Due to my last post, regarding my janitorial background, I seem to be thinking about public restrooms.
An often overlooked aspect of a city's livability, and thus civility, is the availability of public toilets. If one is not at one's home or office, and not patronizing a particular business, one is often out of luck. And it's a bit of an imposition, and an economic hardship, to require a shop or restaurant to open its restrooms to general street traffic. Here's an interesting article out of Marketplace, that includes the following:
"In the middle of the twentieth century, public toilets were relatively common in the United States. For the most part, people had to pay for the stalls, which opened with coins, while urinals were free. But with rising feminist sentiments in the 1970s, people started to recognize this arrangement as sexist, since it meant that women had to pay, while men did not. Over the following decade, the grassroots organization Committee to End Pay Toilets in America succeeded in getting bans on pay toilets in many states, and the late March Fong Eu, California secretary of state from 1975 to 1994, smashed a porcelain toilet with a sledgehammer on the steps of the State Capitol.
"The banning of pay toilets had an unintended outcome. Instead of free public toilets for all, public toilets pretty much disappeared from American cities, since cities found it expensive and difficult to keep them safe and clean. (In Europe, where there was no such movement, pay public toilets persist, as they have since as far back as Roman times.)"
