I’ve been in the UK dozens of times and never seen those. I guess I just don’t pee out that often, but in the pubs and restaurants I’ve been to it’s never come up.
I’m in the UK, and where I live, it’s almost exclusively local council owned toilets that charge a fee. So these aren’t toilets inside private businesses, they’re separate buildings located in car parks, at beaches, and so on. So the fee to use them is almost certainly a combination of preventing homeless people from squatting in them (since they’re not watched over by staff) and to cover the costs of electricity, water, and sending someone over to clean them once in a while (since the majority of people using them are not residents of the area who have paid council tax). The fee is nominal, £0.20, and most of them now have card readers so people don’t need to have a 20p coin on them.
Right. That tracks with my experience. So when Americans are all weirded out by “paid toilets” in Europe, do they mean those? I always read that as them finding they had to pay for toilets in businesses or restaurants.
In an ideal world, yes, the council-owned toilets would be free to use (and there’d be some mechanism for taxing tourism so the people that are using the beach and car park toilets are the ones paying for them). But I really do think Americans and Australians are overstating how common this is, because it really is a minority of toilets - I only actually know of two in my area, compared to dozens of other toilets that are completely free to use.
I’ve been in the UK dozens of times and never seen those. I guess I just don’t pee out that often, but in the pubs and restaurants I’ve been to it’s never come up.
I’m in the UK, and where I live, it’s almost exclusively local council owned toilets that charge a fee. So these aren’t toilets inside private businesses, they’re separate buildings located in car parks, at beaches, and so on. So the fee to use them is almost certainly a combination of preventing homeless people from squatting in them (since they’re not watched over by staff) and to cover the costs of electricity, water, and sending someone over to clean them once in a while (since the majority of people using them are not residents of the area who have paid council tax). The fee is nominal, £0.20, and most of them now have card readers so people don’t need to have a 20p coin on them.
Right. That tracks with my experience. So when Americans are all weirded out by “paid toilets” in Europe, do they mean those? I always read that as them finding they had to pay for toilets in businesses or restaurants.
I’m Australian and we’re also weirded out by paid toilets.
Any of them is what we think of, but it’s even worse when it’s a public toilet. At least a private business being shitty is their natural state.
In an ideal world, yes, the council-owned toilets would be free to use (and there’d be some mechanism for taxing tourism so the people that are using the beach and car park toilets are the ones paying for them). But I really do think Americans and Australians are overstating how common this is, because it really is a minority of toilets - I only actually know of two in my area, compared to dozens of other toilets that are completely free to use.