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.
Happy to be disagreed with, but I’m getting the sense that there are two non-overlapping rivalrous qualities to gov-funded publicly-accessible restrooms: capacity and upkeep.
It seems obvious to me that restrooms are rivalrous in terms of capacity, though I agree with philh that it’s weakly rivalrous. Either way, capacity feels less important re: “what’s the cost-benefit on the government building and funding public restrooms?”.
Even a single, clean stall available in an area would provide a huge QoL improvement for visitors to that area. Sure you can’t satisfy all demand with a single self-cleaning stall, but you can satisfy (I predict) 30-50% of demand! That seems like a huge win.
Upkeep seems like the actual issue here, which I believe is mostly independent of capacity. People aren’t generally getting feces on the walls because there’s a long wait time to get into the bathroom. They’re doing it for other, predetermined reasons that would be true whether there were one or one hundred stalls in a restroom.
My impression is that public restrooms largely don’t exist because of the assumption that those restrooms will have unusually high upkeep costs. Restrooms that you pay a quarter to use don’t make any meaningful money, the real price you’re paying is “proof you can engage literately with the world”, which (I predict) would significantly reduce upkeep cost expectations.
It seems like focusing on solving upkeep would mitigate the downsides of rivalrousness that make government-funded bathrooms unappealing to the government, and capacity is less important, if getting more gov-funded restrooms built and used is the goal.
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.
Happy to be disagreed with, but I’m getting the sense that there are two non-overlapping rivalrous qualities to gov-funded publicly-accessible restrooms: capacity and upkeep.
It seems obvious to me that restrooms are rivalrous in terms of capacity, though I agree with philh that it’s weakly rivalrous. Either way, capacity feels less important re: “what’s the cost-benefit on the government building and funding public restrooms?”.
Even a single, clean stall available in an area would provide a huge QoL improvement for visitors to that area. Sure you can’t satisfy all demand with a single self-cleaning stall, but you can satisfy (I predict) 30-50% of demand! That seems like a huge win.
Upkeep seems like the actual issue here, which I believe is mostly independent of capacity. People aren’t generally getting feces on the walls because there’s a long wait time to get into the bathroom. They’re doing it for other, predetermined reasons that would be true whether there were one or one hundred stalls in a restroom.
My impression is that public restrooms largely don’t exist because of the assumption that those restrooms will have unusually high upkeep costs. Restrooms that you pay a quarter to use don’t make any meaningful money, the real price you’re paying is “proof you can engage literately with the world”, which (I predict) would significantly reduce upkeep cost expectations.
It seems like focusing on solving upkeep would mitigate the downsides of rivalrousness that make government-funded bathrooms unappealing to the government, and capacity is less important, if getting more gov-funded restrooms built and used is the goal.