We honestly just need more public bathrooms, or subsidies paid to venues to keep their bathrooms fully public.
Why do we need more public bathrooms? I’m skeptical because if there was demand for more bathrooms, then I’d expect the market to produce them.
but it’s ridiculous even for those who do have the money that you’re supposed to buy a coffee or something to take a leak (and then in practice you can often sneak by anyway).
Why do we need more public bathrooms? I’m skeptical because if there was demand for more bathrooms, then I’d expect the market to produce them.
The fact that the market demonstrably hasn’t provided this good is little (in fact, practically no) evidence regarding its desirability because the topic of discussion is public bathrooms, meaning precisely the types of goods/services that are created, funded, and taken care of by the government as opposed to private entities.
In particular, these are built on public land (where private developers do not have property rights) for public use (with no excludability) and with little-to-no rivalry, at least across mid-to-long-term timeframes (past the point where another person is physically occupying the bathroom or dirtying it). As such, they fit the frame of public goods to a reasonable extent.
Why is it ridiculous?
I suspect the argument that it is ridiculous comes from an intuition that the need to go to the bathroom is such a human universal that we are all accustomed to, and the knowledge that having to hold in your urine is seriously unpleasant is so universal, that it becomes a matter of basic consideration for your fellow human beings to provide them with the ability to access the bathroom in an establishment when they clearly need to.
There is probably some connection to be drawn here with the debates and intuitions people have over/regarding price gouging, since the person needing to go to the bathroom is in a position of such a temporarily increased demand that it becomes massively unpleasant for them to even make it to other establishments, putting the current establishment owner in a position of power (benefitting from a restricted supply, from the perspective of the customer) that they are “abusing” by compelling the customer to buy something they did not care about in order to gain access to the toilet.
In particular, these are built on public land (where private developers do not have property rights) for public use (with no excludability) and with little-to-no rivalry, at least across mid-to-long-term timeframes (past the point where another person is physically occupying the bathroom or dirtying it). As such, they fit the frame of public goods to a reasonable extent.
‘Public bathrooms’ are definitely not ‘public goods’, not even close. A mere coincidence of the adjective ‘public’ meaning ‘government run’ and ‘society-wide’ doesn’t make them so. The market doesn’t provide it because it is outlawed; where it is not outlawed, it is provided; and where outlawed, it is often provided by the market in a different form anyway, like being excluded to only paying patrons of a store or restaurant. They are ordinary excludable private goods; often a club good, where load is low. That is enough disproof of it being a ‘public good’, but in any case:
government-owned land has property rights, and these are allocated, leased, rented, or sold all the time to private parties all the time, and often building and management of facilities in things like parks are outsourced.
This also applies to wanting government-run bathrooms on non-government land—you immediately see the problem. You don’t need permission from a skyscraper owner to defend them from North Korea launching nukes at them, which is part of what makes it a public good; you do to install a free bathroom at its base for anyone and everyone to use. Building a bathroom 100 miles away does the people there no good. If it did, then it just might be a public good; but it doesn’t, so...
they are extremely excludable: “Excludability refers to the characteristic of a good or service that allows its provider to prevent some people from using it.”
Obviously, a bathroom (whoever owns or runs it) can be locked, and often is (as are associated buildings like cafes which might give access to said bathroom). If anyone can walk into a government-run—or Starbucks or McDonalds—bathroom without a permit or paying etc, it’s because whoever is in charge of that particular bathroom wants that, same as a privately-owned one.
they are by definition rivalrous (“the consumption of a good or service by one person diminishes the ability of another person to consume the same good or service”), as only one person in a stall at a time, and the timeframe doesn’t matter to this point. (“I need to go now!” “Well, don’t worry, in the mid-to-long-term it’s empty, and we’ll all be dead and not need a bathroom ever again, so really, the problem solves itself.”) Again, the inherent nature of a bathroom is to have limited space and capacity. Just ask a woman about that.
They are also rivalrous in especially nasty ways—you handwave away ‘dirtying it’, but I’m not sure you appreciate how dirty is dirty. speaking as someone who has had jobs cleaning government-run bathrooms, specifically, I can attest that cleaning them up can be a shitty job, and whoever was responsible for smearing feces all over the stall and driving people out of that bathroom entirely when they saw it and were understandably repulsed, certainly was a ‘rival’ to whomever came later and might’ve wanted to use it. (Regrettably, I’m not even referring to a single incident here. Also, this was even in government facilities which charged for admission BTW, thereby excluding members of the public. The problem is, almost all people will treat the bathroom well, but the ones who do not self-select into using the bathroom...) Even when that isn’t the case, users of bathrooms have a remarkable propensity to render them too distasteful to use. (I will never understand just how toilets can become so clogged with feces and toilet paper and urine so often unless the patrons were doing it deliberately. This goes for female bathrooms too.)
Bathrooms do not fit public goods at all, and that is part of why government is so bad at providing government-run bathrooms; there’s nothing about them which makes the government better at providing them than any other ordinary private or club good.
they are by definition rivalrous (“the consumption of a good or service by one person diminishes the ability of another person to consume the same good or service”), as only one person in a stall at a time, and the timeframe doesn’t matter to this point.
Why does timeframe not matter? If there’s a pay-and-display parking lot, with enough spaces for everyone, but only one ticket machine, would you say this is rivalrous because only one person can be using the ticket machine at once?
Bathrooms aren’t zero rivalrous, but they seem fairly low-rivalrous to me. (There are some people for whom bathroom use is more urgent, making bathrooms more rivalrous, e.g. pregnant people and those with certain disabilities. My understanding is these people sometimes get access to extra bathrooms that the rest of us don’t.)
(As for dirtiness, all I can say is that the public bathrooms I’ve used tend to be somewhere between “just fine” and “unpleasant but bearable”. I did once have to clean shit from the toilet walls in the cinema where I used to work, but I believe it’s literally once in my life I’ve encountered that. Obviously people will have very different experiences here.)
they are extremely excludable: “Excludability refers to the characteristic of a good or service that allows its provider to prevent some people from using it.”
Depends on details. London has some street urinals that afaict pop up at night, they have no locks or even walls, they’re nonexcludable. Some are “open to everyone the attendant decides to let in”, and some are “open to everyone with a credit card”, and these seem just straightforwardly excludable. Other bathrooms can be locked but have no attendant and no means of accepting payment, so they’re either “open to everyone” or “closed to everyone”, and calling that “excludable” feels like a stretch to me. I suppose you could say that you could install a pay gate so it’s “excludable but currently choosing not to exclude people”, but then it depends how easy it is to install one of them.
would you say this is rivalrous because only one person can be using the ticket machine at once?
Yes. Obviously. The capacity of the parking lot is not the size of the lot, it is the net total of everything that goes into it, including the bottlenecks.
Just as the speed of your computer is not the theoretical peak speed of the fastest component in it, but of the system as a whole; or a movie theater’s theoretical capacity can be limited by how many customers the ticket window or concession stand can process, and not by the physical number of seats in a bay. (To give a concrete example: a year or two ago, I walked out of a movie theater which was so understaffed that they had combined tickets & concessions and so, despite arriving 10 minutes before, while waiting in line, I estimated that I was going to miss the first & best 20-30 minutes of the opera broadcast and decided not to bother and left. This was a pity, but the theater in question had apparently decided that given its constraints in things like hiring, this was their profit-maximizing move.)
Bathrooms aren’t zero rivalrous, but they seem fairly low-rivalrous to me
I wouldn’t even say that: bathrooms are highly rivalrous and this is why they need to be so overbuilt in terms of capacity. While working at a cinema, did you never notice the lines for the womens’ bathroom vs the mens’ bathroom once a big movie let out? And that like 99% of the time the bathrooms were completely empty?
I did once have to clean shit from the toilet walls in the cinema where I used to work, but I believe it’s literally once in my life I’ve encountered that.
Did not the ‘consumption’ of that ‘good or service’ (by smearing shit all over it after using it) by the first toilet user ‘diminish the ability’ of the next would-be toilet user to ‘consume the same good or service’ (the toilet)? How many times, exactly, do you need to encounter a shit-caked toilet stall to prove the point that yes, toilet stalls are, in fact, ‘rivalrous’? I submit to you that ‘once’ is enough to make the point.
Depends on details.
None of your examples are a counterexample. All of them are excludable, and you explain how and that the operators choose not to.
Idk, I think my reaction here is that you’re defining terms far more broadly than is actually going to be helpful in practice. Like, excludability and rivalry are spectrums in multiple dimensions, and if we’re going to treat them as binaries then sure, we could say anything with a hint of them counts in the “yes” bin, but… I think for most purposes,
“occasionally, someone else arrives at the parking lot at the same time as me, and then I have to spend a minute or so waiting for the pay-and-display meter”
is closer to
“other people using the parking lot doesn’t affect me”
than it is to
“when I get to the parking lot there are often no spaces at all”
I wouldn’t even say that: bathrooms are highly rivalrous and this is why they need to be so overbuilt in terms of capacity. While working at a cinema, did you never notice the lines for the womens’ bathroom vs the mens’ bathroom once a big movie let out? And that like 99% of the time the bathrooms were completely empty?
My memory is we didn’t often have that problem, but it was over ten years ago so dunno.
I’d say part of why they’re (generally in my experience) low-rivalrous is because they’re overbuilt. They (generally in my experience) have enough capacity that people typically don’t have to wait, and when they do have to wait they don’t have to wait long. There are exceptions (during the interval at a theatre), but it still seems to me that most bathrooms (as they actually exist, and not hypothetical other bathrooms that had been built with less capacity) are low-rivalrous.
None of your examples are a counterexample. All of them are excludable, and you explain how and that the operators choose not to.
I’m willing to concede on the ones that could be pay gated but aren’t, though I still think “how easy is it to install a pay gate” matters.
But did you miss my example of the pop-up urinals? I did not explain how those are excludable, and I maintain that they’re not.
No they’re not interchangeable. They are all designed with each other in mind, along the spectrum, to maximize profits under constraints, and the reality of rivalrousness is one reason to not simply try to run at 100% capacity every instant.
My memory is we didn’t often have that problem, but it was over ten years ago so dunno.
“Didn’t often have that problem” sounds a lot like saying “had that problem sometimes”. Like shit-caked walls, how often do you need to have that problem to illustrate why the bathrooms are so overbuilt due to the extreme rivalrousness of their use?
I’d say part of why they’re (generally in my experience) low-rivalrous is because they’re overbuilt.
As I just said, yes. Bathroom stalls/toilets/urinals are extremely rivalrous and so you have to overbuild massively instead of, say, building exactly 1 unisex toilet for a whole theater. (Which would often be adequate raw capacity, on average; but the statistician drowned crossing the river which was 2 feet deep on average...) Then the rivalry is fine, and the worst-case lines are tamed.
But did you miss my example of the pop-up urinals? I did not explain how those are excludable, and I maintain that they’re not.
Of course you did. You explained they popped up from the ground. Those are just about the most excludable toilets in existence! (I was impressed when I visited London and saw those. Although I didn’t actually get to use them, unlike the self-cleaning Parisian ones, so I had to more admire them in the abstract idea of them than the reality: “Wow. That’ll keep people out, alright. No half-measures there.”) They are the Fort Knox of toilets—every example I’ve given of toilets being excludable by things like locked doors is way less excludable than your example of fortified telescopic toilets stored in the ground and protected by 10 feet and tons of concrete, rebar, and dirt. If you want to take a leak in a telescopic toilet you are excluded from by being down, you’d better bring either a backhoe or a computer hacker. And you maintain they are not excludable...?
No they’re not interchangeable. They are all designed with each other in mind, along the spectrum, to maximize profits under constraints, and the reality of rivalrousness is one reason to not simply try to run at 100% capacity every instant.
I can’t tell what this paragraph is responding to. What are “they”?
You explained they popped up from the ground. Those are just about the most excludable toilets in existence!
Okay I do feel a bit silly for missing this… but I also still maintain that “allows everyone or no one to use” is a stretch when it comes to excludability. (Like, if the reason we’re talking about it is “can the free market provide this service at a profit”, then we care about “can the provider limit access to people who are paying for it”. If they can’t do that, do we care that they can turn the service off during the day and on at night?)
Overall it still seems like you want to use words in a way that I think is unhelpful.
