The peculiar problems of peeing during a pandemic

Maybe it's really almost over. A couple of weeks ago, I was able to do something that told me this city is making progress on re-opening from the coronavirus: I found a public toilet in an out-of-the-way park and it was open for use! Yippee! Most such facilities had been closed since March 2020 or a little later.

I can testify to this because I whiled away the pandemic by completing huge chunks of my Walking San Francisco project. Even at the very beginning when we didn't know much about how COVID is spread, it seemed as if longish walks with a camera were permissible. In those traffic free days, the city was quiet and sometimes very lovely in a clean-air spring.

Eureka! It's unlocked.

But walking about the city posed a problem: where should I pee? In the previous eight years of the project, I'd gotten very good at scouting out opportunities. But not in 2020. Coffee shops were not open; public libraries were closed; some big retail, grocery stores and mini-malls might be open, but not the bathrooms; public park facilities were mostly locked.

My best bet for relief became residential construction sites equipped with a porta-potty. But in the early days, the workers were off the jobs and sheltering in place too. Most of their facilities were locked. I became eagle-eyed, looking for unlocked enclosures.

Pretty soon I had quite a few points of "anecdata": there were socio-economic patterns to the availability of urban porta-potties. In poor and working class neighborhoods, they were always locked. Ditto in the truly wealthy areas. Not so in upper middle class residential neighborhoods.  There I could usually find a porta-potty to duck into. As job sites reopened, I could sometimes find workers to ask to use their facilities.

And, of course, I've been an urban runner for decades. That means I am not ashamed to use of what I call "circular bushes," conveniently placed shrubbery. A city presents a surprising quantity of possibilities, often on median strips or around public buildings, in just about every neighborhood. You just want to look out for surveillance cameras. Wouldn't want to upset the security ...

A few months ago, Nicholas Kristof, an observant Times columnist who I often find too saccharine, made a great suggestion:

America’s most disgraceful infrastructure failing is its lack of public toilets. ... the United States is simply not made for people who pee. ... Americans have painstakingly built new norms about dog owners picking up after their pets, but we’ve gone backward with human waste. ... How is it that we can afford aircraft carriers but not toilets? 

... it’s not just the homeless who suffer. Taxi drivers, delivery people, tourists and others are out and about all day, navigating a landscape that seems oblivious to the most basic of needs. The same is true of parents out with kids. 

So come on, President Biden! Let’s see an infrastructure plan that addresses not only bridges and electrical grids, but also bladders and bowels.

Now there's an infrastructure plan I could love. And so would a lot of people on the streets, voluntarily or involuntarily.