SF Public Toilets: Reason for Optimism

April, 2024: The $200,000 toilet in Noe Valley (Chron)

San Francisco was understandably mocked when a public toilet was estimated to cost $1.7 million. After contractors donated time and materials and specifications were scaled back, the toilet was completed for $200,000.

Based on that experience, San Francisco has streamlined future toilets and "small" public works projects:

Now officials say they’re able to build one toilet in Bernal Heights’ Precita Park for $262,000 — a huge savings. Officials said the project timeline will also be significantly reduced, shrinking from roughly 17 months to just nine...

The savings at Precita Park stem from the use of a prefabricated design and legislation around new cooperative purchasing rules introduced by then-Mayor London Breed in April that allow the city to purchase goods directly from suppliers. [Rec and Park spokesperson Tamara] Aparton told the Chronicle those rules changes mean the department can make several projects currently in the works cheaper to build, such as the new outdoor gym at Kelloch and Velasco Mini Park in Visitacion Valley and a turf field replacement at Raymond Kimbell Playground in the Western Addition.

Aparton said the cost savings for Precita Park’s bathroom should be “very” replicable across other projects.

Normally I'd be highly skeptical of their cost projections, but San Francisco officials should get the benefit of the doubt from the favorable outcome of last year's Noe Valley toilet project.

A Rare Public Works Project

Sometimes it's not the story itself but the reaction to the story that makes news. The completion of the infamous $1.7 million toilet for $200,000 occurred quietly last week.

The citizens of the Noe Valley neighborhood held a potty party on Sunday.

A group of acrobats juggled plungers. Children circled a maypole clutching long strands of toilet paper. Partygoers downed lemonade and chocolate cupcakes adorned with poop emojis. Organizer Leslie Crawford said the event, dubbed the “Toilet Bowl,” embraced the oddity of honoring an otherwise unremarkable public potty.

“This whole thing got so ridiculous, so why not be ridiculous?” Crawford said.

On second thought, a completed public works project that minimized waste is so rare that it is indeed worthy of celebration.

Way to Go, SF

The new $200,000 toilet in Noe Valley (Chron)

This is not exclusively a "dump on San Francisco" journal, though with so much material it's difficult to keep such posts down to, say, one a week. We didn't remark on the $1.7 million public toilet proposed in 2022, because there was little to add to all the derisive worldwide coverage.

The original plans were withdrawn, the project was scaled down, and the toilet is now operational for a mere $200,000.

The San Francisco toilet that made international news when a Chronicle column revealed its $1.7 million price tag, opened quietly on Monday morning, after installation and an inspection were completed.

The bathroom, which ultimately cost the city about 12% of the original estimate, is tasteful if underwhelming, with cinder block walls painted orange-red, standing sentry near the northeast entrance of the well-used public plaza where it now resides. With the loo open for business, Noe residents have gained two things: a place to go and San Francisco’s newest landmark, arguably the most famous toilet in the city’s history...

The cinder block walls’ fiery shade matches the chairs and playground slide in the plaza. There’s a sloped roof of corrugated metal and some light landscaping, small jasmine bushes next to a black trellis on either side of the bathroom’s exterior...

Inside the tight 50-square-foot bathroom there’s little to see except a single metal toilet, two metal railings and a fixture that fits three standard size rolls of toilet paper. (Will that even be enough to last the morning?) In true San Francisco fashion, something already appears broken: the hand sanitizer dispenser. “We apologize for any inconvenience, and we are working on the issue,” a Rec & Parks sign reads. (A sink and soap dispenser on the outside wall were in full operation.)

The late Herb Caen used to call San Francisco the "City that knows how." Perhaps one day it can earn back that title.

Prices Dropping to a Higher Plateau

A regular shopper at Costco, I was taken aback by the sight of Charmin toilet paper on sale.

Palettes and shelves of toilet paper had fluctuated between empty and threadbare since the beginning of the pandemic, and the markdown gave hope that the balance between production, inventory, and demand had somewhat normalized.