I do agree that the mere fact “markets” are not providing some quantity of publicly accessable bathrooms is hardly an argument that we have a good equalibrium quantity—or even a good nominal/social want quantity.
However, my experience in the USA is that the overwhelming (like on the order of 80%) of the bathrooms I’ve used in public were in fact on private property and privately provided—be they gas stations, shopping malls/stores, restaurants/cafes and the like. Sometimes I will use ones in a (mostly public?) place such as state tourist stops on interstates or highway reststops or in airports and some subway systems. (Many of those as actually private but clearly a contract out solution with government specifying what the services will be). I also note that in a sizable number of cases the more public solutions are pretty poor, unsanitary and often even dangerous.
I do have some agreement with the eye96458 in that it seems a very localized problem for some urban centers and not really a general issue for the USA in general.
I do agree that the mere fact “markets” are not providing some quantity of publicly accessable bathrooms is hardly an argument that we have a good equalibrium quantity—or even a good nominal/social want quantity.
Would you provide your reasoning for this? I’m interested in understanding it.
[This will not be well detailed but hope provides a sense of why I made the claim.]
The most obvious one, and perhaps directly revelant here, is the concept of effective demand—in a market setting those without the money to buy goods or services lack any effective demand. I would concede that alone is not sufficient (or necessary) to reject the claim. But it does point to a way markets do fail to allocate resources to arguably valuable ends. But effective demand failures often produce social and governmental incentives to provide the effective demand for those without resources to pay themselves.
I think one can see two lines of though pointing towards under provision when considering social/government responses to the presense of ineffective demand. The standard economic market failure of under provision of public goods. The other is the issue of narrow and broad insterest in how government/public funds get spent. It’s not clear to me how strong any narrow interest for increasing public toilets are in terms of driving that spending.
I don’t think the public good → under provision (outside some expected range of what a proper market equalibrium should produce) is something one just assumes. Would have to look into things more closely. But the same holds for the “we have markets so it’s all good” type argument too. As is generally the case, the devil is in the details and not the general propositions.
I want to clarify a few things before trying to respond substantively.
The most obvious one, and perhaps directly revelant here, is the concept of effective demand—in a market setting those without the money to buy goods or services lack any effective demand. I would concede that alone is not sufficient (or necessary) to reject the claim. But it does point to a way markets do fail to allocate resources to arguably valuable ends. But effective demand failures often produce social and governmental incentives to provide the effective demand for those without resources to pay themselves.
I don’t have a well-developed understanding of economics and I’m confused about what meaning the term “effective demand” has in this context.
Or, maybe instead, can you tell me what is the difference between demand and effective demand?
I suspect that you are trying to highlight that destitute people still have preferences even though they do not have any resources to aid in realizing those preferences, but I’m not sure.
I think one can see two lines of though pointing towards under provision when considering social/government responses to the presense of ineffective demand. The standard economic market failure of under provision of public goods.
After doing a bit of reading, it appears to me that one of the required criteria for something to be a public good is for it to be non-excludable. But aren’t bathrooms very excludable? Just put a lock on the door that will only open after swiping a credit card.
The other is the issue of narrow and broad insterest in how government/public funds get spent. It’s not clear to me how strong any narrow interest for increasing public toilets are in terms of driving that spending.
Are you pointing out that the homeless have a narrow interest (in the technical economic sense) in the government operating free to use bathrooms?
While I think you can get to my point with either of the links, a lot more is going on in those links that will confuse and complicate the path. The simple point is that without available resources (typically money) to bid for additionaly output one simply has no way to bid resouces away from other production/uses and increase output of X (here public toilets) in a market.
In a pure sense public goods only exist in theory. But there are good that seem to behave a lot like the theoretical good. Looking at a situation through the lens of public goods then provides some useful insights. In this case, the idea of public bathrooms is all about making toilets available to anyone in the area who needs one. In other words it really is not about specific bathroom/toilets but toilet services where one will be available to anyone needing it rather than them needing to use the alley or pay for access.
So if some are shitting in the alleys, and they are not doing so even when they could have used a toilet, then seems the view that current market equalibrium might be off. The two points above just point to reasons why it might be off. Note, that doesn’t mean it is, it’s generally understood that the social equalibrium is not expected to be a 0 (be it polution, or people shitting on the street) solution. We should not assume what is is what should be.
Homeless people may have narrow interests but they have no direct political infulence generally; they cannot do lobbying well and don’t represent a concentrated voting block (probably cannot vote at all lacking a home address). The general public is not a narrow, well organized group that wants to eliminate shitting in the alley by providing increased levels of toilet services. So in some way the poltical eonomy equalibrium is some shitting in the alley, and the (to me at least) kind of obvious under provision of some public good (which might be public toilets, cleaner streets and healthier envionments)
Taking a step back, let me just grant that people shitting in the streets is good evidence that the current price of using a bathroom is too high for some people who would, all else equal, rather use a bathroom than shit in the streets (So, insofar that my original comment suggested that the cost of using the bathroom was cheap enough that anyone who wanted to shit could afford to use a bathroom, I am retracting it.).
And if one’s goal is to reduce the amount of shitting in the streets, then reducing the cost of using the bathroom is a good strategy. And it is possible that the best way to reduce the cost of using the bathroom is to fund bathrooms with tax money.
Then I suspect we are just having a straightforward disagreement over:
Should the government make using the bathroom cheaper?
If so, how?
While I think you can get to my point with either of the links, a lot more is going on in those links that will confuse and complicate the path. The simple point is that without available resources (typically money) to bid for additionaly output one simply has no way to bid resouces away from other production/uses and increase output of X (here public toilets) in a market.
I agree that destitute people are unable to bid resources away from other uses. And that this is relevant in the case of any good a destitute person may desire (food, bathroom access, XBox games, airline tickets, etc). I suspect that you believe toilets are a special case where the government should intervene because destitute people will pollute public spaces if they are unable to access toilets. Is that right?
In a pure sense public goods only exist in theory. But there are good that seem to behave a lot like the theoretical good. Looking at a situation through the lens of public goods then provides some useful insights. In this case, the idea of public bathrooms is all about making toilets available to anyone in the area who needs one. In other words it really is not about specific bathroom/toilets but toilet services where one will be available to anyone needing it rather than them needing to use the alley or pay for access.
I agree that “making toilets available to anyone in the area who needs one” is a genuine policy objective. But the policy objective and the related service, toilet access, are not the same thing. And there is no question of whether or not the policy objective is a pubic good, as that’s just a category error. And toilets are distinctly excludable, so they are not even quasi-public goods.
But maybe I’m still misunderstanding you regarding the public goods issue.
If the lens of public goods is not helpful then perhaps look at positive externalities. The two are fairly closely related with regard to the question you’re asking about. Tyler Cowan’s blurb (scroll down a littel) on Public Goods and Externalities notes how markets will under produce goods with positive external effects.
Again, this is a general point. One can bring in additional details to support the claim that the existing outcome is optimal or to support the claim that it is not optimal. But that was the point of my comment. We cannot just start with market outcome and claim success.
Again, this is a general point. One can bring in additional details to support the claim that the existing outcome is optimal or to support the claim that it is not optimal. But that was the point of my comment. We cannot just start with market outcome and claim success.
You’ve convinced me that my initial comment was mistaken in another way. Specifically, if I haven’t specified an objective (eg, less than 150 incidents of people shitting in San Francisco streets each year, or, every point in San Francisco is within .25 miles of at least 4 free to use bathrooms), then it is meaningless to suggest that it is currently being satisfied. So, insofar that I suggested that an objective involving bathrooms was likely being satisfied (specifically I suggested that we don’t need more bathrooms, but relative to what objective?) without actually specifying that objective, my comment was meaningless.
(Maybe I made this mistake because in my thinking I failed to distinguish between the market equilibrium and objectives.)
If the lens of public goods is not helpful then perhaps look at positive externalities. The two are fairly closely related with regard to the question you’re asking about. Tyler Cowan’s blurb (scroll down a littel) on Public Goods and Externalities notes how markets will under produce goods with positive external effects.
Thanks for the link. Is it the case that people not shitting in the street is a positive externality?
And when you say “under produce” do you mean relative to the market equilibrium for bathrooms or some objective involving bathrooms?
I suspect the argument that it is ridiculous comes from an intuition that the need to go to the bathroom is such a human universal that we are all accustomed to, and the knowledge that having to hold in your urine is seriously unpleasant is so universal, that it becomes a matter of basic consideration for your fellow human beings to provide them with the ability to access the bathroom in an establishment when they clearly need to.
This, and how completely unrelated specifically the “buy a coffee” thing is. It makes no sense that to satisfy need A I have to do unrelated thing B. The private version of the solution would be bathrooms I can pay to use, and those happen sometimes, but they’re not a particularly common business model so I guess maybe the economics don’t work out to it being a good use of capital or land.
This, and how completely unrelated specifically the “buy a coffee” thing is. It makes no sense that to satisfy need A I have to do unrelated thing B.
Why is it better to pay an explicit bathroom providing business, then to pay a cafe (in the form of buying a cup of coffee)? It strikes me as a distinction without real difference, but maybe I’m confused.
The private version of the solution would be bathrooms I can pay to use, and those happen sometimes, but they’re not a particularly common business model so I guess maybe the economics don’t work out to it being a good use of capital or land.
Maybe bathroom services are just one of a cafe’s offerings, but for whatever reason aren’t explicitly put on the menu. Similarly, bars sell access to people interested in hooking up, but it’s not explicitly on their menu of products.
Why is it better to pay an explicit bathroom providing business, then to pay a cafe (in the form of buying a cup of coffee)? It strikes me as a distinction without real difference, but maybe I’m confused.
Most obviously, so someone can provide just a bathroom, rather than wrapping an entire cafe around it as a pretext to avoid being illegal—a cafe which almost certainly operates only part of the time rather than 24/7/365, one might note, as merely among the many benefits of severing the two. As for another example of the benefits, recall Starbucks’s experiences with bathrooms...
‘A bathroom’ is quite a different thing from ‘an entire cafe plus a bathroom’. ‘A bathroom’ prefab fits into many more places than ‘a successful cafe so big it has an attached bathroom for patrons’. Which is probably why there were apparently >50,000 pay bathrooms in the USA before some activists got them outlawed, and you see pay toilets commonly in other countries. (I remember being quite fascinated by a pay toilet in Paris, which had a built-in cleaning cycle, and considering it well worth the euro coin.)
Which is probably why there were apparently >50,000 pay bathrooms in the USA before some activists got them outlawed
Oh, I didn’t know this story. Seems like a prime example of “be careful what economic incentives you’re setting up”. All that banning paid toilets has done is… less toilets, not more free toilets.
Though wonder if now you could run a public toilet merely by plastering it with ads.
Most obviously, so someone can provide just a bathroom, rather than wrapping an entire cafe around it as a pretext to avoid being illegal—a cafe which almost certainly operates only part of the time rather than 24/7/365, one might note, as merely among the many benefits of severing the two. As for another example of the benefits, recall Starbucks’s experiences with bathrooms...
First, I want to note some points of agreement. I agree that there are differences between a just bathrooms business and a cafe with bathrooms. And I agree that having longer hours is a potential benefit of just bathroom businesses. And I prefer (as I infer that you do as well) that just bathroom businesses not be illegal.
Second, in my previous post I was trying to ask about whether or not there were any genuine differences as a user when paying $X for a cup of coffee to a cafe in order to use the bathroom versus paying $X to a just bathroom business to use the bathroom. (I was responding to @dr_s saying this: “This, and how completely unrelated specifically the “buy a coffee” thing is. It makes no sense that to satisfy need A I have to do unrelated thing B.”)
And in an effort to avoid being a weasel, let me clearly state that insofar that just bathroom businesses would remain open 24⁄7, or have very clean bathrooms, or be cheap, then they would offer benefits to people which are unavailable from cafes.
‘A bathroom’ is quite a different thing from ‘an entire cafe plus a bathroom’. ‘A bathroom’ prefab fits into many more places than ‘a successful cafe so big it has an attached bathroom for patrons’.
Second, in my previous post I was trying to ask about whether or not there were any genuine differences as a user when paying $X for a cup of coffee to a cafe in order to use the bathroom versus paying $X to a just bathroom business to use the bathroom. (I was responding to @dr_s saying this: “This, and how completely unrelated specifically the “buy a coffee” thing is. It makes no sense that to satisfy need A I have to do unrelated thing B.”)
