Map of a suburban "porchfest" music event in Suburban Montgomery County, Maryland lists restrooms

-- WoodmoorStock 2026 community music festival, Montgomery County Maryland

When you get older, or at least if you're on diuretics, you notice more about whether or not public restrooms are accessible.  

Here in Salt Lake, many convenience gas stations do have them but equally as many do not.  You can count on grocery stores though. And fast food restaurants and libraries (if one is close by).

In DC, as needed I used to use restrooms in the hotels while I was biking from place to place.

The men's restroom is closed. I ended up peeing behind the building, Brigham City Rest Area, I-15, Box Elder County, Utah | Tourist Services, Public Art

They should have brought in porta potties.  You see the world differently when one of your medications for heart disease is a diuretic (I actually take two different ones).

It might have been because the building seems like it is still under construction on the interior?  

The building was closed but the restrooms are to the side and were theoretically open.  The women's and a family restroom.  Men were directed to the family restroom.  I couldn't wait the line was long.

Many of the convenience stores in the Intermountain region have restrooms, as they are positioned to serve longer distance travelers.  Even in cities, Maverik convenience stores have restrooms.

But we stopped at one place, two stalls, one each for men and women.  

The line was so long, I decided it was easier to go to the gas station on the other side of the freeway--where the wait was blissfully short.

Alas, the Texaco brand is no longer in business.  They marketed clean restrooms as a featured element.  This ad is from 1941.

The Brigham City rest stop had some decent amenities, including a pollinator garden and a small fenced in pet area for small dogs.

The pollinator garden is an extension of my concept that we should plan for public art when building structures in parks, but in public buildings more generally ("Gaps in Parks Master Planning: Part Five | Planning for Public Art as an element of park facilities"). 

This case being purposeful landscaping that satisfies multiple constituencies, even insects (fauna).

Some municipalities like NYC have a percent for art program where they incorporate public art into new buildings.  This should be extended to landscaping.

In Utah, many public and private properties have nice plantings as part of their parking lots.  Years ago, I was blown away when then Mayor Sheila Dixon of Baltimore had herbs that people could pick as part of the landscaping at City Hall.

The Pollinator Garden at the Brigham City Rest Area on I-15 in Box Elder County, Utah was planted recently.

But it doesn't have to be complicated.  An elementary school in Hailey, Idaho has a small mural on the backside of the building.

And they've incorporated public art into bus shelter stops on Woodside Boulevard, which is served by the Mountain Rides Transit System, which like buses in a lot of resort areas (Sun Valley) is free, primarily as a transportation demand management strategy for employee transportation, to reduce demand for parking vis a vis "higher value tourists".  Also see "Bus stops as neighborhood focal points and opportunities for placemaking."

Another way to think about it is what Project for Public Spaces calls the "Power of 10" and how at different scales--city, neighborhood, destination, place--you need 10 things to do.

This Hailey bus stop also has a Little Free Library--and I snagged a couple myself.  

So three things to do (wait for the bus, look at the public art, browse the Little Free Library.  Considering this wasn't a primary arterial, that's pretty good.

Learning from anywhere and everywhere.  When I first got involved in the Main Street commercial district revitalization program in the DC neighborhood of H Street NE (""The community development approach and the revitalization of DC's H Street corridor: congruent or oppositional approaches?"), members from various programs across the city got some support to attend the national conference.  Early on it was in Baltimore.  

Most of the people from DC's "urban programs" were haughty with the "small town" problems, believing they had nothing to learn from them.  I argued that the programs weren't "all of DC" but smaller commercial districts outside of Downtown, and they were equal or smaller in size compared to many of the other programs.

I've always had the attitude I can learn from anywhere.  Ketchum, Idaho, where the Sun Valley Ski Resort is, and nearby towns like Hailey had plenty of best practice and/or provocative ideas that hit me at a good time, when I was in the midst of writing a large grant for a playground for Sugar House Park in Salt Lake.

My original concept had everything but the kitchen sink.  I joked there was a fine line between a playground and an amusement park.  Urban design features in both towns, plus Sun Valley, helped me look at my concept with fresher eyes, and the recognition that it needed "editing" and refinement.

