This is cross-posted from the Poop Culture blog.
Last December, New Yorkers were given a taste of what the public toilets in Heaven must be like when Charmin opened up temporary luxury toilets in Times Square. Shoppers streamed in and streamed out during the Christmas season; but by the time the ball dropped the toilets had been dismantled, and New Yorkers were once again queued up at McDonalds thanks to a lack of publicly-funded options. A similar experience began last December on London's Oxford Street, except their luxury bathroom is here to stay. The difference: it costs a pound to drop a pound -- that is, $2 just to do what comes most natural.
This is a sad (and, for some people's dry cleaning bill, disastrous) byproduct of economic growth: as wealth increases, public toilets disappear.
Oxford Street's luxury toilet-and-powder-room, called WC1 (a clever pun riffing off the postal code of the area), cost almost $2.5 million to build. At WC1, the equivalent of two dollars entitles you to "the loveliest loos in the world" replete with "only the softest toilet tissue." Ten dollars gets you "the ultimate girly moment," which, near as I can tell, translates into free hand cream and hairspray.
(Whether guys are allowed to experience the ultimate manly moment is not clear; but most guys shopping on Oxford Street are probably eager for an excuse to nip into the local pub anyway.)
That WC1 exists at all is testament to a problem plaguing modern cities. Call it Brown Flight: as a population's wealth grows, the priority given to public amenities shrinks. In London, according to the BBC article linked above, the number of public toilets dropped an incredible forty percent from 2000 to 2005, leaving just 415 in a city of 7.5 million. (Although, to be fair, legions of Starbucks and McDonalds have arisen to take their place.) Those that remain are often in states of horrid disrepair -- I remember a set of greasy stairs in the middle of London's Shepherd's Bush Green leading down into a dank facility so miasmatic that fear alone gave me the strength to wait until I got back to my flat.
As a result, we have statistics like this one provided by ENCAMS, an environmental charity: that 95 percent of Britons have urinated, vomited, or defecated in public because no toilet was available.
The BBC article continues this train of thought. "In Beijing, where the average salary is a 10th of London's, there are 7,700 toilets, or one for every 1,948 people. China's capital plans to renovate 3,700 in time for the 2008 Olympics. London, which will host the 2012 games and has one toilet per 18,000 residents, has no such plans."
What better could illustrate the negative correlation between private wealth and public toilets? Beijing has 7,700 public toilets aren't just for tourists or travelers -- they're for the many citizens who don't have facilities in their flats. In Westernized countries, we've relegated the toilet so deeply into the private home that we've forgotten that not everyone can always hold it long enough to make it there. With the luxury of private bathrooms comes an aversion to spending taxpayer dollars on public ones.