Even bracketing out all other concerns, I think there is. You don’t know what the setup is at any given cafe so you might go to the wrong one or do it wrong, social interactions are awkward, you have to decide what to buy, there is deadweight loss from the $5 of coffee you didn’t want (and might not even drink and just throw away), the pay bathroom probably wouldn’t’ve cost $5 (when I paid for that toilet in Paris, it cost a lot less than just about anything I could’ve bought from a walk-in cafe with a bathroom), you may have to wait in a line for who knows how long (and if you have to go, you have to go!) to wait for your order to be called instead of plunking in a coin and going right in, you might have to ask for the key in many places (which is always a bit humiliating, to make it a stranger’s business that you have to go wee or potty), and return the key too… The cafe version of the interaction is many times worse than such a simple trivial task like ‘use a restroom’ has to be.
Okay, I think you’ve convinced me that there are important ways in which pay toilets might offer a better service than cafe bathrooms.
(I suspect that I was getting myself confused by sort of insisting/thinking “But if everything is exactly the same (, except one of the buildings also sells coffee), then everything is exactly the same!” Which is maybe nearby to some true-ish statements, but gets in the way of thinking about the differences between using a pay toilet and a cafe bathroom.)
(Also, Ishare your view that bathrooms are excludable and therefore not public goods. And I’m curious as to why @sunwillrise and @jmh believe that they are in fact public goods.)
Why is it better to pay an explicit bathroom providing business, then to pay a cafe (in the form of buying a cup of coffee)? It strikes me as a distinction without real difference, but maybe I’m confused.
Economically speaking, if to acquire good A (which I need) I also have to acquire good B (which I don’t need and is more expensive), thus paying more than I would pay for good A alone, using up resources and labor I didn’t need and that were surely better employed elsewhere, that seems to me like a huge market inefficiency.
Imagine this happening with anything else. “I want a USB cable.” “Oh we don’t sell USB cables on their own, that would be ridiculous. But we do include them as part of the chargers in smartphones, so if you want a USB cable, you can buy a smartphone.” Would that make sense?
Economically speaking, if to acquire good A (which I need) I also have to acquire good B (which I don’t need and is more expensive), thus paying more than I would pay for good A alone, using up resources and labor I didn’t need and that were surely better employed elsewhere, that seems to me like a huge market inefficiency.
I had not thought of this until you and gwern pointed it out, so thanks.
I agree that this is a good candidate for a way in which buying-a-cup-of-coffee-that-one-doesn’t-want-in-order-to-use-the-bathroom as a common activity within a society causes harm (via resource misallocation) to most members of that society.
But I do insist that this isn’t a way in which the particular act of giving $X to a cafe for a cup of coffee in order to use their bathroom is worse for the particular consumer than giving $X to a just-bathrooms business. (I’m not sure what the appropriate words are for distinguishing these two different types of concerns, maybe, “on-going & systematic” and “one shot”.)
(Have you considered just tipping the barista half the amount of the cup of coffee instead of buying the coffee? This would at least save you some $ and you wouldn’t be contributing to the resource misallocation problem. And I realize that just you and I tipping instead of buying is entirely insufficient for solving the resource misallocation problem.)
Tipping the barista is not really sticking to the rules of the business, though. It’s bribing the watchman to close an eye, and the watchman must take the bribe (and deem it worthy its risks).
I agree that such a tip is roughly a bribe. But why is that a problem? Maybe you believe it is a problem because many people are inclined not to accept bribes, and so such a move would frequently not work.
We’re discussing whether this is a systemic problem, not whether there are possible individual solutions. We can come up with solutions just fine, in fact most of the times you can just waltz in, go to the bathroom, and no one will notice. But “everyone pays bribes to the barista to go to the bathroom” absolutely makes no sense as a universal rule over “we finally acknowledge this is an issue and thus incorporate it squarely in our ordinary services instead of making up weird and unnecessary work-arounds”.
warning meta: I am genuinely curious (as I don’t get much feedback in day to day life), have you found my comments to be unclear and/or disorganized in this thread? I’d love to improve my writing so would appreciate any critique, thanks.
No, sorry, it’s not that I didn’t find it clear, but I thought it was kind of an irrelevant aside—it’s obviously true (though IMO going to a barista and passing a bill while whispering “you didn’t see anything” might not necessarily work that well either), but my original comment was about the absurdity of the lack of systemic solutions, so saying there are individual ones doesn’t really address the main claim.
By “original comment” are you referring to “This, and how completely unrelated specifically the “buy a coffee” thing is. It makes no sense that to satisfy need A I have to do unrelated thing B.”? I actually took that as to be about the individual problem, so that may explain some of our failure to get on the same page. But, looking at the comment again now, the rest of it does seem to me to be more about the systematic problem, “The private version of the solution would be bathrooms I can pay to use, and those happen sometimes, but they’re not a particularly common business model so I guess maybe the economics don’t work out to it being a good use of capital or land.”.
This comment of yours on the other hand struck me as being more about the systematic problem.
Why do we need more public bathrooms? I’m skeptical because if there was demand for more bathrooms, then I’d expect the market to produce them.
The fact that the market demonstrably hasn’t provided this good is little (in fact, practically no) evidence regarding its desirability because the topic of discussion is public bathrooms, meaning precisely the types of goods/services that are created, funded, and taken care of by the government as opposed to private entities.
I disagree. My reasoning is as follows. I believe that (P1) there is a high correlation between demand for additional bathrooms owned-operated by private businesses (ie, private bathrooms) and demand for additional bathrooms owned-operated by a government (ie, public bathrooms), and that (P2) there is little demand for additional private bathrooms. So, I infer that (C1) there is little demand for additional public bathrooms.
Do you then object to (P1), (P2) or my inference?
In particular, these are built on public land (where private developers do not have property rights) for public use (with no excludability) and with little-to-no rivalry, at least across mid-to-long-term timeframes (past the point where another person is physically occupying the bathroom or dirtying it). As such, they fit the frame of public goods to a reasonable extent.
I’m not sure why you are arguing that bathrooms are public goods (or are you arguing that just public bathrooms are public goods?). Is it because you are implicitly making this argument?
P3: Free markets do not do a good job of supplying public goods.
P4: Bathrooms are public goods.
C2: So, free markets do not do a good job of supplying bathrooms.
(Sorry for my awkward usage of the term “good job”, my economic knowledge is weak.)
I suspect the argument that it is ridiculous comes from an intuition that the need to go to the bathroom is such a human universal that we are all accustomed to, and the knowledge that having to hold in your urine is seriously unpleasant is so universal, that it becomes a matter of basic consideration for your fellow human beings to provide them with the ability to access the bathroom in an establishment when they clearly need to.
Are you describing a heuristic here? Specifically that, if some need is (i) universal among humans, (ii) widely understood and (iii) unpleasant, then often one should immediately act to accommodate anyone who reports that they currently have that need.
And taking a step back, I suspect that I made a mistake and should have initially asked “What do you mean by the term ‘ridiculous’ here?” As I’m not sure if @dr_s is just reporting that he doesn’t like the current situation, or that it makes him laugh, or that it causes harm, or that it could be easily improved, or something else entirely.
But thanks for trying to explain the reasoning to me.
There is probably some connection to be drawn here with the debates and intuitions people have over/regarding price gouging, since the person needing to go to the bathroom is in a position of such a temporarily increased demand that it becomes massively unpleasant for them to even make it to other establishments, putting the current establishment owner in a position of power (benefitting from a restricted supply, from the perspective of the customer) that they are “abusing” by compelling the customer to buy something they did not care about in order to gain access to the toilet.
Interesting. I do not share the intuition that price gouging ought to be made illegal, so maybe you are on to something.
I think (P2) has a somewhat strange framing, particularly given the fact that ‘private bathrooms’ can refer to either bathrooms in the homes/dwellings of people, which does not really have much to do with the conversation here, or to auxiliary goods in private establishments, in which case they satisfy the demand from the costumers that are there to purchase the main goods being offered (such as coffee or breakfast etc) but not from the revolving cast of people who are not interested in the main goods (but, as a result, in the current system their ‘demand’ for the bathrooms does not causally impact the creation of such bathrooms).
In any case, going from (P1) and (P2) to (C1) does seem locally valid to a reasonable extent.
Are you describing a heuristic here? Specifically that, if some need is (i) universal among humans, (ii) widely understood and (iii) unpleasant, then often one should immediately act to accommodate anyone who reports that they currently have that need.
Yes, that is the general heuristic I am describing, perhaps with the following added requirement: (iv) the person reporting they need it appears genuine and doesn’t appear to try to exploit you in a bad-faith manner.
As I’m not sure if @dr_s is just reporting that he doesn’t like the current situation, or that it makes him laugh, or that it causes harm, or that it could be easily improved, or something else entirely.
I would suspect it means he thinks it is bad in such a clear and manifest manner that it is an instance and a signal of general civilizational inadequacy and insanity.
Interesting. I do not share the intuition that price gouging ought to be made illegal, so maybe you are on to something.
Neither do I, although I suppose I implicitly did back before I studied enough economics to change my view on it.
Why do you disagree with (P1)? Do you explain it here: “in which case they satisfy the demand from the costumers that are there to purchase the main goods being offered (such as coffee or breakfast etc) but not from the revolving cast of people who are not interested in the main goods (but, as a result, in the current system their ‘demand’ for the bathrooms does not causally impact the creation of such bathrooms).”?
And I completely grant that I might be mistaken about (P1). I haven’t spent many cycles investigating this topic.
I think (P2) has a somewhat strange framing, particularly given the fact that ‘private bathrooms’ can refer to either bathrooms in the homes/dwellings of people, which does not really have much to do with the conversation here, or to auxiliary goods in private establishments
I tried to give a definition of “private bathrooms” in my previous comment, specifically, ”… bathrooms owned-operated by private businesses (ie, private bathrooms)...”. But to be more explicit, by “private bathrooms” I mean the auxiliary goods in private business establishments (eg, cafes) and the primary goods offered by just-bathroom businesses.
Does that clear up the strangeness?
in which case they satisfy the demand from the costumers that are there to purchase the main goods being offered (such as coffee or breakfast etc) but not from the revolving cast of people who are not interested in the main goods (but, as a result, in the current system their ‘demand’ for the bathrooms does not causally impact the creation of such bathrooms).
Why is the demand of the people only interested in using the bathroom not being satisfied? I expect them to buy the cheapest thing and then use the bathroom. But maybe I’m confused.
And why is their demand not causally impacting the creation of such bathrooms?
In any case, going from (P1) and (P2) to (C1) does seem locally valid to a reasonable extent.
So given that you find the inference to be of good-ish quality and assuming that we can clear up the strangeness with (P2), then does it follow that you would accept (C1) if you became convinced that (P1) was likely true?
Are you describing a heuristic here? Specifically that, if some need is (i) universal among humans, (ii) widely understood and (iii) unpleasant, then often one should immediately act to accommodate anyone who reports that they currently have that need.
Yes, that is the general heuristic I am describing, perhaps with the following added requirement: (iv) the person reporting they need it appears genuine and doesn’t appear to try to exploit you in a bad-faith manner.
Okay. AFAICT I try to avoid using heuristics that call for me to drop whatever I’m doing and act to assist someone else. I also roughly prefer that other people avoid using such heuristics. But I do understand that if someone were using that heuristic, then they might be outraged or upset that people are being turned away from bathrooms.
(I’m also open to the possibility that there are some good heuristics of this type.)
I would suspect it means he thinks it is bad in such a clear and manifest manner that it is an instance and a signal of general civilizational inadequacy and insanity.
Yes, I suspect this is a good guess as to what @dr_s meant. And thanks for the interesting-to-me link.
Are you done discussing the matter of bathrooms as public goods? I’m not sure if that line of discussion is worth continuing or not.
Why do you disagree with (P1)? Do you explain it here: “in which case they satisfy the demand from the costumers that are there to purchase the main goods being offered (such as coffee or breakfast etc) but not from the revolving cast of people who are not interested in the main goods (but, as a result, in the current system their ‘demand’ for the bathrooms does not causally impact the creation of such bathrooms).”?