Some elements make less sense now.  Other elements take on a new prominence.  But still editing and "simplification" of a sort--still a complicated project, but less cluttered, less full of stuff, and "cleaner" and better.

Man peeing in hiding because there are no restrooms

This man is stopping to pee in the trees on Jordan River Parkway at 1700 South in Salt Lake City.  This is a vote for those Throne restrooms.

The funny thing is with the new restrooms at Glendale Regional Park, no more than one mile behind him, he could have peed there.

But unless you know the park, which is brand new and in fact parts are still under construction, you wouldn't know because there isn't pedestrian or bicycle wayfinding signage on 1700 South that lists restrooms.

It makes me realize more than ever we need to add restroom proximity to wayfinding signage.

There is wayfinding signage on the Jordan River Parkway--although it's often out of date as here it points to "The Waterpark" as a destination and that's now the Glendale Regional Park.  It could highlight the restroom too.  It can be words like on the sign below, or the pictograms used in highway wayfinding signage systems.

Top: Jordan River Parkway Sign.  Wayfinding signage, Pioneer Historic Byway, Soda Springs, Idaho

Middle Top: new restroom at Glendale Regional Park.

Middle Bottom:  pictogram signage, Eight Dollar Mountain & Jeffery Pine Loop Trail, BLM

Bottom: Legend, Bicycle Map, Iowa State Dept of Transportation.  Wayfinding sign, Salesforce Park, SF

But there isn't signage like that on bike routes.  But it would be easy to do by adding it to the bottom of a sign, reserving the bottom section of the sign for "services."  I'm pretty sure I thought about that when writing about "Making Cycling Irresistible" but it's been almost 20 years.

The Throne automated restroom could be perfect for other spots on the trail.  

I don't love their design which could feel discordant in a nature setting.  But maybe just having a nature focused mural on three sides would make it fit better.

They are good because they're small and they don't need expensive connections to the water and sewage networks.  They have that self contained through tanks, albeit they have to be emptied and refilled regularly.

Public restrooms: single versus multiple-occupant

DC isn't very big on public restrooms, although some federal parks have them ("Where Did All the Public Bathrooms Go?," Bloomberg).  

This is common for many cities--no public restrooms.  Early on cities had public restrooms and baths because much of housing did not.  As bathrooms became more prevalent in housing and as local government budgets declined and demands increased, provision of public restrooms was one of the first services to be eliminated.

That's why I'd been surprised moving to Salt Lake City that the larger (termed "regional") public parks have restrooms.  But other cities out West too, bigger like Boise, and smaller like Ennis, Montana or at trailheads in the Wasatch Front like Bell Canyon ("New trailhead expected to help grow one of Salt Lake County's more popular trails," KSL) which has a great facility and definitely no concerns about the homeless because it is so remote.

Of course, the bigger cities, with homelessness, a propensity for vandalism, higher usage, low investment in facilities, and lack of attendants, have a problem in maintaining quality public facilities ("The Disappearing Public Toilet," Seton Hall Law Review, 2020).

"Fancy restroom" in Bryant Park, New York City.

In recent decades, NYC has effectively restored quality public restrooms, at least in Manhattan but largely this comes from significant investment and the provision of attendants ("New York's most luxurious public restroom just got a $300,000 makeover," CNN). 

And it's often done by business improvement districts and/or parks conservancies.

Although the NYC Parks Department operates a massive number of restrooms in all five boroughs.  

Including some very attractive facilities, including a combination pavilion-restroom structure for a new regional park in Far Rockaway. 

The NYC Parks facilities are an absolute illustration of my point that the quality of public facilities (civic assets) communicates whether or not we value the public and the civic commons.  NYC shows that they do.

Single versus multiple occupant public restrooms. It turns out the trade refers to single-occupant restrooms versus multi-occupant.  

The latter are shared, like in a typical office building, with multiple stalls and sinks (+ urinals for the men).  Single-occupant are lockable single units.

Single occupant restrooms.  Many places have installed them, as they are often specified as part of street furniture/advertising projects ("City Room City Room Blogging From the Five Boroughs In 9 Years of Work, Just 3 Public Toilets Go Live," New York Times, 2014, "JCDecaux wins San Francisco's iconic Street Furniture contract").  Seemingly, they are cheaper to maintain.

