The Decibel - Why aren’t there more public toilets?

Episode Date: May 27, 2024

When nature calls, you have to answer, and quickly. The last thing you’d want is to walk several kilometers to find a public toilet.. And yet, public bathrooms aren’t easy to find in many cities across Canada. Overall, Canada has 18 public toilets per 100,000 people, which puts it in 15th place globally. And for those facing homelessness or a medical condition, public toilets are crucial for their ability to move freely through urban spaces.The Globe’s urban affairs reporter, Oliver Moore, explains why good public toilets are so hard to find, how the pandemic created a two-tier system of access, and what Canadian cities are doing to address the scarcity.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

I'm currently at Queen's Quay and Yonge Street. Yonge Street is probably considered like the heart of downtown Toronto. Queen's Quay is kind of on the water. It's a very touristy area. You know, you'd think you'd run into a bathroom. So I'm going to start walking slash biking and see what I can find. Producer Cheryl Sutherland went looking for a public toilet. In many places, they can be hard to find,

which makes it difficult for people to spend time out in a city. All right, I am now at Lower Sherbourne Street, which is where I'm going to turn up to go to the Globe and Mail Centre. But there is, in fact, like a very, I would say architecturally, very interesting looking bathroom. I guess it's a public bathroom. I'm going to check it out, see if it's open. Oh, it is open. Bathroom found. So from where I was to where I biked, it's about a kilometre away, so. You got to go. And you also don't know the city very well. You might be sort of walking around aimlessly, hoping to run into one.

And a kilometer is not exactly close. Since everyone needs bathrooms, why aren't they more available? And frankly, why aren't they less gross? The Globe's urban affairs reporter, Oliver Moore, is on the show to talk about why it's so difficult to have good public toilets and how cities in Canada are trying to build better bathrooms. I'm Maina Karaman-Wilms, and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Oliver, great to have you here. Pleasure.

This is a very basic question, but I think we need to define it off the top. What exactly is a public toilet? Very basic, important question. Not actually that easy to define. I would say that a public toilet is one that is publicly accessible to anyone. And that sounds like I'm doing a bit of a circular logic here, but it should be a toilet

that anyone can go into under any circumstances. It shouldn't be a toilet where if there's a person at the gate who doesn't like the look of you, you can't go in. So I think what a lot of people think of as quasi-public toilets, the toilet at the mall, the toilet at a Starbucks, those are definitely not public toilets because there's a staff member there who can say, hey, you're allowed in, you're not allowed in. There's other places that are more ambiguous. You know, let's say a library. I would say a library is a public toilet because it's a publicly run institution. They're not going to keep someone out because they look a little scruffy. Though some libraries do have security features. And so

there is a barrier to get in even to get access to the toilet. You know, somewhere like St. Lawrence Market in Toronto, I'd say probably is because it's a city-run institution. The Forks in Winnipeg feels a lot like St. Lawrence Market, but it's actually run by a not-for-profit. There could be different rules applied in a place like that than a place like St. Lawrence Market. On the face of it, they all look the same.

They're not. I mean, there's a great Seinfeld episode where George Costanza is bragging that, give me any intersection, I can tell you the best public toilet nearby. Anywhere in the city. Anywhere in the city, I'll tell you the best public toilet. Okay. 54th and 6th. Sperry Rand Building, 14th floor, Morgan Apparel. Mention my name, she'll give you the key. Oh my God. Now that is clearly not a public toilet because you have to know it's there. You have to go to the 14th floor. But the truth is we all have these little hacks.

I won't say what they are because these are my hacks. Those are your secrets. There's a faculty at U of T that has fantastic bathrooms. And I'm aware of this. There's a hotel not far from the Eaton Center that has great lobby bathrooms. But I can go in there and use them. I'm a middle class, middle-aged guy. Not everybody can go in.

Those aren't public bathrooms, even if I happen to know about them and can use them. Yeah, this is interesting because a lot of middle class people, right, we have access to these spaces, like you're saying, like a Starbucks, like a faculty at U of T, that if you kind of know where those are, you can access them. But not everyone has that amount of access. If we're talking about then public toilets specifically, Oliver, so things like a library or in a park, who is running them, I guess, those kind of public toilets? I mean, the library would be the library service. And so I think they are public, but they wouldn't normally be counted as among a city's public toilets. I mean, Toronto has about 100 library branches. I think it's 102 now. Then separately, Toronto has about 300 public toilets that are outside community centers. And so I think we're looking at three different numbers here.