Yes. I believe there is significant (and currently unmet) demand for publicly-accessible bathrooms that do not require the users to purchase some other good or service (such as coffee) that they are not interested in (which a private establishment could, and in many cases does, require).
Why is the demand of the people only interested in using the bathroom not being satisfied? I expect them to buy the cheapest thing and then use the bathroom. But maybe I’m confused.
For the reasons mentioned in my paragraph above, I model these as two different types of goods for our discussion. It seems to carve reality at the joints in a meaningful way.
I also roughly prefer that other people avoid using such heuristics.
This preference, valid as it may be, cannot be met in practice, at least at a large scale (in terms of number of people).
While individualized assessments contain benefits (such as the use of discretion to take into account specific situations that are not taken care of well by rigid and context-independent rules and heuristics), they also impose significant costs on those who engage in them, namely the increased expenditures of time and mental energy needed to analyze situations on their individual merits (as compared to placing them in one of many mental “boxes” that you had already conceptualized and that you know how to dispose of quickly). Humans have a limited amount of fucks to give, so to say, and (en masse) they won’t spend them on topics like these, which are less important from a subjective perspective than stuff like familial relationships, boss-to-underling interactions etc.
Are you done discussing the matter of bathrooms as public goods? I’m not sure if that line of discussion is worth continuing or not.
Well, public bathrooms are approximately public goods, for the reasons I mentioned at the beginning (I said only ‘approximately’ because there is a small level of short-term rivalry involved due to the fact that someone occupying a bathroom stall physically prevents you from going in during the time they are inside and because such users can temporarily damage the structures there in such a way as to prevent future users from accessing the facilities, until the damages are fixed).
Why do you disagree with (P1)? Do you explain it here: …
Yes. I believe there is significant (and currently unmet) demand for publicly-accessible bathrooms that do not require the users to purchase some other good or service (such as coffee) that they are not interested in (which a private establishment could, and in many cases does, require).
Okay. I don’t understand your reasoning. Are you specifically suggesting that there are people who would pay some $X to use the bathroom, but the cheapest item on the cafe menu is $Y where X < Y, and so those people are unable to access a bathroom? Otherwise I’m not sure why someone who needed to use the bathroom would be unwilling to spend $ on some unrelated good in order to use the bathroom.
Why is the demand of the people only interested in using the bathroom not being satisfied? I expect them to buy the cheapest thing and then use the bathroom. But maybe I’m confused.
For the reasons mentioned in my paragraph above, I model these as two different types of goods for our discussion. It seems to carve reality at the joints in a meaningful way.
Okay, you may be right to do so, but from my perspective your reasoning is still opaque.
I also roughly prefer that other people avoid using such heuristics.
This preference, valid as it may be, cannot be met in practice, at least at a large scale (in terms of number of people).
While individualized assessments contain benefits, they also impose significant costs on those who engage in them, namely the increased expenditures of time and mental energy needed to analyze situations on their individual merits.
I want to be clear that I am specifically opposing the use of heuristics that call for one to immediately render aid to someone else. I am not opposing the use of all heuristics. I agree that it would be a mistake for someone to never use heuristics, because as you say, humans have limited time and mental energy.
Are we talking past one another here?
Are you done discussing the matter of bathrooms as public goods? I’m not sure if that line of discussion is worth continuing or not.
Well, public bathrooms are approximately public goods, for the reasons I mentioned at the beginning
That seems plausible to me, but I still don’t understand why you are pointing out that bathrooms are approximately public goods. (I speculated as to why in my initial response to you.)
Are you specifically suggesting that there are people who would pay some $X to use the bathroom, but the cheapest item on the cafe menu is $Y where X < Y, and so those people are unable to access a bathroom?
This is part of the dynamic, yes. But it is not the only relevant consideration: often times, people do not reason on the basis of stand-alone monetary considerations, but also in terms of other, more ineffable concepts, such as principles or values. In this specific case, I believe there are a lot of people that would hate the idea of having to pay for something they don’t care about (again, like coffee) in order to access the bathroom, independently (and in addition to) the fact that they must part with some of their cash. It would be more of a principled, i.e. deontological, objection of sorts, and would increase their desire to be able to access public bathrooms.
Are we talking past one another here?
Well, I don’t see what evidence or reasoning we have to single out “heuristics that call for one to immediately render aid to someone else” as worthy of specialized treatment as compared to just “heuristics” more broadly.
That seems plausible to me, but I still don’t understand why you are pointing out that bathrooms are approximately public goods
Public goods are (broadly speaking) better served through intervention by a central authority such as a government. As such, correctly identifying something as a public good helps explain why the (private) market has not provided a socially optimal quantity of that good.
I’m following up here after doing some reading about public goods.
Public goods are (broadly speaking) better served through intervention by a central authority such as a government. As such, correctly identifying something as a public good helps explain why the (private) market has not provided a socially optimal quantity of that good.
I’m inclined to believe that bathrooms are excludable (because, for example, an entrepreneur can just put a lock on the bathroom that will only open after a credit card swipe/payment) and so are not public goods. Am I getting this wrong?
But it is not the only relevant consideration: often times, people do not reason on the basis of stand-alone monetary considerations, but also in terms of other, more ineffable concepts, such as principles or values.
I roughly agree. (Although, values are always involved in decision making, right? Or maybe you believe that value, as in, don’t steal, and value, as in, I’d rather spend money on XBox games than a jet ski, are different sorts of things and you just mean the first sort here.)
In this specific case, I believe there are a lot of people that would hate the idea of having to pay for something they don’t care about (again, like coffee) in order to access the bathroom, independently (and in addition to) the fact that they must part with some of their cash.
You might be right about this, I’m not sure. That isn’t how I think about the situation so I might be committing a typical mind fallacy. I’m interested in why you believe that to be the case, but I recognize that it might be quite a bit of work for you to try to nail down an explanation.
I don’t see what evidence or reasoning we have to single out “heuristics that call for one to immediately render aid to someone else” as worthy of specialized treatment as compared to just “heuristics” more broadly.
My intuition is that it’s usually neutral to pretty bad to rush off and offer someone else assistance without thinking it over carefully. I believe this because (i) most people do a bad job of modeling other people, and, (ii) people are generally quite good at helping themselves, (iii) it sometimes triggers a wasteful arms race of people competing to appear to be the most caring, (iv) people straightforwardly pursuing their own interests is a good recipe for improving the world.
Public goods are (broadly speaking) better served through intervention by a central authority such as a government. As such, correctly identifying something as a public good helps explain why the (private) market has not provided a socially optimal quantity of that good.
Okay, I now understand your reasoning, but I will have to think about it more before offering a substantive response.
Why do we need more public bathrooms? I’m skeptical because if there was demand for more bathrooms, then I’d expect the market to produce them.
I wouldn’t expect so, why would you think that? Markets have a problem handling unpriced externalities without regulation. (Tragedy of the commons.) Pollution is a notable example of market failure, and the bathrooms issue is a special case of exactly this. Why pay extra to dispose of your waste properly if you can get away with dumping it elsewhere? As a matter of public health, it’s better for everyone if this type of waste goes in the sewers and not in the alley, even if the perpetrators can’t afford a coffee. How would you propose we stop the pollution? Fining them wouldn’t help, even if we could catch them reliably, which would be expensive, because they don’t have any money to take. Jailing them would probably cost taxpayers more than maintaining bathrooms would. Taxpayers are already paying for the sewer system (a highly appropriate use of taxation). This is just an expansion of the same.
epistemic status: I am a public policy and economics amateur. I do not have extreme cognitive ability and I thought about the question for < 1 hour.
I’m going to suggest some other possible ways to stop homeless people from shitting in the streets and then I will nominate my current preferred solution.
Reduce the number of homeless people (by, for example, giving them homes and/or letting developers build more homes).
Start a charity that operates bathrooms for the homeless.
My current preference is a mix of (a) punishing people who shit in the streets with jail time, (b) reducing the number of homeless by facilitating more housing development, (c) and removing legal restrictions on running just-bathroom businesses.
AFAICT I prefer my solution to yours because I am wary of the San Francisco Division of Public Bathrooms turning into a permanent boondoggle (I’m generally suspicious of government activity, although I do accept that, for example, the Apollo Program and Manhattan Project are very impressive, and IMO most American police departments do an okay job.) and because I suspect the situation is being heavily influenced by anti-housing-development policies and anti-just-bathroom-businesses policies.
If you have a good critique of my solution, please offer it. As I said, I’m a public policy noob.
I explained my reasoning here. Also note that most people who have demand for using the bathroom are not penniless homeless people.
Why pay extra to dispose of your waste properly if you can get away with dumping it elsewhere?
I agree. A self-interested rational agent would just shit in the streets if they could get away with it.
As a matter of public health, it’s better for everyone if this type of waste goes in the sewers and not in the alley, even if the perpetrators can’t afford a coffee.
I agree.
How would you propose we stop the pollution? Fining them wouldn’t help, even if we could catch them reliably, which would be expensive. Besides, they don’t have any money to take. Jailing them would probably cost taxpayers more than maintaining bathrooms would. Taxpayers are already paying for the sewer system (a highly appropriate use of taxation). This is just an expansion of the same.
I understand you to be raising the question, “What is the best way to stop homeless people from shitting in the streets?”. And then you’ve suggested four possible solutions:
Government operates more free to use bathrooms.
Government pays private businesses to make their bathrooms available to everyone.
Government fines people who shit in the streets.
Governments jails people who shit in the streets.
And you claim that (1) and (2) are the best options.
I explained my reasoning here. Also note that most people who have demand for using the bathroom are not penniless homeless people.
Here is my reasoning. On one hand, obviously going to the bathroom, sometimes in random circumstances, is an obvious universal necessity. It is all the more pressing for people with certain conditions that make it harder for them to control themselves for long. So it’s important that bathrooms are available, quickly accessible, and distributed reasonably well everywhere. I would also argue it’s important that they have no barrier to access because sometimes time is critical when using it. In certain train stations I’ve seen bathrooms that can only be used by paying a small price, which often meant you needed to have and find precise amounts of change to go. Absolutely impractical stuff for bathrooms.
On the other, obviously maintaining bathrooms is expensive as it requires labour. You don’t want your bathrooms to be completely fouled on the regular, or worse, damaged, and if they happen to be, you need money to fix them. So bathrooms aren’t literally “free”.
Now one possible solution would be to have “public bathroom” as a business. Nowadays you could allow entrance with a credit card (note that this doesn’t solve the homeless thing, but it addresses most people’s need). But IMO this isn’t a particularly high value business, and on its own certainly not a good use of valuable city centre land, which goes directly against the fact that you need bathrooms to be the most where the most people are. So this never really happens.
Another solution is to have bathrooms as part of private businesses doing other stuff (serving food/drinks) and have them charge for their use. Which is how it works now. The inadequacy lies into how for some reason these businesses charge you indirectly by asking you to buy something. This is inefficient in a number of ways: it forces you to buy something you don’t really want, paying more than you would otherwise, and the provider probably still doesn’t get as much as they could if they just asked a bathroom fee since they also need the labour and ingredients to make the coffee or whatever. So why are things like this? I’m not sure—I think part of it may be that they don’t just want money, they want a filter that will discourage people from using the bathroom too much to avoid having too many bathroom goers. If that’s the case, that’s bad, because it means some needs will remain unfulfilled (and some people might forgo going out for too long entirely rather than risking being left without options). Part of it may be that they just identify their business as cafes and would find it deleterious to their image to explicitly provide a bathroom service. But that’s a silly hangup and one we should overcome, if it causes this much trouble. Consider also that the way things are now, it’s pretty hard of the cafes to enforce their rules anyway, and lots of people will just use the bathroom without asking or buying anything anyway. Everyone loses.
Or you could simply build and maintain public bathrooms with tax money. There are solutions to the land value problem (e.g. build them as provisionary structures on the sidewalk) and this removes all issues and quite a lot of unpleasantness. You could probably use even just some of the sales tax and house taxes income from the neighbourhood and the payers would in practice see returns out of this. Alternatively, you could publicly subsidize private businesses offering their bathrooms for free. Though I reckon that real public bathrooms would be better for the homeless issue since businesses probably don’t want those in their august establishments.
