Pay-per-poo: in London, your urge will cost you

Pay-per-poo: in London, your urge will cost you

Posted 02.28.2007 by Dave

Last December, New Yorkers were given a taste of what the public toilets in Heaven must be like in Charmin's giant advertisement in the guise of public toilet facilities. Shoppers streamed in and streamed out (get it?) during the Christmas season; but by the time the ball dropped the toilets had been dismantled, and New Yorkers were back queuing up at McDonalds because the city doesn't provide public facilities anywhere in the area. A similar experience began last December on London's Oxford Street, except their luxury toilets are here to stay. The difference: it costs a pound to drop a pound -- that is, $2 for the privilege of cutting some cable.

Oxford Street's new luxury toilet-and-powder-room, called WC1 (a clever pun riffing off the postal code of the area), cost almost $2.5 million to build. At WC1, the equivalent of two dollars entitles you to "the loveliest loos in the world" replete with "only the softest toilet tissue." Ten dollars gets you "the ultimate girly moment," which, near as I can tell, translates into free hand creams and hairspray.

(Whether guys are able to experience the ultimate moments of their own is not clear; but most guys who have ever shopped on Oxford Street will have given up on shopping and headed to the pub long before the urge to poop strikes.)

That WC1 exists at all is testament to a reverse plague of modern cities: as populations grow in wealth, public toilet facilities disappear. In London, the number of public toilets dropped an incredible forty percent from 2000 to 2005, leaving just 415 in a city of 7.5 million (although, to be fair, legions of Starbucks and McDonalds have arisen to take their place). Those that remain are often in states of horrid disrepair -- I remember London's Shepherd's Bush green sporting a set of greasy stairs leading down into a dank tile pit so nasty-looking it scared the poop right back up inside me.

As a result, we have statistics like this one by ENCAMS, an environmental charity, which claims that 95 percent of Britons have urinated, vomited, or defecated in public because no toilet was available.

The article continues this train of thought: "In Beijing, where the average salary is a 10th of London's, there are 7,700 toilets, or one for every 1,948 people. China's capital plans to renovate 3,700 in time for the 2008 Olympics. London, which will host the 2012 games and has one toilet per 18,000 residents, has no such plans."

This illustrates the negative correlation between private wealth and public pooping: while Beijing has 7,700 public toilets, they're not for tourists or travelers but for people in the neighborhood -- because few flats there have their own facilities. In Westernized countries, we've relegated the toilet so deeply into the private home that we've forgotten that not everyone can always hold it long enough to make it there. With private crappers comes an aversion to spending taxpayer dollars on public ones.

In rich cities, free toilets are provided not by government but by Starbucks or McDonalds, who do so only in hope that you'll buy something on the way out. WC1 is eliminating this pretense of public service and flatly demanding $2 for your number two -- a further erosion of the pooper's bill of rights, and a further step away from our dream of Fecal Utopia.

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Show some poop support, or make a poop retort.

Brudenell (not verified) -- 03.01.2007

WC1 opened charging £5 not US$2. This works out to nearly 10 bucks!

Anal About Poop (240) -- 03.01.2007

I think the price is well worth it. Especially if you have a turtle head poking out and there are no decent toilets in sight. In New Orleans during Mardi Gras a lot of the bars and restaurants will not even let you look at a toilet with out a 2 drink minimum.

Fart Poopie (1257) -- 03.01.2007

So... um... what keeps women from dumping all those towels, soaps and things in their purse? Or is that what the fee is paying for?

Gaseous Glay (not verified) -- 03.05.2007

If only NYC would do the same. We need more toilets and they can charge whatever they want as far as I'm concerned. The current situation is a shame and a disgrace.

daphne (3667) -- 03.05.2007

I wonder if there will ever be a "toilet pass" like we have subway passes or bus passes in the future - you know, pay something like 15 to 20 dollars a month to use the toilets that may be built at this time in major cities. I would not be surprised if this happens in the future.

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.....hugging bunnies since 1969
www.daphneszoo.com

Deja Poo (649) -- 03.05.2007

I disagree that public toilets are forgotten in city planning because we all have access to them in our homes and work places. Although I've never taken a poll on it, I bet that we've all been stuck with the urge on the street but no public place to evacuate. This would even include the city planning staff, I'm sure.

I suspect that the real reason is more mercenary. I think that there aren't much in terms of public facilities because they are costly to build, costly to maintain and have a very low return on investment. Even from a politician's point of view, which is more likely to garner votes: a new park or a suite of public crappers?

Most public places in Russia either offer only pay toilets or are strictly reserved for patrons -- as in, buy first, crap second. My observation has been that, if there are no public toilets, then all of the world becomes a public toiet. I can't tell you how many times I've seen mothers drop their kids' pants in the middle of the park or on the street, in plain sight of everybody. And for the Vodka swilling classes, it doesn't even have to be dark or too far away from the main thoroughfares to be considered an alley. Relieving oneself shamelessly in public is not a decision because there is not publicly-available privacy alternative.

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Deja Poo - Because this shit's so strange, it couldn't ever have happened before.

daphne (3667) -- 03.05.2007

Russia is a sad state of affairs. Of course they're vodka swillers. 'Member a couple of years ago when the country was so poor they were paying people in vodka?
_______
.....hugging bunnies since 1969
www.daphneszoo.com

Anonymous Coward (not verified) -- 03.10.2007

Why are cubicles in the US lacking privacy - gaps aroung the doors - gaps under the partitions - Yet the urinals provide more privacy than in the UK?