The ones that are inside community centers that may be closed for many hours of the day, the ones at libraries for their own separate hours, and the ones that are actually out in the wild as it were. And so different organizations or different government bodies would take care of them, but there's different types of public toilets, even if they're all public toilets. Okay. And this, again, seems kind of obvious, but why are they so essential to have in urban spaces? Why do we need them around the city? There's a term that advocates use, and it's called the bladder's leash. It's basically how far can you go before you need a toilet?

And that's different for everybody. It's different for a senior. It's different for a child, for a man, for a woman, a pregnant woman, a not pregnant woman. But everyone has that leash on some level. And so having public toilets available, it's a little bit like having water available. You can only go so long without water. Once you've drunk water, you can only go so long without a public toilet. So if you don't have these things, you don't have sort of free

and unfettered use of the city because at some point you're going to have to either buy water and then later get rid of water. Without those things, you're ultimately hamstrung. And I've certainly talked to seniors who say they won't go for a walk or an outing unless they know where a public toilet is, or they will not go for past a certain distance because they know that they can get back home if they need to. And so those people have a very short bladder sleeve. Some people have a very long one, and they may not think about this because they're young and healthy and great, but not everybody's in that position. And the pandemic actually really exposed a lot of the way our system works here with public toilets, right, Oliver?

Can you tell me about that? What did we learn from the pandemic? A lot of people started using places like Starbucks as public toilets. A lot of those businesses were closed down during the pandemic. And it really exposed that without those, this is what the options are. And the options are public toilets. And in many cases, most cases, they're not very good. But a lot of people who weren't getting into the malls, weren't getting into the McDonald's,

they weren't getting into those places beforehand, that's all they ever had. And we also, I guess, saw that in a way maybe many people hadn't seen it before. Can we look at Canada as a whole? Do we have numbers about how many public toilets we have as a country? Not overall. I mean, some of the numbers, city by city, you can look at city websites, you can get them. How we rank globally, a lot of the methodology is not great or it's fairly opaque, the methodology. But we'll look at the number per city first because that's relatively straightforward because the city's published some of this data. Toronto, as I mentioned earlier, has about 300 of them that are not in community centers.

Vancouver has 105, almost all are in parks. That's relevant because if you're in a park, particularly if you have a young child, it's great that you have a public toilet there. But when you're just moving through the city and doing your normal rhythms of city life, you're not always in a park. That's not the only place they're needed. Calgary has 49 in parks. It's unclear if there's others elsewhere.

I think when I talked to someone in Calgary, they said they've had limited success with standalone toilets. Ottawa has 177. There's an advocacy group there that says, got to go. And they say only 22 success with standalone toilets. Ottawa has 177 advocacy group there says got to go. And they say only 22 of those are downtown. And there are no signs pointing them, which of course is another issue with public toilets is you have to know where they are. Right. It amazes me that Ottawa is a city with so many tourists would not have one,

more public toilets downtown and two, signs all over the place saying go that direction. Overall, Canada has 18 public toilets per 100,000 people. And that puts it in 15th place globally, which is ahead of the UK, which is 15 per 100,000. But it's way behind Iceland, which is the leader, 56, and Switzerland, 46. Now you can say those are small countries, rich countries. It's not necessarily a fair comparison. But Australia, which is often in many ways seen as a comparator to Canada, it is fifth overall. They have 37 toilets per 100,000. We have 18. So we have a ways to go, I would say. Yeah, we could be doing a little bit better here. So let's talk about, I guess, what's holding us back here. What are the barriers that prevent us

from actually implementing them? Well, it's a few things. One is that they are costly. They're costly to install. They're costly to winterize and allow you to be around. And they are costly. They're costly to install, they're costly to winterize and allow you around, and they're costly to operate. And they are often damaged. But I think part of it is there's this great waspy squeamishness about bodily function. I mean, I've covered city issues on and off for years, and it almost never comes up at city councils. Usually it's because some activist group, which is maybe like three people, and bless them that they're doing it because no one else is doing it. They'll kind of force it on the agenda. I think people just don't like thinking about it. They don't like talking about bodily function.

They don't like that it's there, basically. It's kind of taboo, isn't it? It is. You know, I even look at like a lot of the advertising. You've got like the toilet paper ad and it's like some bear. What's a bear got to do with toilet paper, you know? Or ads for menstrual products are like masters of euphemism. It's like the blue liquid. Yeah, or like everyone's dancing around with toilet paper, you know? Or ads for menstrual products are like masters of euphemism. It's like the blue liquid.