Thanks for providing this detailed account of your reasoning. I understand most of what you are saying, but I’m a little confused about the first two paragraphs.
On one hand, obviously going to the bathroom, sometimes in random circumstances, is an obvious universal necessity. It is all the more pressing for people with certain conditions that make it harder for them to control themselves for long. So it’s important that bathrooms are available, quickly accessible, and distributed reasonably well everywhere. I would also argue it’s important that they have no barrier to access because sometimes time is critical when using it. In certain train stations I’ve seen bathrooms that can only be used by paying a small price, which often meant you needed to have and find precise amounts of change to go. Absolutely impractical stuff for bathrooms.
On the other, obviously maintaining bathrooms is expensive as it requires labour. You don’t want your bathrooms to be completely fouled on the regular, or worse, damaged, and if they happen to be, you need money to fix them. So bathrooms aren’t literally “free”.
Here I take you to be laying out the problem/goal that the rest of your comment addresses with various candidate solutions. But what exactly is the goal?
Bathrooms are available, quickly accessible, well distributed and with no barrier to access (while taking into account the fact that bathrooms are expensive to maintain).
Literally every potential visitor to a given geographical region (regardless of the person’s medical, biological or economic idiosyncrasies) has unencumbered access to clean and functioning bathroom facilities.
<something else>
My confusion is being prompted by the suspicion that different neighborhoods have different optimal bathroom regimes (unless the goal is trying to make every neighborhood accommodate the same set of people (eg, all people, or all Americans, or middle class residents of the city, etc)). For example:
Neighborhood A is mostly a bunch of expensive boutique clothiers and almost all of their customers are wealthy women. It turns out (and I might be totally wrong about this specific case) that nearly all wealthy American women do not suffer from conditions that would require them to ever need short notice immediate access to a bathroom (eg, IBS). But this is not true of the wider American population. How many bathrooms should be in neighborhood A?
Then suppose that over time neighborhood A shifts from being mostly boutique clothiers to restaurants frequented by middle class tourists. Now how many bathrooms should be in neighborhood A?
So, I’m just looking for clarification on precisely what problem/goal the comment is addressing.
Or you could simply build and maintain public bathrooms with tax money. There are solutions to the land value problem (e.g. build them as provisionary structures on the sidewalk) and this removes all issues and quite a lot of unpleasantness.
And so that my comment isn’t just harassing you for clarification, I like the idea of building bathrooms in places that would not crowd out other businesses, but what about re-zoning (maybe “re-zoning” isn’t the right term) parts of the sidewalk so that entrepreneurs could setup bathroom businesses on it?
I think in general it’s mostly 1); obviously “infinite perfect bathroom availability everywhere” isn’t a realistic goal, so this is about striking a compromise that is however more practical than the current situation. For things like these honestly I am disinclined to trust private enterprise too much—especially if left completely unregulated—but am willing to concede that it’s not my main value. Obviously I wouldn’t want the sidewalk to be entirely crowded out by competing paid chemical toilets though, that solves one problem but creates another.
Since the discussion here started around homelessness, and homeless people obviously wouldn’t be able to pay for private bathrooms (especially if these did the obvious thing for convenience and forgo coins in exchange for some kind of subscription service, payment via app, or such), I think the best solution would be free public bathrooms, and I think they would “pay themselves” in terms of gains in comfort and cleanliness for the people living in the neighborhood. They should be funded locally of course. Absent that though, sure, I think removing some barriers to private suppliers of paid for bathroom services would still be better than this.
I think in general it’s mostly 1); obviously “infinite perfect bathroom availability everywhere” isn’t a realistic goal, so this is about striking a compromise that is however more practical than the current situation.
Then I believe that I understand your previous comment, so I’m going to respond to your proposed solutions.
Now one possible solution would be to have “public bathroom” as a business. Nowadays you could allow entrance with a credit card (note that this doesn’t solve the homeless thing, but it addresses most people’s need). But IMO this isn’t a particularly high value business, and on its own certainly not a good use of valuable city centre land, which goes directly against the fact that you need bathrooms to be the most where the most people are. So this never really happens.
I’m not sure where you live, but as others have pointed out (and as you are aware of), some cities and states (including California according to Wikipedia) ban pay toilets. If this ban was lifted, then would you expect the public bathroom situation to meaningfully improve?
(And I grant that this doesn’t address your concerns about people who cannot afford to use paid toilets.)
Another solution is to have bathrooms as part of private businesses doing other stuff (serving food/drinks) and have them charge for their use. Which is how it works now. The inadequacy lies into how for some reason these businesses charge you indirectly by asking you to buy something. This is inefficient in a number of ways: it forces you to buy something you don’t really want, paying more than you would otherwise, and the provider probably still doesn’t get as much as they could if they just asked a bathroom fee since they also need the labour and ingredients to make the coffee or whatever. So why are things like this?
I agree that these are important questions (also, is it illegal for a cafe to charge someone just to use the bathroom? and, have any cafes tried to offer this service?). Before anyone takes any public policy action I would want them to get to the bottom of these matters.
I’m not sure—I think part of it may be that they don’t just want money, they want a filter that will discourage people from using the bathroom too much to avoid having too many bathroom goers. If that’s the case, that’s bad, because it means some needs will remain unfulfilled (and some people might forgo going out for too long entirely rather than risking being left without options). Part of it may be that they just identify their business as cafes and would find it deleterious to their image to explicitly provide a bathroom service. But that’s a silly hangup and one we should overcome, if it causes this much trouble. Consider also that the way things are now, it’s pretty hard of the cafes to enforce their rules anyway, and lots of people will just use the bathroom without asking or buying anything anyway. Everyone loses.
These seem to be plausible hypotheses to me. Also, cafe entrepreneurs may just not have had the idea to offer a ‘Use Bathroom’ service. And insofar that they are interested in making money, that may overcome a desire to not do something weird.
Or you could simply build and maintain public bathrooms with tax money. There are solutions to the land value problem (e.g. build them as provisionary structures on the sidewalk) and this removes all issues and quite a lot of unpleasantness. You could probably use even just some of the sales tax and house taxes income from the neighbourhood and the payers would in practice see returns out of this. Alternatively, you could publicly subsidize private businesses offering their bathrooms for free. Though I reckon that real public bathrooms would be better for the homeless issue since businesses probably don’t want those in their august establishments.
I agree that this might be the best solution. I’m generally skeptical of government services (although many municipalities do IMO an okay-ish job of delivering police, fire and water services) because they are not enmeshed in the market pricing mechanism (ie, they aren’t threatened by bankruptcy and they aren’t trying to make profit). But othercommentershave argued that bathrooms are public goods and that free markets don’t do public goods well, so maybe I’m mistaken. I still haven’t thought about their argument.
Since the discussion here started around homelessness, and homeless people obviously wouldn’t be able to pay for private bathrooms (especially if these did the obvious thing for convenience and forgo coins in exchange for some kind of subscription service, payment via app, or such)
Why can homeless people obviously not pay for private bathrooms? I’ve seen homeless people use phones, but maybe most of them don’t have phones. And I’ve seen homeless people have money (eg, panhandling then buying food), but maybe they don’t have enough, or maybe they don’t have credit or debit cards.
But maybe I’m missing the point and the real question is just, what about the people (regardless of what percentage of the homeless they are) who cannot afford to use private bathrooms? If the number is tiny, then just putting them in jail for shitting in the streets seems good enough to me. If it’s larger, then maybe more public bathrooms are necessary, or maybe the destitute should be (de facto) banned from certain areas of cities, or maybe something else, I’m not sure.
Why do we need more public bathrooms? I’m skeptical because if there was demand for more bathrooms, then I’d expect the market to produce them.
Why is it ridiculous?
edit: There are some problems with this comment.
The fact that the market demonstrably hasn’t provided this good is little (in fact, practically no) evidence regarding its desirability because the topic of discussion is public bathrooms, meaning precisely the types of goods/services that are created, funded, and taken care of by the government as opposed to private entities.
In particular, these are built on public land (where private developers do not have property rights) for public use (with no excludability) and with little-to-no rivalry, at least across mid-to-long-term timeframes (past the point where another person is physically occupying the bathroom or dirtying it). As such, they fit the frame of public goods to a reasonable extent.
I suspect the argument that it is ridiculous comes from an intuition that the need to go to the bathroom is such a human universal that we are all accustomed to, and the knowledge that having to hold in your urine is seriously unpleasant is so universal, that it becomes a matter of basic consideration for your fellow human beings to provide them with the ability to access the bathroom in an establishment when they clearly need to.
There is probably some connection to be drawn here with the debates and intuitions people have over/regarding price gouging, since the person needing to go to the bathroom is in a position of such a temporarily increased demand that it becomes massively unpleasant for them to even make it to other establishments, putting the current establishment owner in a position of power (benefitting from a restricted supply, from the perspective of the customer) that they are “abusing” by compelling the customer to buy something they did not care about in order to gain access to the toilet.
‘Public bathrooms’ are definitely not ‘public goods’, not even close. A mere coincidence of the adjective ‘public’ meaning ‘government run’ and ‘society-wide’ doesn’t make them so. The market doesn’t provide it because it is outlawed; where it is not outlawed, it is provided; and where outlawed, it is often provided by the market in a different form anyway, like being excluded to only paying patrons of a store or restaurant. They are ordinary excludable private goods; often a club good, where load is low. That is enough disproof of it being a ‘public good’, but in any case:
government-owned land has property rights, and these are allocated, leased, rented, or sold all the time to private parties all the time, and often building and management of facilities in things like parks are outsourced.
This also applies to wanting government-run bathrooms on non-government land—you immediately see the problem. You don’t need permission from a skyscraper owner to defend them from North Korea launching nukes at them, which is part of what makes it a public good; you do to install a free bathroom at its base for anyone and everyone to use. Building a bathroom 100 miles away does the people there no good. If it did, then it just might be a public good; but it doesn’t, so...
they are extremely excludable: “Excludability refers to the characteristic of a good or service that allows its provider to prevent some people from using it.”
Obviously, a bathroom (whoever owns or runs it) can be locked, and often is (as are associated buildings like cafes which might give access to said bathroom). If anyone can walk into a government-run—or Starbucks or McDonalds—bathroom without a permit or paying etc, it’s because whoever is in charge of that particular bathroom wants that, same as a privately-owned one.
they are by definition rivalrous (“the consumption of a good or service by one person diminishes the ability of another person to consume the same good or service”), as only one person in a stall at a time, and the timeframe doesn’t matter to this point. (“I need to go now!” “Well, don’t worry, in the mid-to-long-term it’s empty, and we’ll all be dead and not need a bathroom ever again, so really, the problem solves itself.”) Again, the inherent nature of a bathroom is to have limited space and capacity. Just ask a woman about that.
They are also rivalrous in especially nasty ways—you handwave away ‘dirtying it’, but I’m not sure you appreciate how dirty is dirty. speaking as someone who has had jobs cleaning government-run bathrooms, specifically, I can attest that cleaning them up can be a shitty job, and whoever was responsible for smearing feces all over the stall and driving people out of that bathroom entirely when they saw it and were understandably repulsed, certainly was a ‘rival’ to whomever came later and might’ve wanted to use it. (Regrettably, I’m not even referring to a single incident here. Also, this was even in government facilities which charged for admission BTW, thereby excluding members of the public. The problem is, almost all people will treat the bathroom well, but the ones who do not self-select into using the bathroom...) Even when that isn’t the case, users of bathrooms have a remarkable propensity to render them too distasteful to use. (I will never understand just how toilets can become so clogged with feces and toilet paper and urine so often unless the patrons were doing it deliberately. This goes for female bathrooms too.)
Bathrooms do not fit public goods at all, and that is part of why government is so bad at providing government-run bathrooms; there’s nothing about them which makes the government better at providing them than any other ordinary private or club good.
Why does timeframe not matter? If there’s a pay-and-display parking lot, with enough spaces for everyone, but only one ticket machine, would you say this is rivalrous because only one person can be using the ticket machine at once?
Bathrooms aren’t zero rivalrous, but they seem fairly low-rivalrous to me. (There are some people for whom bathroom use is more urgent, making bathrooms more rivalrous, e.g. pregnant people and those with certain disabilities. My understanding is these people sometimes get access to extra bathrooms that the rest of us don’t.)