Portland created their own version, called the Portland Loo, which opens the bottom and top of the structure to the elements, as a way to reduce negative behavior.  But that facility isn't practical in colder climates.

Vandalism.  The problem with the lockable single units is that they are big enough to be used by groups, and people can cause a lot of mayhem in a short period of time.  And there is no oversight.

Salt Lake has standardized on single occupant facilities, and with the rise of homelessness and noxious use, as well as ever stressed budgets, the facilities are subject to misuse, closure, and even in the best of circumstances, are pretty grim.

Note that the suburbs have restroom facilities in parks too, and depending on how "urban" the places are, e.g. South Salt Lake versus Bell Canyon in Sandy, the facilities are equally or less subject to vandalism and misuse.

Policy and practice in public space management depending on the revitalization health of a community.  Many years ago, in evaluating the success of 8th Street SE in DC's Capitol Hill after a streetscape improvement ("Systematic neighborhood engagement," 2007), I came to realize that DC's rating of places: distressed; emerging; transitioning; healthy, could be applied at different scales and in different ways:

• comparing the residential versus the commercial sections of the neighborhood
  
• block by block within a district, and
  
• at the city scale, between districts.
  

Basically, the residential area was healthy before the streetscape investment while the commercial district lagged.  

The public investment in the streetscape communicated to property and business owners that it was worth investing in the commercial district, and the more attractive streetscape encouraged residents to patronize the businesses.

So the commercial district "caught up" to the already successful neighborhood.

But if the residential area hadn't already been high income, the length of time required to trigger revitalization would have been much longer, because property and business owners wouldn't have been primed to invest despite new public investment.

Points (2) and (3) are crucial and failure to consider them at the fine grained required is the cause of most failures in government policies and programs. By creating one size fits all programs, and not really understanding the nuances and details of a place, and the levers at your disposal, failure is more likely.

For example, emerging and distressed commercial districts aren't likely ready for street furniture, and need more assistance in developing organizational capacity, compared to healthy districts, or those in later stages of transition. 

Similarly, it's much harder to move distressed commercial districts up the ladder when the residential neighborhood is also distressed.

Applying public space management principles to restrooms.  When it comes to public restrooms, at least in cities, we have to recognize that the facilities are likely to receive a lot of use, and some of it will be mis-use, and we have to plan for and address this in advance.

I argue that in most center cities, the cheaper upfront cost of a single occupant facility comes at the expense of significantly more vandalism and noxious use.  (Not that multiple occupant facilities are immune to noxious use either.) And that despite the desire to provide the service, the quality of the service is wanting.

Not only should there be investments in public restrooms if you're committed to having them, but there should be design and other considerations made to decrease the likelihood of misuse.

Shared restrooms provide "natural surveillance" in a way that single occupant restrooms do not.

But even then, in today's circumstances, you still need to invest in "attendants" in all likelihood, to further reduce potential problems.

Design treatments/Public Art.  I also suggest, in an extension of the principles of design exhibited by Bryant Park, that rather than creating and maintaining grim value engineered public restrooms, it makes sense treating interiors and exteriors of restrooms in creative ways to increase a sense of ownership and wonder, and as a branding and identity element of parks and the network of civic assets more generally.

It's worth testing this to see if it has a measurable effect on the reduction of vandalism.

Resources. As with most every topic, it turns out there are great resources in the academic literature, from books to journal articles, and some cities have codified policies too.

-- Public washroom design and technical guidelines, City of Vancouver BC
-- "Building Safe Toilet Design into Shared Urban Space," Public Hygiene Lets Us Stay Human (PHLUSH)
-- Public toilet advocacy toolkit, PHLUSH
-- "Why Do Women Not Use the Bathroom? Women’s Attitudes and Beliefs on Using Public Restrooms," International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (2020)
-- "Female restrooms in the tourist destination: how the socio-spatial conditions of public toilets influence women’s perception of safety," Journal of Asian Architecture and Building Engineering (2022)

Other issues.  Access to restrooms for the homeless.  Transexual access (something I didn't bring up in the proposal at all).  Perception of safety and cleanliness and special needs for women.  I did include having menstruation products available as an element of the proposal.