alt Hacker NewsHaving no public restrooms within a 15 minute walk is worse than having no public benches. Cities shouldn't be allowed to exist without either of them. Also, ground-level restaurants and supermarkets should not be allowed to reject non-customers from using them.
Bulk urine is a good source of urea/ammonia which has commercial value, especially considering the global fertilizer shortage.
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> Also, ground-level restaurants and supermarkets should not be allowed to reject non-customers from using them.
The single biggest reason why there are no public restrooms within a 15 minute walk in many American cities is because the visibly homeless fuck them up, through crazy vandalism, deliberately dirtying them with their bodily fluids, doing drugs in them, etc. Businesses being legally compelled to let non-customers use their bathrooms would exacerbate this problem.
> Bulk urine is a good source of urea/ammonia which has commercial value, especially considering the global fertilizer shortage.
It's not cost effective to set up systems to capture the ammonia from the urine of people using public restrooms in urban areas, or else people would be doing that. There are municipal sewage treatment plants that sell some of the byproducts from treating human wastewater as fertilizers, because that is cost-effective at their scale and level of centralization.
These are likely good litmus tests for the distinction between a city and "people storage".
Every public toilet eventually becomes and ad-hoc homeless shelter.