(As for dirtiness, all I can say is that the public bathrooms I’ve used tend to be somewhere between “just fine” and “unpleasant but bearable”. I did once have to clean shit from the toilet walls in the cinema where I used to work, but I believe it’s literally once in my life I’ve encountered that. Obviously people will have very different experiences here.)
Depends on details. London has some street urinals that afaict pop up at night, they have no locks or even walls, they’re nonexcludable. Some are “open to everyone the attendant decides to let in”, and some are “open to everyone with a credit card”, and these seem just straightforwardly excludable. Other bathrooms can be locked but have no attendant and no means of accepting payment, so they’re either “open to everyone” or “closed to everyone”, and calling that “excludable” feels like a stretch to me. I suppose you could say that you could install a pay gate so it’s “excludable but currently choosing not to exclude people”, but then it depends how easy it is to install one of them.
Yes. Obviously. The capacity of the parking lot is not the size of the lot, it is the net total of everything that goes into it, including the bottlenecks.
Just as the speed of your computer is not the theoretical peak speed of the fastest component in it, but of the system as a whole; or a movie theater’s theoretical capacity can be limited by how many customers the ticket window or concession stand can process, and not by the physical number of seats in a bay. (To give a concrete example: a year or two ago, I walked out of a movie theater which was so understaffed that they had combined tickets & concessions and so, despite arriving 10 minutes before, while waiting in line, I estimated that I was going to miss the first & best 20-30 minutes of the opera broadcast and decided not to bother and left. This was a pity, but the theater in question had apparently decided that given its constraints in things like hiring, this was their profit-maximizing move.)
I wouldn’t even say that: bathrooms are highly rivalrous and this is why they need to be so overbuilt in terms of capacity. While working at a cinema, did you never notice the lines for the womens’ bathroom vs the mens’ bathroom once a big movie let out? And that like 99% of the time the bathrooms were completely empty?
Did not the ‘consumption’ of that ‘good or service’ (by smearing shit all over it after using it) by the first toilet user ‘diminish the ability’ of the next would-be toilet user to ‘consume the same good or service’ (the toilet)? How many times, exactly, do you need to encounter a shit-caked toilet stall to prove the point that yes, toilet stalls are, in fact, ‘rivalrous’? I submit to you that ‘once’ is enough to make the point.
None of your examples are a counterexample. All of them are excludable, and you explain how and that the operators choose not to.
Idk, I think my reaction here is that you’re defining terms far more broadly than is actually going to be helpful in practice. Like, excludability and rivalry are spectrums in multiple dimensions, and if we’re going to treat them as binaries then sure, we could say anything with a hint of them counts in the “yes” bin, but… I think for most purposes,
“occasionally, someone else arrives at the parking lot at the same time as me, and then I have to spend a minute or so waiting for the pay-and-display meter”
is closer to
“other people using the parking lot doesn’t affect me”
than it is to
“when I get to the parking lot there are often no spaces at all”
My memory is we didn’t often have that problem, but it was over ten years ago so dunno.
I’d say part of why they’re (generally in my experience) low-rivalrous is because they’re overbuilt. They (generally in my experience) have enough capacity that people typically don’t have to wait, and when they do have to wait they don’t have to wait long. There are exceptions (during the interval at a theatre), but it still seems to me that most bathrooms (as they actually exist, and not hypothetical other bathrooms that had been built with less capacity) are low-rivalrous.
I’m willing to concede on the ones that could be pay gated but aren’t, though I still think “how easy is it to install a pay gate” matters.
But did you miss my example of the pop-up urinals? I did not explain how those are excludable, and I maintain that they’re not.
No they’re not interchangeable. They are all designed with each other in mind, along the spectrum, to maximize profits under constraints, and the reality of rivalrousness is one reason to not simply try to run at 100% capacity every instant.
“Didn’t often have that problem” sounds a lot like saying “had that problem sometimes”. Like shit-caked walls, how often do you need to have that problem to illustrate why the bathrooms are so overbuilt due to the extreme rivalrousness of their use?
As I just said, yes. Bathroom stalls/toilets/urinals are extremely rivalrous and so you have to overbuild massively instead of, say, building exactly 1 unisex toilet for a whole theater. (Which would often be adequate raw capacity, on average; but the statistician drowned crossing the river which was 2 feet deep on average...) Then the rivalry is fine, and the worst-case lines are tamed.
Of course you did. You explained they popped up from the ground. Those are just about the most excludable toilets in existence! (I was impressed when I visited London and saw those. Although I didn’t actually get to use them, unlike the self-cleaning Parisian ones, so I had to more admire them in the abstract idea of them than the reality: “Wow. That’ll keep people out, alright. No half-measures there.”) They are the Fort Knox of toilets—every example I’ve given of toilets being excludable by things like locked doors is way less excludable than your example of fortified telescopic toilets stored in the ground and protected by 10 feet and tons of concrete, rebar, and dirt. If you want to take a leak in a telescopic toilet you are excluded from by being down, you’d better bring either a backhoe or a computer hacker. And you maintain they are not excludable...?
I can’t tell what this paragraph is responding to. What are “they”?
Okay I do feel a bit silly for missing this… but I also still maintain that “allows everyone or no one to use” is a stretch when it comes to excludability. (Like, if the reason we’re talking about it is “can the free market provide this service at a profit”, then we care about “can the provider limit access to people who are paying for it”. If they can’t do that, do we care that they can turn the service off during the day and on at night?)
Overall it still seems like you want to use words in a way that I think is unhelpful.
I think there are some disconnects here.
I do agree that the mere fact “markets” are not providing some quantity of publicly accessable bathrooms is hardly an argument that we have a good equalibrium quantity—or even a good nominal/social want quantity.
However, my experience in the USA is that the overwhelming (like on the order of 80%) of the bathrooms I’ve used in public were in fact on private property and privately provided—be they gas stations, shopping malls/stores, restaurants/cafes and the like. Sometimes I will use ones in a (mostly public?) place such as state tourist stops on interstates or highway reststops or in airports and some subway systems. (Many of those as actually private but clearly a contract out solution with government specifying what the services will be). I also note that in a sizable number of cases the more public solutions are pretty poor, unsanitary and often even dangerous.
I do have some agreement with the eye96458 in that it seems a very localized problem for some urban centers and not really a general issue for the USA in general.
Would you provide your reasoning for this? I’m interested in understanding it.
[This will not be well detailed but hope provides a sense of why I made the claim.]
The most obvious one, and perhaps directly revelant here, is the concept of effective demand—in a market setting those without the money to buy goods or services lack any effective demand. I would concede that alone is not sufficient (or necessary) to reject the claim. But it does point to a way markets do fail to allocate resources to arguably valuable ends. But effective demand failures often produce social and governmental incentives to provide the effective demand for those without resources to pay themselves.
I think one can see two lines of though pointing towards under provision when considering social/government responses to the presense of ineffective demand. The standard economic market failure of under provision of public goods. The other is the issue of narrow and broad insterest in how government/public funds get spent. It’s not clear to me how strong any narrow interest for increasing public toilets are in terms of driving that spending.
I don’t think the public good → under provision (outside some expected range of what a proper market equalibrium should produce) is something one just assumes. Would have to look into things more closely. But the same holds for the “we have markets so it’s all good” type argument too. As is generally the case, the devil is in the details and not the general propositions.
I want to clarify a few things before trying to respond substantively.
I don’t have a well-developed understanding of economics and I’m confused about what meaning the term “effective demand” has in this context.
Are you using it the same way that Keynes uses it in The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money?
Or, are you using the term as it is used in this Wikipedia article?
Or, maybe instead, can you tell me what is the difference between demand and effective demand?
I suspect that you are trying to highlight that destitute people still have preferences even though they do not have any resources to aid in realizing those preferences, but I’m not sure.
After doing a bit of reading, it appears to me that one of the required criteria for something to be a public good is for it to be non-excludable. But aren’t bathrooms very excludable? Just put a lock on the door that will only open after swiping a credit card.
Are you pointing out that the homeless have a narrow interest (in the technical economic sense) in the government operating free to use bathrooms?
While I think you can get to my point with either of the links, a lot more is going on in those links that will confuse and complicate the path. The simple point is that without available resources (typically money) to bid for additionaly output one simply has no way to bid resouces away from other production/uses and increase output of X (here public toilets) in a market.
In a pure sense public goods only exist in theory. But there are good that seem to behave a lot like the theoretical good. Looking at a situation through the lens of public goods then provides some useful insights. In this case, the idea of public bathrooms is all about making toilets available to anyone in the area who needs one. In other words it really is not about specific bathroom/toilets but toilet services where one will be available to anyone needing it rather than them needing to use the alley or pay for access.
So if some are shitting in the alleys, and they are not doing so even when they could have used a toilet, then seems the view that current market equalibrium might be off. The two points above just point to reasons why it might be off. Note, that doesn’t mean it is, it’s generally understood that the social equalibrium is not expected to be a 0 (be it polution, or people shitting on the street) solution. We should not assume what is is what should be.
Homeless people may have narrow interests but they have no direct political infulence generally; they cannot do lobbying well and don’t represent a concentrated voting block (probably cannot vote at all lacking a home address). The general public is not a narrow, well organized group that wants to eliminate shitting in the alley by providing increased levels of toilet services. So in some way the poltical eonomy equalibrium is some shitting in the alley, and the (to me at least) kind of obvious under provision of some public good (which might be public toilets, cleaner streets and healthier envionments)
Taking a step back, let me just grant that people shitting in the streets is good evidence that the current price of using a bathroom is too high for some people who would, all else equal, rather use a bathroom than shit in the streets (So, insofar that my original comment suggested that the cost of using the bathroom was cheap enough that anyone who wanted to shit could afford to use a bathroom, I am retracting it.).
And if one’s goal is to reduce the amount of shitting in the streets, then reducing the cost of using the bathroom is a good strategy. And it is possible that the best way to reduce the cost of using the bathroom is to fund bathrooms with tax money.
Then I suspect we are just having a straightforward disagreement over:
Should the government make using the bathroom cheaper?
If so, how?
I agree that destitute people are unable to bid resources away from other uses. And that this is relevant in the case of any good a destitute person may desire (food, bathroom access, XBox games, airline tickets, etc). I suspect that you believe toilets are a special case where the government should intervene because destitute people will pollute public spaces if they are unable to access toilets. Is that right?
I agree that “making toilets available to anyone in the area who needs one” is a genuine policy objective. But the policy objective and the related service, toilet access, are not the same thing. And there is no question of whether or not the policy objective is a pubic good, as that’s just a category error. And toilets are distinctly excludable, so they are not even quasi-public goods.
But maybe I’m still misunderstanding you regarding the public goods issue.
If the lens of public goods is not helpful then perhaps look at positive externalities. The two are fairly closely related with regard to the question you’re asking about. Tyler Cowan’s blurb (scroll down a littel) on Public Goods and Externalities notes how markets will under produce goods with positive external effects.
Again, this is a general point. One can bring in additional details to support the claim that the existing outcome is optimal or to support the claim that it is not optimal. But that was the point of my comment. We cannot just start with market outcome and claim success.
You’ve convinced me that my initial comment was mistaken in another way. Specifically, if I haven’t specified an objective (eg, less than 150 incidents of people shitting in San Francisco streets each year, or, every point in San Francisco is within .25 miles of at least 4 free to use bathrooms), then it is meaningless to suggest that it is currently being satisfied. So, insofar that I suggested that an objective involving bathrooms was likely being satisfied (specifically I suggested that we don’t need more bathrooms, but relative to what objective?) without actually specifying that objective, my comment was meaningless.
(Maybe I made this mistake because in my thinking I failed to distinguish between the market equilibrium and objectives.)
Thanks for the link. Is it the case that people not shitting in the street is a positive externality?
And when you say “under produce” do you mean relative to the market equilibrium for bathrooms or some objective involving bathrooms?
This, and how completely unrelated specifically the “buy a coffee” thing is. It makes no sense that to satisfy need A I have to do unrelated thing B. The private version of the solution would be bathrooms I can pay to use, and those happen sometimes, but they’re not a particularly common business model so I guess maybe the economics don’t work out to it being a good use of capital or land.
