[phnk]

> Parisian culture leans toward leisurely café sipping, which means there aren't a lot of Starbucks-type places where one can stop quickly to pee and grab a drink or snack.

Wait, what?

There are restrooms in every single café in my (northern Parisian) neighbourhood. If you are sipping café there, or buying it to go, then you are a customer and are allowed access to the restroom.

I have no idea what 'renting a table for an hour' means in relation to going to a café, but your view of how life in Paris works seems very seriously off.

It might just be me, though -- I am unable to understand how other grown adults in this thread (not parent comment, other posts) can think that they are entitled to bladder release for free outside of their homes.

[torstenvl]

Many cafés do not serve coffee à emporter and do not have paper cups. If you stop by PAUL or la Brioche Dorée or some such chain, sure, but they are not as ubiquitous as Starbucks or Dunkin are in the U.S.

Additionally, many of the places that do sell food or drink to-go are in kiosks. If I stop to buy a cup of vin chaud or something, chances are the vendor won't even have a toilet for customers.

My view of life in Paris compared to life in the U.S. comes from living in both places. It may not match your experience, but you are unqualified to tell me whether my description is "very off" from my experience.

In any case, your defensiveness is at odds with the fact that some people apparently do think this is a problem. If people can pee in any café they stop in at for a cuppa, what's the point of these uritrottoirs? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[phnk]

> Many cafés do not serve coffee à emporter and do not have paper cups.

Apologies for contradicting you on the sole basis of personal experience, but you are, again, in my own experience, very wrong: you really have to find yourself in the poshest streets of Paris (with only salons de thé in them) not to find at least one café that serves coffee to go (in paper cups), hence my surprise at your point about restroom access.

I do not know enough of the USA to compare, but basically, you can get coffee and pee every 500m or less in Paris (for various prices going from more-than-reasonable to perfectly-obscene).

> If I stop to buy a cup of vin chaud or something, chances are the [kiosk] vendor won't even have a toilet for customers.

Will it be proof of my own defensiveness if I mention that kiosks in the US are also unlikely to have restrooms? (Unless those I saw in Phillie and NYC this winter are outliers.)

> My view of life in Paris compared to life in the U.S. comes from living in both places. It may not match your experience, but you are unqualified to tell me whether my description is "very off" from my experience.

Apologies if you felt that I was denying your experience of whatever country or city. You are absolutely correct: your Parisian experience does not match mine, which is what "seems very off" meant in my original comment.

> If people can pee in any café they stop in at for a cuppa, what's the point of these uritrottoirs? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

As mentioned in the article, the uritrottoirs is to stop people peeing on the sidewalk. What those people will be peeing is not coffee but beer from cans bought in grocery shops or supermarkets.

If you have lived in Paris and been to Canal Saint-Martin, bords de Seine or equivalent places, you know exactly who those uritrottoirs are aimed at. That target population does not intersect much with the clientele of cafés.

Apologies for the long post and sorry again if my wording offended you.