| > 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. |