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.
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.