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.