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.
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.