To Address Public Washroom Shortage, This City Took an Incremental Approach
(Source: Flickr/David Hepburn.)
The city of Medicine Hat in Alberta, Canada, has come up with small, immediately impactful steps to provide its residents with better access to public restrooms.
Free public restrooms are limited throughout North America, and those that do exist are not usually easy to find. A pregnant mother biking in Toronto was forced to relieve herself behind a bush. People in Portland, particularly those experiencing homelessness, have found themselves cornered into open defecation. A lack of free public restrooms were blamed for a 2017 hepatitis A outbreak in San Diego. The contagion, caused by waste on the streets, was deemed responsible for the deaths of 20 and hundreds falling ill.
"Public restrooms are fundamental to human dignity and health in cities,” said Strong Towns Director of Community Action Edward Erfurt.
Over the past year, Medicine Hat city officials have held conversations on what should be done about their public washroom shortage, especially within the downtown area. Staff previously developed plans to install a new restroom two blocks from the core downtown, a location that some felt was too far away from the central shopping area. The project, although well intended, was estimated to exceed the city’s budget for the year. The cost sat at a little over half a million dollars, though some expenses like staff salaries were not included in this sum.
With unknown budget costs, and uncertainties of the placement, Medicine Hat decided to pause their massive plans for the new restroom. Instead, they went in search of an option that would not take months of construction, but instead could be a small bet that instantly benefited locals.
City staff pointed out that the local bus station already had public restrooms, but like most other public toilets, they closed when employees went home. By dedicating just $48,000 dollars through the rest of 2023 for night security, the already established restrooms could be open around the clock.
“It was the concept of trying something and just seeing what the results are,” said Manager of Transit Systems Gordon Dykstra.
The decision to start with a small bet, instead of a large unaffordable project, created multiple benefits for the city.
“Having a restroom security guard created a bonus effect of more ‘eyes on the street,’” said Erfurt. “By taking the small bet to add night security, Medicine Hat reaped two instant benefits at a low cost: needed access to public restrooms and a safer downtown.” This added security has cut damage violations nearly in half, public services managing director Brian Stauth informed Medicine Hat News.
Once Medicine Hat took a step in making public restrooms more accessible, staff realized there was a missing piece: many people had no idea where the toilets were, or that the hours had extended. But instead of waiting for the bureaucratic process to take care of the issue, Gordon Dykstra decided to take initiative in solving the problem.
“My concern was that we were putting effort into having extra bathroom hours, and that people wouldn’t know about it,” he said.
Within half an hour, he created simple, laminated paper signs with maps and directions to public restrooms. With the help of transit lead hands, who already frequented downtown, the signs were zipped-tied onto lamp posts.
(Source: Gordon Dykstra.)
“It was a bit of a cowboy act to just do it,” said Dykstra. “But it turns out, if we hadn't done those laminated signs, we would be two months in now, and we still wouldn’t have any signs up.”
Without having taken immediate action, the normal approving processes would have delayed the implementation of signs. The simple action Dykstra took expedited the feedback loop and sent a message to the community that the city was responding to their concern.
“Bureaucracy is invasive in people's minds,” said Dykstra. “It's a mindset: ‘The bureaucrats will take care of that,’ or ‘You better follow the process or you're gonna have trouble.’ And so I'm hoping that this leads to other things, small things, that are easily done that people are just willing to try.”
“[Putting up the signs] had no risk,” he added. “It took me 30 minutes to put them together, and it would have taken 30 minutes to take them down if it had been the wrong thing to do.”
Medicine Hat, with a population of 63,000, is not the only place that has had to contend with a shortage of open public restrooms. The Public Toilet Index revealed that within the U.S. there are only eight free public restrooms per 100,000 people (in New York, it’s four toilets per 100,000 people). Canada sits a little above with 18 toilets per 100,000 people. But this is still a low count compared to other developed countries, such as Iceland, which has 58 public toilets per 100,000 persons.
“Despite the need, installing new 24-hour public restrooms can become a complicated and expensive undertaking that can quickly exceed city budgets when small bets aren’t considered first,” said Erfurt. For instance, New York City has faced egregious complications with installing public toilets. The city purchased 20 self-cleaning toilets in 2008. As of March 2023, 14 years later, only five are in operation thanks to an extensive list of requirements that have drastically slowed down the process.
Lots of different people make use of public restrooms when they can find them. Pregnant mothers, people suffering from IBS or other illnesses, taxi drivers, mail carriers, people doing street repair, and just normal people going about their daily lives may find themselves in need of a private place to refresh.
“Washrooms, that's a public service,” said Dykstra. “It's a human dignity thing. It shows that we're caring for the people who use the downtown core. I think it's a sign of respect. Especially when you've got people who don't have access to the same kinds of resources everybody else does. It’s a way of caring for your neighbor.”
Seairra Jones serves as the Lead Story Producer for Strong Towns. In the past, she's worked as a freelance journalist and videographer for a number of different organizations. She currently resides between small-town Illinois and the rural Midwest with her husband, where they help manage a family homestead. When Seairra isn’t focusing on how to make our towns stronger, you can find her outside working on the farm, writing fictional tales in a coffee shop, or reading in a hammock.