However, the sale price of $19.49 was about 10% higher than the comparable sale price at the end of 2019.

The price level of toilet paper, in fact everything, appears to have reached a higher, permanent plateau.

We were pleased to see that gas had dipped below $6 a gallon at the end of June. During our round trip to Seattle at the end of July the cost in California was $5.20, while in Washington it ranged between $4.50 and $4.80. In the Bay Area this week we paid $4.95 (picture).

I like the downward trend, but I doubt we'll ever see the $3.20/gallon we paid at the end of 2019 in a "normal" economy or the $2.80 at the end of 2020 when activity had slowed to a crawl. Like I said, a higher, permanent plateau.

Stanford is Going Down the Toilet

(Stanford Medical News)

The headline is literal, not metaphorical.

It’s a smart toilet. But not the kind that lifts its own lid in preparation for use; this toilet is fitted with technology that can detect a range of disease markers in stool and urine, including those of some cancers, such as colorectal or urologic cancers. The device could be particularly appealing to individuals who are genetically predisposed to certain conditions, such as irritable bowel syndrome, prostate cancer or kidney failure, and want to keep on top of their health...

[The late Dr. Sanjiv] Gambhir’s toilet is an ordinary toilet outfitted with gadgets inside the bowl. These tools, a suite of different technologies, use motion sensing to deploy a mixture of tests that assess the health of any deposits. Urine samples undergo physical and molecular analysis; stool assessment is based on physical characteristics.

The toilet automatically sends data extracted from any sample to a secure, cloud-based system for safekeeping. In the future, Gambhir said, the system could be integrated into any health care provider’s record-keeping system for quick and easy access.

(WSJ image)

Companies are already working on bringing smart toilets to market: [bold added]

Some smart toilets are geared toward helping doctors monitor patients with chronic conditions or heightened risk for certain diseases, whereas other companies aim to sell the toilets—with price tags in the hundreds or thousands of dollars—directly to consumers as a tool to track or improve their own health and wellness.

Researchers at Stanford School of Medicine have outfitted a toilet bowl with cameras and trained a machine-learning algorithm to analyze the waste against a diagnostic chart. The toilet can also track the flow, color and volume of urine. It is equipped with a urine test-strip similar to a pregnancy test that detects specific molecules that can provide insight into a person’s health. To tell users apart, the toilet has both a fingerprint scan when a person flushes and a scan of their anus’s characteristics, or an anal print.

No doubt we'll have to suffer through smart-toilet humor as these products are rolled out. Once we get those out of our system, market acceptance should be rapid--no more taking stool samples, toddlers will enjoy toilet-training games, instantaneous feedback on a variety of health indicators, etc.

But "anal printing"? That is where I draw the line.

Tempest in a Chamber Pot

The portable toilets have hand-washing stations (Chron)

The cost of solving the homeless problem ($75,000? $336,000?) seems astronomical when it's analyzed on a per-person basis, especially compared to the living expenses of the average person.

But it's not surprising when one considers the slow-as-molasses nature of government. Look at the dithering over portable toilets: [bold added]

The fight over toilets gets at the bigger question of how the city with the most expensive housing in the country should respond to the issues of visible homelessness and soiled sidewalks. Some argue providing amenities like toilets encourages sleeping on the streets if and when other options are available, while others say a place to relieve oneself is a basic human dignity required to keep the streets clean when affordable housing isn’t yet accessible.

The crux of the conflict: toilets encourage homeless camps, but they help keep streets less disgusting. Both arguments could be correct, so for heaven's sake, choose one or the other, envision the consequences and deal with those too. After all, you have $billions to, er, waste. (For the record, I'm in favor of keeping the toilets, even putting more out there.)

About the cost:

It costs from just over $100,000 to nearly $632,000 a year to staff and rent a toilet, depending on the kind of bathroom and how many hours it’s open a day.

On a monthly basis San Francisco spends $8,300 to $53,000. Here are the rental rates posted by a port-a-potty company.

