty-three/ and https://harmreduction.org/publication-type/podcast/eighty-four/

There are so many complicated issues around public restrooms, and who gets access to them. As a former drug user, I can’t help but pay attention to how different public restrooms are designed and what their policies are. 19 years later, I still expect a harried barista to bar me from a bathroom because I look too sketchy.

I lived for 10 years in San Francisco, the US city with the highest density of pubic defecation. In the 90s, San Francisco closed down a lot of its public restrooms because of pubic sex, drug use, and people sleeping in bathroom structures, and they were replaced with space toilets (self-contained, self-cleaning token toilets made by JCDecaux). The toilets cost money and were on a timer and so people broke the lock on the toilet in Boedekker Park (a notorious drug spot a block and a half from my apartment) and the alarm would go off for days at a time.

At around the same time, I worked at a coffee shop in the Haight Ashbury that had a buzzer for the (single occupant) bathroom. I spent a lot of mental energy trying to keep track of how long people had been in the bathroom, and hassling people who’d been in there too long particularly if they pinged my druggy radar. A month after I quit, the guy who took over my job found someone dead in the bathroom.

So, I guess, it’s an issue that I spend a lot of time thinking about. And it felt like that Slate article only barely touched on the things that seem to me like the biggest issues.

[shy_magpie]

It's just very weird that everyone is expected to just ignore their discomfort as we adjust our lives around the idea that people will inject drugs in bathrooms rather than say if its that common we need to change our drug policy. As you point out, we have things that if not 'solve' certainly help. That's before you get into how a safe injection site could help with larger problems like dirty needles spreading disease or making services available to people wary of the government. Its reminds me of a disfunctional family, those who try to talk about it directly are treated as the problem, while everyone is expected to adjust quietly around it without acknowledging that it's happening much less that the constant effort is a sign something is wrong.

[shy_magpie]

Also the gate keeping around bathrooms is just weird, if homeless people are using business bathrooms is something we see as a problem then we need to make more public bathrooms available not make minimum wage minimum training workers guard them on top of their other duties. How can we complain about people cleaning up in the bathroom when we don't offer any alternatives?

[fandomnumbergenerator]

I totally agree on a societal level, though I also understand why small businesses might feel like they and their employees don’t have the resources to take on societal-level issues of homelessness and drug use.
I guess my worry is that trying to make bathrooms more comfortable would result in there being a few nice bathrooms in expensive businesses and no public restrooms anywhere else.
I also worry about what people want out of a nice bathroom. Is it sometimes code for a fancy space away from undesirable people?
Though I know that I am coming from a very specific perspective: I have a high tolerance for gross stuff and am not pee or poop shy in public restrooms.

[shy_magpie]

That's kinda the opposite of what I said. I said we need to have more public bathrooms and quit acting like employees should gatekeep bathrooms. They already have to control who gets let in to the bathroom, thus making them responsible for not letting in people they think will use drugs. More and more businesses are already taking out bathrooms even with giant gaps in the doors. They usually blame societal ills like homeless people and drug users using them. Having the gap only helps if you make people look through them to police behavior.

[fandomnumbergenerator]

I didn’t mean to come off like I was arguing with you. I understand that we were agreeing that the problem is at the societal level and should be paid for/ legislated at that level. And that the solution would require some pretty dramatic rethinking of a lot of policies.
I think I am just very pessimistic about that happening any time soon. Because even cities that are experimenting with supervised injection facilities and supportive housing for homelessness are still pretty far away from tackling the public restroom question. I was in San Francisco for a week and so a lot of these things have been particularly on my mind. I was also traveling with my kids and so very dependent on quick access to public restrooms.
I think I am still trying to articulate (to myself, I guess) my frustration with the original Slate article, which seemed to be focusing on comfort without really talking about what it would take to totally rethink public restrooms. And seemed to be taking for granted that people are able to access public restrooms in the first place.

[shy_magpie]

The article was a very surface read of a surprisingly deep issue. I just think gap or no gap people will use drugs and the effect of the gap is that we pretend the issues are already solved.