Yeah, or like everyone's dancing around in white pants, you know? It's just, it's still now a taboo topic, even after, you know, Victorian era has been over for 120-what years. So, okay. So, I guess part of the barrier, yes, is that it's not really a topic that we want to talk about. And as a result, it's not really popular always for politicians to, you know, to advocate for it. But let's also talk about some of these other barriers. So we mentioned cost here. How much are these things costing? For perspective, there's an outfit called Portland Loo in the Oregon City of Portland. And they do a very bare bones, austere public toilet, unheated water, the sink is outside, and it's still a few hundred thousand to build it. And

then you have to have a spot to put it and you have to plumb it. I mean, in Winnipeg, just north of downtown, there's a quite grand public toilet that was built about two years ago. It's coming up on its second anniversary. Expensive, it costs $875,000 to build, but it's quite nice. It's striking, it's stylish, it's working very well. And after two years, it's in remarkably good condition. But that's a fair amount of money. Part of it is that it has to be kind of indestructible. It has to get a lot of use. A public bathroom gets way more use than a home bathroom. And it's going to be built for more use. It's got to be durable. It's got to be rugged. And that, unfortunately, part of that plays into why they're inhospitable. And I think it's one of the things

with every individual action that resulted in that very inhospitable play is how to reason at the time whether you sort of agreed with it or not. I mean, one of the reasons I'm told that mirrors were taken out is because men were using them to cruise, just to meet other men for sex in the washrooms. You know, shelves were taken out

because people were apparently laying out lines of drugs on them. You know, toilet seats were taken out because people were smashing them. Each one of those actions has a defensible reason in the moment. I mean, arguable, but defensible. There's a reason why they did it.

But the end result is you have a public washroom that you kind of don't want to go into. I think this is an interesting point, though, that you're hitting. Because, I mean, when we think about public toilets, honestly, we think about them being kind of gross. They're not always inviting. Sometimes we're worried about safety, right, when we enter those bathrooms. So these are valid concerns, though, too. Oh, for sure.

And one of the features of the Portland Loo I mentioned a moment ago is that the walls are louvered so you can get privacy, and they don't go to the ground. So you get privacy, but you can see if there's someone else in there. Because one of the concerns many people have is they go to a public toilet, they're not sure what they're going to find inside. And it's not an invalid concern. One way to get around that historically would have been to have an attendant. You have to pay for an attendant, of course. Another way is to stop seeing public toilets as something that only poor people use. And it's a bit of a circular argument, but if they're nicer, they attract a broader constituency that then takes care of them and makes sure they're kept

nice and advocates for their behalf at City Hall. It's an ideal world, but Calgary is trying with something like that in a project in the East Village part of downtown where they're installing four bathroom stalls and they're associating it with a pickleball court. And the idea being that they'll have enough people around. It's kind of like the Jane Jacobs eyes on the street thing. They'll have enough people around that the toilets will be sort of kept in better condition and treated better. Yeah, that's an interesting way of kind of getting around that problem then. A lot of our public toilets too, especially the ones in the parks and stuff, they're closed during winter. Why is that? Well, the simplest answer is that pipes are not winterized. Why the pipes are not winterized,

of course, is the real question. And I think most of it was that it was the cheapest way to do it. And they thought people would not use the parks in the winter. So it's fine. And I think that over time, it also became something that was not a priority to fix because if they were open all year and all night, homeless people would shelter in them. So rather than deal with the fact that homeless people have nowhere to go, it's easier to close the toilets. I mean, the argument being it's easier to keep some people out if you keep everybody out.

But then the end result is nobody's got a toilet. We'll be back in a moment. Oliver, can we talk about the history of public toilets a little bit? Because this is, I think this is a really interesting part to get into here. When did we start to see the first public toilets in cities and what did those look like? I mean, you were way back, go super trad, you know, the Romans had public toilets after a fashion. But in the modern terms, we're looking at the 19th century, European cities started installing flushing public toilets. And they were, in some cases, they were pretty grand.