VIP restroom for rent

$75-$100 per month for a Standard Portable Toilet with once a week service

$100-$125 per month for a Handicap Accessible Toilet

$50-$80 per weekend for a Special Event Unit

$700 - $1,800 per weekend for a VIP Luxury Trailer

Even allowing for continuous monitoring and cleaning, it's difficult to get to a toilet expense of $53,000 per month, but it's not surprising since the City is in charge.

Flashback: the Navy spent $600 on toilet seats in 1985 in what became a mini-scandal. (They were engineered for P3 Orion planes.) Ah, the good old days.

Bottom Story of the Day

Our TP inventory

Last spring we were concerned about the Fear of Running Out. We and millions of others apparently have stopped worrying.

Drop in Toilet-Paper Demand Prompts Kimberly-Clark’s Worst Sales Drop in a Decade

It is a sharp reversal from 2020 when the world’s consumers, stuck at home and hyper focused on cleaning, drove a 6% increase in organic sales for the year as they loaded up on paper towels, cleaning products and other household staples. Consumer-tissue sales last year rose 14%...

Demand for toilet paper shot up in the outbreak’s initial weeks, doubling in the second week of March, and remained elevated throughout most of 2020. Americans spent more than $11 billion on toilet paper last year, up from $9 billion in a typical year, according to NielsenIQ. If the current pace holds, 2021 sales would be less than $9 billion.

We carry our stock of paper goods at higher levels than we used to and no longer wait for a sale to load up, partly because there are fewer sales anyway. This is the same psychology that makes us fill our gas tanks at the one-half mark instead of waiting for the needle to drop below a quarter-tank.

When Kimberly-Clark and Procter & Gamble start having sales on TP again, then we know we're back to normal.

Support Your Local Merchant

Though continuing to shop at Amazon and Costco, I have diverted more spending dollars toward supermarkets, drug stores, and other physical retail outlets. Sure, the latter is more expensive, but while saving money is the most important thing, it's not the only thing.

The stores provide local employment, immediate availability of goods, and a larger selection than Costco. I want to keep them in business; the negative externality of a half-empty mall detracts from our happiness and well-being.

And so it was that I found myself picking up a package of Hello Kitty toilet paper at the local 99 Ranch. Neither the brand nor the store has a national presence.

30 rolls for $20 wasn't an outrageous price. In fact the same quantity of Charmin costs $20 at the local Costco ($27.99 at Costco online).

I still give the nod to Charmin for the combination of strength, softness, and absorbency, but Hello Kitty TP was perfectly adequate.

And that's the bottom line.

A Miserable and Thankless Task

(Chronicle photo)

It's easy to make a joke here, but it's not funny to the City workers who have to deal with the problem: (bold added)

San Francisco workers say it’s hard enough cleaning up after the homeless, but having to share toilets with them is too much to bear...

Interviews with several Public Works staffers, who asked not to be named for fear of retribution, said that some of the 49 Pit Stop toilets installed by the city for use by the homeless and the public are at times downright scary.

“Someone heard banging coming from one of the toilets. When they unlocked it, they found a homeless man inside. He had been in the toilet all the way from the street to the yard,” [Theresa Foglio-Ramirez of Local Union 261] said. “If you are sanitizing after every use, how do you explain that?”

We approve of stories that criticize hypocritical politicians who won't use mass transit or send their kids to public school. Here we make an exception. These workers should not have to use public restrooms; they're not responsible for the mushrooming homeless population that befouls public spaces. The task is miserable and thankless enough.

The Chronicle had the good taste not to show pictures of the facilities in question. Like with horror movies, we're most frightened when the sights are left to our imaginations.

Why I Didn’t Flush the Urinal

Hint: this one makes a loud noise.

The guy on the toilet next to me was on the speakerphone talking to a girl. Yes, he ought to know better or maybe the girl didn’t care. But I wasn’t going to be the one to harsh his mellow by pulling the handle.

There are a lot of new trade offs that Emily Post never had to consider.

A Reasonable Request

They weren't highly absorbent anyway.

Outside a Neighbor's House

...a truck I never hope to see outside mine.

