No they don't. when you supply hardly any public toilets, then yeah, that's going to be a problem. When you make plenty of them available and create jobs to keep them clean, it tends not to be that big of a problem.
I used to work as a cook, and before I could cook I had to learn every other job in the restaurant. Believe me I've cleaned my share of junkie-occupied toilets. It's a problem, but not the insurmountable problem you claim.
> Community sharps are needles, syringes and lancets that are used to administer medications and drugs outside a clinical setting.
> We need to dispose of sharps safely to prevent needlestick injury in our public places, at home and for workers who remove waste or clean facilities.
> Whether or not a community sharp is used for medication or drug use, sharps are to be treated as clinical waste, like they would be in a hospital.
> Local councils have a number of community sharps bins installed in community centres, libraries and public toilets to encourage sharps waste to be managed separately from general waste.
City's are big, when you have a million+ people you can find a small group doing just about anything. Further, these people would shoot up somewhere else without public toilets.
Most telling if you had twice as many of them you would not get twice as many people shooting up.
I've already acknowledged it as a problem. Simply throwing a bunch of links at me isn't going to alter my view or anyone else's. If you have an argument to make, make it.
Public municipal toilets in Europe are staffed, just one person constantly keeping the place clean, and ready to call the police if anything like that goes on.
And it works. Certainly works better than having elevator shafts in MUNI and BART smell of excrement.
Melbourne also has pop-up urinals that come out of the sidewalk late at night because all the drunks used to just piss on the street or the sides of buildings...
Because what's better than being 20 minutes into the worst diarrhoea shit of your life whilst away from home? Oh yeah, the door deciding to swing open when you're 21 minutes in.
..or for a someone to sleep for the night out of the wind.
Lots of reasons why a small building providing nothing but toilet services gets re-purposed. I think the German system would work in San Francisco, but if the Bremen experience is correct it should be possible to pay a restaurant $500 a month for leaving their toilet open. That might help fund the additional cleaning and supplies needed.
The German system would be a step in the right direction (if the restaurants that participated actually let homeless people use their toilets). But most restaurants in SF close pretty early, and some problem parts of the city don't even have restaurants nearby. What would one do at night, or when in one of those problem areas?
Why would a junkie want to shoot up in a public toilet of all places? Sure I imagine its better than a park bench in front of the police station, but observing worse solutions doesn't prove something else is the best solution. Their own bathroom? A methadone or other treatment strategy clinic? Its a mere assumption that a culture rich enough to afford places to poop can afford mental health care? Some contaminant in the dirt of the USA that makes it unaffordable here, only affordable everywhere else in the civilized world? If so, wouldn't it be sensible to fix or decontaminate our magic dirt? What, specifically, is wrong with our magic dirt, such that it doesn't work here?
I've noticed that since I was a kid, something has developed such that the public library seems to be used as a free day care center for poor people. The solution to that societal ill is probably not to ban libraries, or ban being poor.
