It’s Potty Time

For a few pence or francs, Angelenos ambling through London or Paris can avail themselves of private, self-cleaning sidewalk toilets. In Los Angeles, strolling tourists, shoppers and business people on coffee binges are too often left to hop from foot to foot or sweet-talk their way into a restroom at a gas station or Denny’s.

On Tuesday the Los Angeles City Council approved a plan to put 2,500 bus shelters and 150 pay toilets in areas used heavily by pedestrians. The shelters aren’t controversial. The toilets are. But we owe it to the British, French and our own squirming citizens not to let this plan be derailed by concerns about crime.

As in almost any discussion of public policy, criminals must be taken into consideration. The San Francisco Chronicle reported this month that 25% of that city’s sidewalk restrooms harbor prostitutes, junkies or crackheads indulging their vices. Homeless people jam open the automatic doors so they can bed down for the night.

To reduce such activity, the head of San Francisco’s Department of Public Works suggested that the Board of Supervisors consider putting external video cameras on the restrooms to nab criminals, enforcing a one-user-at-a-time policy, removing the toilets from trouble spots and training police officers in how to open the toilets when they suspect illegal activity.

San Francisco’s experience should inform negotiations between Los Angeles city officials and the Franco-American consortium that will provide and service the toilets. In exchange for the projected millions in profits that the firm stands to make by selling advertising on the bus shelters, L.A. officials should insist on frequent service visits, around the clock, and plenty of anti-crime precautions.

A siting committee that includes council staffers, representatives of the L.A. Public Works Department, police officers and members of the public will decide where to locate the toilets. The Board of Public Works will make the final decision, with priority given to areas of homelessness.

For their own sake and for public health, it’s important that people living on the city’s sidewalks have somewhere other than those sidewalks to perform bodily functions. Activist Alice Callaghan fought hard to distribute 26 standard-issue portable toilets on skid row but warns that the bigger and fancier models in the new plan will attract criminal behavior and vandalism. Indeed, in hard-core street crime areas the city should consider the new models experimental, to be tried with existing portable toilets left in place.

But the city must not lose track of whom the toilets are really for--and it isn’t the criminals. Cities that base public policy solely on fear of what crackheads and hookers may do diminish the quality of life for everyone.