And this was an era of sort of grand engineering works. You know, a train station was grand, a bridge was grand, and a public toilet was supposed to be a nice, a respectable thing. I mean, to a point, it was only for men because women who were out were either working class and were not necessarily on the radar of the people around the city, or they were women of just distinction who were assumed that they would, to our point earlier about taboo, they would do their filthy, unimaginable business somewhere else, meaning at home, or in a chamber pot in their carriage. And so the public toilets were only for, I guess, the men who would just seem to be brutes,

who if they're not a public toilet, they would simply urinate everywhere, which was perhaps true. And flipping ahead to modern times, there is an element of that that still persists in how public toilets are designed in cities now. In many cities, there's way more facilities for men than for women. And the best theory I've ever heard on that, and I think it rings true, is that particularly in the evening, particularly in the club parts of cities, men, if there are no public toilet, will simply urinate somewhere.

Women are less likely to do so. So rather than accept the fact that women, for biological reasons, need more toilets than men need, they've still looked at it the other way and said, men are more likely to do this behavior we don't like if we don't give them a toilet, so we'll give them a toilet. And women get short shift. So you just, yeah, you have half the population there that really just does not have access then. I mean, again, going back to European cities, some of them will have these sort of pop-up urinals that are in the ground during the day and in the evening to deal with crowds of people who have possibly had a whole lot to drink. They will pop up and they'll have kind of a very minimally private

urinal on each side. So you have four of them, which is all well and good if you're a guy. And if you're a woman, you're so well. Yeah. I've seen those and it's just easier for them then to provide toilets for men so that they end up doing that. But then, yeah, as we said, half the population is kind of left without. I mean, it does take more space to put in a stall than a urinal. That's true. That's without. I mean, it does take more space to put in a stall than a urinal. That's true. That's geometry. I mean, universal toilets are one way to get around that.

But again, they take space, but it does get at the inequity of the current situation. But I think that the future, in many cases, is going to be universal toilets because they clarify that issue of who has how much access. Everyone gets the same amount. Tell me about this new public toilet in Winnipeg. It's a public toilet that incorporates what they call wraparound services. And so you can go in there. Anyone can go in there. The clientele is largely people who are vulnerable, who are homeless. And it's very clean. It's bright. It's welcoming. And anyone can go in there and they can

just use the toilet. And that's it. They can go in and use the toilet. But when they go in, they may be asked by the staff, man, there's attendants there, how they're doing. Just casual question. They're not interrogated. There's not an interview, but a little bit of how you're doing. And if they want it, they can get advice about shelters. They can get safer supply paraphernalia. There's a foot washing station because particularly, well, for everyone, but particularly for homeless people, foot care is a very important thing. So they can use as much or as little of the service as they want. And some of the numbers are remarkable. They sort of assisted so many people. I mean, thousands of people a month. Again, most of them are just using the toilet, but they've also got all these other things they offer. And it's considered so

successful, at least, that one of the Winnipeg counselors said he wanted to have a program, sort of like almost a stopgap program where that's the only public toilet in Winnipeg councilor said he wanted to have a program, almost a stopgap program where that's the only public toilet in Winnipeg. He wanted to say anywhere, public buildings, stadiums, government buildings, anything that gets either government support or is part of a government could open their toilets to the public. A different councilor said that wasn't a good idea because without the support, it wouldn't work. You'd have people potentially overdosing there and then a staff member wasn't ready for it to help. And it's an interesting idea because in a way, it seems like perfect is the enemy of the good, that if you don't have this wonderful toilet that kind of has all these features, you don't have any. And you could have a lot of just regular toilets for

that same price. The counter argument is that those regular toilets, someone goes into them, they overdose in them, and no one's there to see them. No one's there to help them. Or going back to Calgary, they had some of the standalone torrents. They found they got vandalized a lot. So the question then is, is it better to spend more money on something that seems kind of elaborate and way too complex, but have a better result than to spend less money on something that's more simple and more austere and maybe doesn't work?

Yeah. So there's kind of that more steer and maybe doesn't work. Yeah. So there's kind of that choice that cities then have to make. I mean, I use the word new, but this toilet has actually been open for a couple of years, new as relative. It opened in June 2022. And you said it was welcoming, Oliver. And I just want to come back to that point because that is not usually the word we associate with public toilets, right?