The Glow Has Yet to Grow

The technologist in our household affixed a motion-sensor to each water closet. As one approaches in the dark, a blue light switches on and guides one's aim. The risk of various bathroom accidents has been reduced, but I have to admit that the glow has yet to grow on me.

The coolness of the blue light suits night time, but during the Christmas season it would have been fun to do one's business in red or green. Oh, wait, one can.

It's the Law to Stall Progress

At one of my favorite holes-in-the-wall in the Sunset District the signage on the Men's and Women's restrooms has been changed.

They're getting a jump on the new law. Two weeks ago Governor Jerry Brown signed a bill requiring "that businesses and governments post non-gender-specific signs on single-occupant restrooms by March 1, 2017."

There is a beneficial side-effect to the new signage: greater efficiency. Often I've observed ladies waiting outside "their" restroom while the Men's room was unoccupied. Everyone can now use either restroom, and overall wait times should go down. Progress.

Worship at this Inventor's Throne

There are too many possible comments to the following invention. None of them do it justice. (H/T Tyler Cowen)

FitButt
pic.twitter.com/CYTY1zIyAQ

— Shyam Sunder (@ShyamNation) August 24, 2016

Living The Golden Dream

The drought is so severe that "the prospect of sewer water being treated and redirected back into faucets is the future of California if the water crisis continues":

Toilet-to-tap technology is already here. Two water districts in the Bay Area — the Dublin San Ramon Services District and the Santa Clara Valley Water District — are testing systems that filter sewer water and purify it to the point that it can be consumed by the public. Orange County has a system in place that recycles 100 million gallons of wastewater a day — enough to quench the thirst of 850,000 people — by treating it and injecting it into aquifers.

(Image from vetstreet.com)

Comments:

1) This winter's El Nino rains can't come soon enough.

2) "TTT", for toilet-to-tap, is an easy-to-remember acronym.

3) The Bay Area is the leader in trying out new technology, but I'm glad Orange County went first.

4) In California "living like a dog" is more than just a metaphor.

Looking Good Against the Competition

OK, I have watched contractors install toilets, and the wax ring on the flange is an off-putting shade of yellow-brown, but this marketing campaign pushes the limit.

The "Perfect Seal" display makes the wax ring look pretty gross by darkening the color and roughening up the wax (click to enlarge).

They had me without the picture, but now it doesn't smell right.

Conglomerations of Grossness

Left: not okay to flush. Right: maybe not okay either.

As public-spirited citizens we have been careful to put cleaning wipes in the garbage and have been disposing of moistened "flushable" wipes as indicated in the name.

It turns out that flushable wipes are a product whose kinks haven't been smoothed out:

Indestructible wipes are coalescing into conglomerations of grossness that are clogging the sewers, The New York Times reports.

Often, the wipes combine with other materials, like congealed grease, to create a sort of superknot. "They're really indestructible," said Vincent Sapienza, a deputy commissioner for the city's Department of Environmental Protection. "I guess that's the purpose."

If you must have a wet tissue, carry a cup of water into the stall to moisten (biodegradable) toilet paper.

Being environmentally conscious means setting aside one's squeamishness about biological functions, touching the garbage, and range anxiety. And getting used to the smells.

Did You Forget to Celebrate?

Illustration from American Greetings

Confession of a Law-Breaker

An oil seal keeps sewer gas down

We are seeing (and peeing into--is that TMI?) more waterless urinals in restaurant and retail store bathrooms.

In my humble opinion the technology is far from perfect. Without regular flushing the equipment becomes pretty rank, especially if the air conditioning is sputtering. To be sure, the drought is forcing all of us to take actions (letting plants die, showering every other day, etc.) that we wouldn't otherwise contemplate.

Another thought: consider amending the laws against public urination, which is a crime in every state. It's not much of a nuisance if a person does his business in flora that is at a distance sufficient to conceal him from foot traffic. (Confession: I've broken the law three times in the past year, but hey, I'm saving water for the environment.) © 2014 Stephen Yuen