When you gotta go, you gotta go.......

Public urination is much like littering: Giving people a convenient and viable alternative pretty much stops the offending behavior in its tracks.

My sister-in-law just had her wedding in a beautiful lodge at a state park. It would have been perfect but for the stench of urine from where someone had recently pissed in the entrance.

Charming.

Hosing her down-I love it! Good for her.

I certainly agree that public property isn't the place for depositing one's waste, but I will not soon forget the response I got when spending New Year's Eve on the Champs-Elysées and asking the police nationale for the nearest public restroom. Answer: there wasn't any. At all. For the thousands of people on the streets that night.

Fortunately, I had a tour bus to return to, though we were admonished not to actually use its restroom, but I did anyway. I figured better there than on the street. But seriously, Paris: if you don't want us pissing on the street, make some restrooms available.

Most of the bathrooms in NYC are for customers only. If I had the time to stand in line and buy a drink, I wouldn't be having an emergency. My ex and I were in NYC for New Year's Eve in 1999, and I had him buy a hot chocolate while I used a restroom.

My father got ticketed once for peeing in the street. Old man + old prostate + being soaked in water after setting up a sprinkler system = a hefty fine. I'd take a fine, too, before I urinated in my pants.

I'm not pro-pee or anything, but sometimes it's unavoidable.

Don't take it so personally, when you gotta go you gotta go. I don't understand why people would be so mad about this.

When you gotta go, you gotta go.......

Public urination is much like littering: Giving people a convenient and viable alternative pretty much stops the offending behavior in its tracks.

Posted by: Scott at August 2, 2010 3:07 AM
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Jon Stossel did a story a couple years ago about this. I believe it was New York City that experimented with sidewalk toilets. The ones I saw were actually quie attractive.Not like many of the port-o-potties you normally see. However, certain people abused them so they got rid of them. Drug addicts shooting up. Homeless people living in them, people hiding from the cops etc...
I have seen this where I live. Several of the parks have public restrooms but they are closed much of the time. It doesn't give me warm fuzzies that the government takes money from me to build these things and then they can't be used because they are used for drugs, the homeless and for some reason the gays were using them to hook-up.
Me, I'm just a schmuck taxpayer that gets his money confiscated from my paycheck to build restrooms that are almost never open to the public.

I had heard that Paris had sidewalk toilets. Guess not.

Three cheers for the piss police! It gets pretty pungent around here every Monday morning, especially where the bars are. Where the bars are...wasn't that a song?

Anyway--personally, I'd like to see public spitting become a punishable offense again. Hey, if they can start getting serious about jaywalkers and pee, (new Arnold film, The Urinator) why not loogies? Cuz that really grosses me out.

I really hate seeing public urination but I've very occasionally, like 15 years ago, been guilty of darting desperately into an alley while my friends guarded the entrance. It's too bad for people with prostate trouble. My dad did that when we were out once - just dashed into the alley like lightning.

So, Amy, has your photo-shaming campaign had any noticeable result? Is there less pissing because you're one person out there with a camera every so often? Sounds to me like you live in a barnyard. You've heard the proverb about trying to teach pigs to sing. These are drunks we're talking about. They're probably not that sensitive to shaming. If it's that hateful, and you love your hood despite the pee smell, start a neighborhood movement to shut down the bars early (which will make you very popular, I'm sure) or get extra police patrols. Or make the bars wash their sidewalks (consumes more water but smells better). I don't think you can stop drunks from pissing unless there's a chaperone on every corner, or a lot of neighborhood patrols.

If you live in a hip & happening area with lots of funky bars and coffee shops, in a large and heavily populated metropolis, and no rain in the summertime, one of the drawbacks is the smell. Why not vote with your feet and move someplace else? It's not like you have a job to commute to.

I have been told by a sheriffs deputy that in Texas, women can't be ticketed for peeing in public. I haven't checked that officially. Anyway, it's gross and it smells. Just as equally gross as dogs lifting their legs on my bushes and pooping/peeing in the grass my kids play in at the park. What can we do about that problem?

The Paris police should draft mohels.

End of problem....

I remember seeing sidewalk toilets in Paris in the 80's. They basically looked like restroom stalls out in the open.

And the Metro smelled more like urine than any other subway system worldwide.

"The Paris police should draft mohels."

ROTFLMAO. Can't wait to see the expressions.

Oh wait… don't circumcize the women! Male circumcision is OK, but female circumcision is a crime.

Paris used to have sidewalk toilets. Expats living in Paris called them a "Pissoir". They have been taken down.

During Summers, Paris has sidewalk pay toilets where tourists are found in large numbers. I used one within a block of the Notre Dame.

Isomber, I think Paris replaced all those old pissoirs some time ago. When I was there, about eight years ago, they had put in some sidewalk toilets (usable by both sexes) that looked like big plastic barrels standing on end. Never had occasion to try one out.

"The Paris police should draft mohels."
What if they are already circumsized?
... no, I don't really want to know.

My favorite: When seeing someone throw out a tissue from a parked car, I walked over, picked it up and threw it back into their car, while saying "I think you dropped this"...

I dislike confrontation, but littering gets me very upset.

One of my least favorite things about the ADA is what it has done to bar restrooms. A decade ago when I had a life I would go out and some of these clubs would have a line of people waiting to get in, 3 deep at the bar, and a single pisser in the men's room. But if you did manage to hold it long enough to get to the front of the line, you had a nice 10 by 10 room all to yourself. Small wonder people seek out an alley. Bring back the trough!

*Please note that I do not wish indignity upon the disabled, I blame bar owners for creating this externality by not budgeting enough square footage to reclaim their wares. It's not novel. People drink, then they piss. Then they drive home but that's another post.

Having been in the situation of non-French-speaking tourist in Paris desperately needing to find a place to pee (fortunately I managed to eventually try a bar where a patron felt sorry for me and helped me with a cover story to use their toilet), I must say I don't feel sorry for the Parisians if they have street-urine troubles - if you want people to not use the street, don't make it so difficult to use a real toilet! (I usually don't get myself in situations like that, but a combination of some minor prostate issues and being stuck (and lost) in Paris rush-hour traffic for hours resulted in me 'running out of time'. Where I'm from, it's considered common courtesy for businesses to allow you, provided you look half-decent enough and ask nicely, to use their restrooms if you're in a pinch.)

"Don't take it so personally, when you gotta go you gotta go."

You perhaps haven't noticed, but what and how much you drink, combined with your bodies processes, actually correlate with when you're going to need the toilet. In fact, it's not something that happens randomly and unpredictably e.g. when cosmic rays strike your bladder. Therefore, by "thinking" and "planning", you can actually not just predict when you're likely to have to "gotta go", but even control the onset to a reasonable degree. As Amy says, "It's like dealing with hunger - you need to prepare"; throwing your hands in the air and invoking a logical fallacy implying that this is just something that "happens" and that the world must thus bend to your demands, because you couldn't be bothered to plan and instead think it's OK to put others out of their way, is a little inconsiderate. Everybody makes mistakes sometimes in their planning, sure I have too, but those mistakes should be the exception, and should be dealt with in a way that recognizes that you in fact made the mistake, and are putting others out for needing their toilet suddenly. There's a world of difference between an apologetic "I'm sorry" attitude vs an entitled "when you gotta go, you gotta go - therefore you must all bend to my demands now" attitude. Hunger is indeed a good analogy; imagine walking into a stranger's house and demanding food because you just forgot to eat that day and suddenly find yourself very hungry, and hey, "when you gotta eat, you gotta eat" ... "I mean it just happens, y'know? And we'd die without food".