At least in California, pay-for-use toilets are uncommon in part because they’re illegal
Why is it better to pay an explicit bathroom providing business, then to pay a cafe (in the form of buying a cup of coffee)? It strikes me as a distinction without real difference, but maybe I’m confused.
Maybe bathroom services are just one of a cafe’s offerings, but for whatever reason aren’t explicitly put on the menu. Similarly, bars sell access to people interested in hooking up, but it’s not explicitly on their menu of products.
Most obviously, so someone can provide just a bathroom, rather than wrapping an entire cafe around it as a pretext to avoid being illegal—a cafe which almost certainly operates only part of the time rather than 24/7/365, one might note, as merely among the many benefits of severing the two. As for another example of the benefits, recall Starbucks’s experiences with bathrooms...
‘A bathroom’ is quite a different thing from ‘an entire cafe plus a bathroom’. ‘A bathroom’ prefab fits into many more places than ‘a successful cafe so big it has an attached bathroom for patrons’. Which is probably why there were apparently >50,000 pay bathrooms in the USA before some activists got them outlawed, and you see pay toilets commonly in other countries. (I remember being quite fascinated by a pay toilet in Paris, which had a built-in cleaning cycle, and considering it well worth the euro coin.)
Oh, I didn’t know this story. Seems like a prime example of “be careful what economic incentives you’re setting up”. All that banning paid toilets has done is… less toilets, not more free toilets.
Though wonder if now you could run a public toilet merely by plastering it with ads.
First, I want to note some points of agreement. I agree that there are differences between a just bathrooms business and a cafe with bathrooms. And I agree that having longer hours is a potential benefit of just bathroom businesses. And I prefer (as I infer that you do as well) that just bathroom businesses not be illegal.
Second, in my previous post I was trying to ask about whether or not there were any genuine differences as a user when paying $X for a cup of coffee to a cafe in order to use the bathroom versus paying $X to a just bathroom business to use the bathroom. (I was responding to @dr_s saying this: “This, and how completely unrelated specifically the “buy a coffee” thing is. It makes no sense that to satisfy need A I have to do unrelated thing B.”)
And in an effort to avoid being a weasel, let me clearly state that insofar that just bathroom businesses would remain open 24⁄7, or have very clean bathrooms, or be cheap, then they would offer benefits to people which are unavailable from cafes.
Yes, you are right.
Thanks for the relevant historical information.
Even bracketing out all other concerns, I think there is. You don’t know what the setup is at any given cafe so you might go to the wrong one or do it wrong, social interactions are awkward, you have to decide what to buy, there is deadweight loss from the $5 of coffee you didn’t want (and might not even drink and just throw away), the pay bathroom probably wouldn’t’ve cost $5 (when I paid for that toilet in Paris, it cost a lot less than just about anything I could’ve bought from a walk-in cafe with a bathroom), you may have to wait in a line for who knows how long (and if you have to go, you have to go!) to wait for your order to be called instead of plunking in a coin and going right in, you might have to ask for the key in many places (which is always a bit humiliating, to make it a stranger’s business that you have to go wee or potty), and return the key too… The cafe version of the interaction is many times worse than such a simple trivial task like ‘use a restroom’ has to be.
Okay, I think you’ve convinced me that there are important ways in which pay toilets might offer a better service than cafe bathrooms.
(I suspect that I was getting myself confused by sort of insisting/thinking “But if everything is exactly the same (, except one of the buildings also sells coffee), then everything is exactly the same!” Which is maybe nearby to some true-ish statements, but gets in the way of thinking about the differences between using a pay toilet and a cafe bathroom.)
(Also, I share your view that bathrooms are excludable and therefore not public goods. And I’m curious as to why @sunwillrise and @jmh believe that they are in fact public goods.)
Economically speaking, if to acquire good A (which I need) I also have to acquire good B (which I don’t need and is more expensive), thus paying more than I would pay for good A alone, using up resources and labor I didn’t need and that were surely better employed elsewhere, that seems to me like a huge market inefficiency.
Imagine this happening with anything else. “I want a USB cable.” “Oh we don’t sell USB cables on their own, that would be ridiculous. But we do include them as part of the chargers in smartphones, so if you want a USB cable, you can buy a smartphone.” Would that make sense?
I had not thought of this until you and gwern pointed it out, so thanks.
I agree that this is a good candidate for a way in which buying-a-cup-of-coffee-that-one-doesn’t-want-in-order-to-use-the-bathroom as a common activity within a society causes harm (via resource misallocation) to most members of that society.
But I do insist that this isn’t a way in which the particular act of giving $X to a cafe for a cup of coffee in order to use their bathroom is worse for the particular consumer than giving $X to a just-bathrooms business. (I’m not sure what the appropriate words are for distinguishing these two different types of concerns, maybe, “on-going & systematic” and “one shot”.)
(Have you considered just tipping the barista half the amount of the cup of coffee instead of buying the coffee? This would at least save you some $ and you wouldn’t be contributing to the resource misallocation problem. And I realize that just you and I tipping instead of buying is entirely insufficient for solving the resource misallocation problem.)
Tipping the barista is not really sticking to the rules of the business, though. It’s bribing the watchman to close an eye, and the watchman must take the bribe (and deem it worthy its risks).
I agree that such a tip is roughly a bribe. But why is that a problem? Maybe you believe it is a problem because many people are inclined not to accept bribes, and so such a move would frequently not work.
We’re discussing whether this is a systemic problem, not whether there are possible individual solutions. We can come up with solutions just fine, in fact most of the times you can just waltz in, go to the bathroom, and no one will notice. But “everyone pays bribes to the barista to go to the bathroom” absolutely makes no sense as a universal rule over “we finally acknowledge this is an issue and thus incorporate it squarely in our ordinary services instead of making up weird and unnecessary work-arounds”.
I tried to stipulate that I was not proposing barista tips as a solution to the “on-going and systematic” problem, specifically I said, “And I realize that just you and I tipping instead of buying is entirely insufficient for solving the resource misallocation problem.”
warning meta: I am genuinely curious (as I don’t get much feedback in day to day life), have you found my comments to be unclear and/or disorganized in this thread? I’d love to improve my writing so would appreciate any critique, thanks.
No, sorry, it’s not that I didn’t find it clear, but I thought it was kind of an irrelevant aside—it’s obviously true (though IMO going to a barista and passing a bill while whispering “you didn’t see anything” might not necessarily work that well either), but my original comment was about the absurdity of the lack of systemic solutions, so saying there are individual ones doesn’t really address the main claim.
By “original comment” are you referring to “This, and how completely unrelated specifically the “buy a coffee” thing is. It makes no sense that to satisfy need A I have to do unrelated thing B.”? I actually took that as to be about the individual problem, so that may explain some of our failure to get on the same page. But, looking at the comment again now, the rest of it does seem to me to be more about the systematic problem, “The private version of the solution would be bathrooms I can pay to use, and those happen sometimes, but they’re not a particularly common business model so I guess maybe the economics don’t work out to it being a good use of capital or land.”.
This comment of yours on the other hand struck me as being more about the systematic problem.
Sorry for any misinterpretation of your comments.
I disagree. My reasoning is as follows. I believe that (P1) there is a high correlation between demand for additional bathrooms owned-operated by private businesses (ie, private bathrooms) and demand for additional bathrooms owned-operated by a government (ie, public bathrooms), and that (P2) there is little demand for additional private bathrooms. So, I infer that (C1) there is little demand for additional public bathrooms.
Do you then object to (P1), (P2) or my inference?
I’m not sure why you are arguing that bathrooms are public goods (or are you arguing that just public bathrooms are public goods?). Is it because you are implicitly making this argument?
P3: Free markets do not do a good job of supplying public goods.
P4: Bathrooms are public goods.
C2: So, free markets do not do a good job of supplying bathrooms.
(Sorry for my awkward usage of the term “good job”, my economic knowledge is weak.)
Are you describing a heuristic here? Specifically that, if some need is (i) universal among humans, (ii) widely understood and (iii) unpleasant, then often one should immediately act to accommodate anyone who reports that they currently have that need.
And taking a step back, I suspect that I made a mistake and should have initially asked “What do you mean by the term ‘ridiculous’ here?” As I’m not sure if @dr_s is just reporting that he doesn’t like the current situation, or that it makes him laugh, or that it causes harm, or that it could be easily improved, or something else entirely.
But thanks for trying to explain the reasoning to me.
Interesting. I do not share the intuition that price gouging ought to be made illegal, so maybe you are on to something.
I completely disagree with (P1).
I think (P2) has a somewhat strange framing, particularly given the fact that ‘private bathrooms’ can refer to either bathrooms in the homes/dwellings of people, which does not really have much to do with the conversation here, or to auxiliary goods in private establishments, in which case they satisfy the demand from the costumers that are there to purchase the main goods being offered (such as coffee or breakfast etc) but not from the revolving cast of people who are not interested in the main goods (but, as a result, in the current system their ‘demand’ for the bathrooms does not causally impact the creation of such bathrooms).
In any case, going from (P1) and (P2) to (C1) does seem locally valid to a reasonable extent.
Yes, that is the general heuristic I am describing, perhaps with the following added requirement: (iv) the person reporting they need it appears genuine and doesn’t appear to try to exploit you in a bad-faith manner.
I would suspect it means he thinks it is bad in such a clear and manifest manner that it is an instance and a signal of general civilizational inadequacy and insanity.
Neither do I, although I suppose I implicitly did back before I studied enough economics to change my view on it.
Why do you disagree with (P1)? Do you explain it here: “in which case they satisfy the demand from the costumers that are there to purchase the main goods being offered (such as coffee or breakfast etc) but not from the revolving cast of people who are not interested in the main goods (but, as a result, in the current system their ‘demand’ for the bathrooms does not causally impact the creation of such bathrooms).”?
And I completely grant that I might be mistaken about (P1). I haven’t spent many cycles investigating this topic.
I tried to give a definition of “private bathrooms” in my previous comment, specifically, ”… bathrooms owned-operated by private businesses (ie, private bathrooms)...”. But to be more explicit, by “private bathrooms” I mean the auxiliary goods in private business establishments (eg, cafes) and the primary goods offered by just-bathroom businesses.
Does that clear up the strangeness?
Why is the demand of the people only interested in using the bathroom not being satisfied? I expect them to buy the cheapest thing and then use the bathroom. But maybe I’m confused.
And why is their demand not causally impacting the creation of such bathrooms?
So given that you find the inference to be of good-ish quality and assuming that we can clear up the strangeness with (P2), then does it follow that you would accept (C1) if you became convinced that (P1) was likely true?
Okay. AFAICT I try to avoid using heuristics that call for me to drop whatever I’m doing and act to assist someone else. I also roughly prefer that other people avoid using such heuristics. But I do understand that if someone were using that heuristic, then they might be outraged or upset that people are being turned away from bathrooms.
(I’m also open to the possibility that there are some good heuristics of this type.)
Yes, I suspect this is a good guess as to what @dr_s meant. And thanks for the interesting-to-me link.
Are you done discussing the matter of bathrooms as public goods? I’m not sure if that line of discussion is worth continuing or not.
Yes. I believe there is significant (and currently unmet) demand for publicly-accessible bathrooms that do not require the users to purchase some other good or service (such as coffee) that they are not interested in (which a private establishment could, and in many cases does, require).
For the reasons mentioned in my paragraph above, I model these as two different types of goods for our discussion. It seems to carve reality at the joints in a meaningful way.
This preference, valid as it may be, cannot be met in practice, at least at a large scale (in terms of number of people).
While individualized assessments contain benefits (such as the use of discretion to take into account specific situations that are not taken care of well by rigid and context-independent rules and heuristics), they also impose significant costs on those who engage in them, namely the increased expenditures of time and mental energy needed to analyze situations on their individual merits (as compared to placing them in one of many mental “boxes” that you had already conceptualized and that you know how to dispose of quickly). Humans have a limited amount of fucks to give, so to say, and (en masse) they won’t spend them on topics like these, which are less important from a subjective perspective than stuff like familial relationships, boss-to-underling interactions etc.
Well, public bathrooms are approximately public goods, for the reasons I mentioned at the beginning (I said only ‘approximately’ because there is a small level of short-term rivalry involved due to the fact that someone occupying a bathroom stall physically prevents you from going in during the time they are inside and because such users can temporarily damage the structures there in such a way as to prevent future users from accessing the facilities, until the damages are fixed).