So what is this one like? It is not normally a word I would use for the public toilet. First of all, it's bright. It's well lit. There's large glass. It's yellow on the inside, which kind of makes it feel a bit cheery. And this is, I can't overstate this, it's scrupulously clean. But it's not clean like it smells like harsh chemicals clean. It's just clean. It's remarkable. But I would say that it's welcoming. I mean, I talked to a guy who's the team lead for the project. He said one of his proudest moments is when someone who's not part of the general population, not part of the vulnerable homeless population, and he used

examples of the guy with the Tesla and the $1,000 shoes, or he said the mom and her young kids. And he said he loves that because then it's everybody's toilet. And I think that's it. If it's welcoming to everybody, it's working. That's a genuine public toilet then. Yeah. One thing, another thing the gentleman I spoke to there, he said he was very proud of has been, there's no damage to this thing. And he sees that very much as it's community ownership is taking place. Because that is an area that has, if you just walk the streets, and many Winnipeggers don't walk that area because they are scared of it, it's a lot of damage. And so the fact that there's been no damage at this facility, I think speaks to his point. I think

he's probably right that there is a community ownership there that keeps eyes on it. People care about it. So they take care of it. Just in our last few minutes here, Oliver, I guess it seems like cost is a huge part of this discussion. And because politicians don't feel the pressure to create more public toilets, this ends up being an unpopular cost too, right? So I guess I wonder, is there a way for private companies to fill this gap? Like if they had to let everyone use their facilities, everyone could go into a Starbucks or a Tim Hortons, would that maybe help solve this problem? It could. I mean, you do run into risks of that sort of gatekeeper effect. I mean,

even if legally everyone has to be allowed in, I think it would be very easy to imagine scenarios where some people are allowed in and some people are not. It could work, but I think there's the risk that this would be a way of the government sloughing off its own responsibility to a situation that maybe wouldn't necessarily work that well. And the interesting comparison is why should the government not take care of this? Because governments build parks, government put park benches in those parks, they build sidewalks and roads and all these things. And the toilet, for whatever historic reason, has been seen as a different thing somehow than all those other things.

That's not to say that the private sector can't play some role. I mean, there's a program in Germany where private business is open to the public. And by all accounts, it seems to work very well. There is a small-scale program in North America where people with Crohn's and colitis and irritable bowel syndrome and situations like that can get kind of a card and then the business will put a decal on the window saying, you know, you can come here, which obviously helps people in this situation. It does seem a little bit like you're kind of like in kindergarten saying, please, can I go to the bathroom?

Do they have like a membership card or something? Yeah, you kind of show your card and say, you know, I'm allowed in. So I think there's a role for private sector potentially, but I don't know that the answer is the public sector hands it off because there has been some attempts at that. And I would say they've never really worked. Can we talk about that? When has it not worked, I guess? Well, a number of years ago, cities, including Canada, Toronto, New York tried the same thing. They tried to effectively say, we'll give a huge large advertising contract to a company. And in return, they'll provide a bunch of street furniture, street furniture, meaning benches, garbage cans, that sort of thing.

And also these automated self-cleaning public toilets you've seen in some other countries. And that just hasn't worked out. I think Toronto was supposed to get 20 of these toilets. I think there's two of them. I think New York was supposed to get about the same number. Last I read, there was five of them. What about pay toilets? I've seen those in Europe, right?

Could that help with... If we're talking about a cost issue as well, is this a potential solution? It could. I mean, one of the concerns that is usually raised with that is that most people can afford a euro or a dollar in Canada. But if you're poor enough that that dollar is meaningful, you're probably going to save it for something else, even if you could actually afford the dollar, and then you end up with the problem of people urinating and defecating in the street. Which kind of brings us full circle back to what is public because it's easy to say, I can go into Starbucks and I can afford the dollar. My quality of life is not diminished

if you have a paid toilet, but my quality of life is diminished if the streets of Toronto are people defecating and urinating them. So the quality of life of everybody's improved if everybody has access. Just very lastly here, Oliver, then we've talked about a lot of issues, but how do we, I guess, make this more equitable? What needs to change here for Canada to get more public toilets? Well, this might be the one silver lining of Canada's aging population. We hear a lot about the great health burden that's coming up and the pension problems and the worker to retiree ratios, all that is very valid. But it's possible that, you know, I talked earlier about the bladder's leash. It's possible that as Canada ages and the number of seniors

gets bigger and bigger, and we have politically active seniors, it is possible they will push harder for more public toilets because they will see a need that they didn't see 10, 20 years ago. Oliver, great to have you here. Thanks for doing this. Always a pleasure. That's it for today. I'm Maina Karaman-Wilms. Our intern is Aja Sauter. Our producers are Madeline White, Cheryl Sutherland, and Rachel Levy-McLaughlin. David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Cheung is our senior producer, and Matt Frainer is our managing editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you tomorrow.