[abeppu]

I think the sad part is I think most people would be ok funding more public bathrooms if we had confidence that they would be used only as bathrooms ... but in the places that need them the most, people have the expectation that they will be used for other purposes.

[vkou]

That same standard isn't applied to most other public services.

Nobody says: "Well, I'd stand behind funding public roads, but I won't since people don't follow traffic laws on them."

[abeppu]

I think that's an unfair comparison insofar as a person speeding on the highway generally passes you by quickly and doesn't prevent others from using the highway.

But a person who tries to camp out in the bathroom because it's an indoor place and their tent was taken/destroyed by the police etc, does functionally prevent others from using it as just a bathroom. Similarly if someone locks themselves in to get high. The bathroom then not only doesn't give the broader public a place to pee, but also becomes a liability where whomever is responsible for it periodically has to have confrontational interactions. People and organizations seem to have a strong preference for avoiding such interactions and will go awkwardly out of their way to avoid them.

It's like once your city has a bad issue with homelessness, a bunch of public services get distorted around making them not be encampments. A couple examples:

- At one point SF was considering fare-free public transit and the mayor basically refused on the grounds that unhoused people would just use buses/trains as a place to hang out indoors rather than to go anywhere in particular. It's not that she hated the concept of public transit in particular so much as that having the ability to exclude the homeless was viewed as a way to keep transit as transit.

- The closest library to me got some press for shutting off its wifi after hours, not because anyone using the wifi was bad per se, but because a semi-permanent encampment was erected around it, so the unhoused population could access it.

[vkou]

> I think that's an unfair comparison insofar as a person speeding on the highway generally passes you by quickly and doesn't prevent others from using the highway.

Insane drivers doing dangerous shit are by far the biggest threat to my health and personal safety on a day-to-day basis. And next to nothing is done about them.