Okay. I don’t understand your reasoning. Are you specifically suggesting that there are people who would pay some $X to use the bathroom, but the cheapest item on the cafe menu is $Y where X < Y, and so those people are unable to access a bathroom? Otherwise I’m not sure why someone who needed to use the bathroom would be unwilling to spend $ on some unrelated good in order to use the bathroom.
Okay, you may be right to do so, but from my perspective your reasoning is still opaque.
I want to be clear that I am specifically opposing the use of heuristics that call for one to immediately render aid to someone else. I am not opposing the use of all heuristics. I agree that it would be a mistake for someone to never use heuristics, because as you say, humans have limited time and mental energy.
Are we talking past one another here?
That seems plausible to me, but I still don’t understand why you are pointing out that bathrooms are approximately public goods. (I speculated as to why in my initial response to you.)
This is part of the dynamic, yes. But it is not the only relevant consideration: often times, people do not reason on the basis of stand-alone monetary considerations, but also in terms of other, more ineffable concepts, such as principles or values. In this specific case, I believe there are a lot of people that would hate the idea of having to pay for something they don’t care about (again, like coffee) in order to access the bathroom, independently (and in addition to) the fact that they must part with some of their cash. It would be more of a principled, i.e. deontological, objection of sorts, and would increase their desire to be able to access public bathrooms.
Well, I don’t see what evidence or reasoning we have to single out “heuristics that call for one to immediately render aid to someone else” as worthy of specialized treatment as compared to just “heuristics” more broadly.
Public goods are (broadly speaking) better served through intervention by a central authority such as a government. As such, correctly identifying something as a public good helps explain why the (private) market has not provided a socially optimal quantity of that good.
I’m following up here after doing some reading about public goods.
I’m inclined to believe that bathrooms are excludable (because, for example, an entrepreneur can just put a lock on the bathroom that will only open after a credit card swipe/payment) and so are not public goods. Am I getting this wrong?
I roughly agree. (Although, values are always involved in decision making, right? Or maybe you believe that value, as in, don’t steal, and value, as in, I’d rather spend money on XBox games than a jet ski, are different sorts of things and you just mean the first sort here.)
You might be right about this, I’m not sure. That isn’t how I think about the situation so I might be committing a typical mind fallacy. I’m interested in why you believe that to be the case, but I recognize that it might be quite a bit of work for you to try to nail down an explanation.
My intuition is that it’s usually neutral to pretty bad to rush off and offer someone else assistance without thinking it over carefully. I believe this because (i) most people do a bad job of modeling other people, and, (ii) people are generally quite good at helping themselves, (iii) it sometimes triggers a wasteful arms race of people competing to appear to be the most caring, (iv) people straightforwardly pursuing their own interests is a good recipe for improving the world.
Okay, I now understand your reasoning, but I will have to think about it more before offering a substantive response.
I wouldn’t expect so, why would you think that? Markets have a problem handling unpriced externalities without regulation. (Tragedy of the commons.) Pollution is a notable example of market failure, and the bathrooms issue is a special case of exactly this. Why pay extra to dispose of your waste properly if you can get away with dumping it elsewhere? As a matter of public health, it’s better for everyone if this type of waste goes in the sewers and not in the alley, even if the perpetrators can’t afford a coffee. How would you propose we stop the pollution? Fining them wouldn’t help, even if we could catch them reliably, which would be expensive, because they don’t have any money to take. Jailing them would probably cost taxpayers more than maintaining bathrooms would. Taxpayers are already paying for the sewer system (a highly appropriate use of taxation). This is just an expansion of the same.
From your response it seems to me that I’ve understood your question and position, so I’m responding to it here.
epistemic status: I am a public policy and economics amateur. I do not have extreme cognitive ability and I thought about the question for < 1 hour.
I’m going to suggest some other possible ways to stop homeless people from shitting in the streets and then I will nominate my current preferred solution.
Remove legal restrictions to running just-bathroom businesses.
Reduce the number of homeless people (by, for example, giving them homes and/or letting developers build more homes).
Start a charity that operates bathrooms for the homeless.
My current preference is a mix of (a) punishing people who shit in the streets with jail time, (b) reducing the number of homeless by facilitating more housing development, (c) and removing legal restrictions on running just-bathroom businesses.
AFAICT I prefer my solution to yours because I am wary of the San Francisco Division of Public Bathrooms turning into a permanent boondoggle (I’m generally suspicious of government activity, although I do accept that, for example, the Apollo Program and Manhattan Project are very impressive, and IMO most American police departments do an okay job.) and because I suspect the situation is being heavily influenced by anti-housing-development policies and anti-just-bathroom-businesses policies.
If you have a good critique of my solution, please offer it. As I said, I’m a public policy noob.
its a public externality, you don’t need a government division to run bathrooms, you just need to do 1. + provide a subsidy
I explained my reasoning here. Also note that most people who have demand for using the bathroom are not penniless homeless people.
I agree. A self-interested rational agent would just shit in the streets if they could get away with it.
I agree.
I understand you to be raising the question, “What is the best way to stop homeless people from shitting in the streets?”. And then you’ve suggested four possible solutions:
Government operates more free to use bathrooms.
Government pays private businesses to make their bathrooms available to everyone.
Government fines people who shit in the streets.
Governments jails people who shit in the streets.
And you claim that (1) and (2) are the best options.
Do I understand you correctly?
Here is my reasoning. On one hand, obviously going to the bathroom, sometimes in random circumstances, is an obvious universal necessity. It is all the more pressing for people with certain conditions that make it harder for them to control themselves for long. So it’s important that bathrooms are available, quickly accessible, and distributed reasonably well everywhere. I would also argue it’s important that they have no barrier to access because sometimes time is critical when using it. In certain train stations I’ve seen bathrooms that can only be used by paying a small price, which often meant you needed to have and find precise amounts of change to go. Absolutely impractical stuff for bathrooms.
On the other, obviously maintaining bathrooms is expensive as it requires labour. You don’t want your bathrooms to be completely fouled on the regular, or worse, damaged, and if they happen to be, you need money to fix them. So bathrooms aren’t literally “free”.
Now one possible solution would be to have “public bathroom” as a business. Nowadays you could allow entrance with a credit card (note that this doesn’t solve the homeless thing, but it addresses most people’s need). But IMO this isn’t a particularly high value business, and on its own certainly not a good use of valuable city centre land, which goes directly against the fact that you need bathrooms to be the most where the most people are. So this never really happens.
Another solution is to have bathrooms as part of private businesses doing other stuff (serving food/drinks) and have them charge for their use. Which is how it works now. The inadequacy lies into how for some reason these businesses charge you indirectly by asking you to buy something. This is inefficient in a number of ways: it forces you to buy something you don’t really want, paying more than you would otherwise, and the provider probably still doesn’t get as much as they could if they just asked a bathroom fee since they also need the labour and ingredients to make the coffee or whatever. So why are things like this? I’m not sure—I think part of it may be that they don’t just want money, they want a filter that will discourage people from using the bathroom too much to avoid having too many bathroom goers. If that’s the case, that’s bad, because it means some needs will remain unfulfilled (and some people might forgo going out for too long entirely rather than risking being left without options). Part of it may be that they just identify their business as cafes and would find it deleterious to their image to explicitly provide a bathroom service. But that’s a silly hangup and one we should overcome, if it causes this much trouble. Consider also that the way things are now, it’s pretty hard of the cafes to enforce their rules anyway, and lots of people will just use the bathroom without asking or buying anything anyway. Everyone loses.
Or you could simply build and maintain public bathrooms with tax money. There are solutions to the land value problem (e.g. build them as provisionary structures on the sidewalk) and this removes all issues and quite a lot of unpleasantness. You could probably use even just some of the sales tax and house taxes income from the neighbourhood and the payers would in practice see returns out of this. Alternatively, you could publicly subsidize private businesses offering their bathrooms for free. Though I reckon that real public bathrooms would be better for the homeless issue since businesses probably don’t want those in their august establishments.
Thanks for providing this detailed account of your reasoning. I understand most of what you are saying, but I’m a little confused about the first two paragraphs.
Here I take you to be laying out the problem/goal that the rest of your comment addresses with various candidate solutions. But what exactly is the goal?
Bathrooms are available, quickly accessible, well distributed and with no barrier to access (while taking into account the fact that bathrooms are expensive to maintain).
Literally every potential visitor to a given geographical region (regardless of the person’s medical, biological or economic idiosyncrasies) has unencumbered access to clean and functioning bathroom facilities.
<something else>
My confusion is being prompted by the suspicion that different neighborhoods have different optimal bathroom regimes (unless the goal is trying to make every neighborhood accommodate the same set of people (eg, all people, or all Americans, or middle class residents of the city, etc)). For example:
Neighborhood A is mostly a bunch of expensive boutique clothiers and almost all of their customers are wealthy women. It turns out (and I might be totally wrong about this specific case) that nearly all wealthy American women do not suffer from conditions that would require them to ever need short notice immediate access to a bathroom (eg, IBS). But this is not true of the wider American population. How many bathrooms should be in neighborhood A?
Then suppose that over time neighborhood A shifts from being mostly boutique clothiers to restaurants frequented by middle class tourists. Now how many bathrooms should be in neighborhood A?
So, I’m just looking for clarification on precisely what problem/goal the comment is addressing.
And so that my comment isn’t just harassing you for clarification, I like the idea of building bathrooms in places that would not crowd out other businesses, but what about re-zoning (maybe “re-zoning” isn’t the right term) parts of the sidewalk so that entrepreneurs could setup bathroom businesses on it?
I think in general it’s mostly 1); obviously “infinite perfect bathroom availability everywhere” isn’t a realistic goal, so this is about striking a compromise that is however more practical than the current situation. For things like these honestly I am disinclined to trust private enterprise too much—especially if left completely unregulated—but am willing to concede that it’s not my main value. Obviously I wouldn’t want the sidewalk to be entirely crowded out by competing paid chemical toilets though, that solves one problem but creates another.
Since the discussion here started around homelessness, and homeless people obviously wouldn’t be able to pay for private bathrooms (especially if these did the obvious thing for convenience and forgo coins in exchange for some kind of subscription service, payment via app, or such), I think the best solution would be free public bathrooms, and I think they would “pay themselves” in terms of gains in comfort and cleanliness for the people living in the neighborhood. They should be funded locally of course. Absent that though, sure, I think removing some barriers to private suppliers of paid for bathroom services would still be better than this.
Then I believe that I understand your previous comment, so I’m going to respond to your proposed solutions.
I’m not sure where you live, but as others have pointed out (and as you are aware of), some cities and states (including California according to Wikipedia) ban pay toilets. If this ban was lifted, then would you expect the public bathroom situation to meaningfully improve?
(And I grant that this doesn’t address your concerns about people who cannot afford to use paid toilets.)
I agree that these are important questions (also, is it illegal for a cafe to charge someone just to use the bathroom? and, have any cafes tried to offer this service?). Before anyone takes any public policy action I would want them to get to the bottom of these matters.
These seem to be plausible hypotheses to me. Also, cafe entrepreneurs may just not have had the idea to offer a ‘Use Bathroom’ service. And insofar that they are interested in making money, that may overcome a desire to not do something weird.
I agree that this might be the best solution. I’m generally skeptical of government services (although many municipalities do IMO an okay-ish job of delivering police, fire and water services) because they are not enmeshed in the market pricing mechanism (ie, they aren’t threatened by bankruptcy and they aren’t trying to make profit). But other commenters have argued that bathrooms are public goods and that free markets don’t do public goods well, so maybe I’m mistaken. I still haven’t thought about their argument.
Why can homeless people obviously not pay for private bathrooms? I’ve seen homeless people use phones, but maybe most of them don’t have phones. And I’ve seen homeless people have money (eg, panhandling then buying food), but maybe they don’t have enough, or maybe they don’t have credit or debit cards.
But maybe I’m missing the point and the real question is just, what about the people (regardless of what percentage of the homeless they are) who cannot afford to use private bathrooms? If the number is tiny, then just putting them in jail for shitting in the streets seems good enough to me. If it’s larger, then maybe more public bathrooms are necessary, or maybe the destitute should be (de facto) banned from certain areas of cities, or maybe something else, I’m not sure.