Here is some very nice news! Chicago is about to get a bunch of public, self-cleaning restroom as part of a long-awaited pilot program, Block Club reported this week.
“We have never been closer to having a public bathroom pilot in Chicago,” Ald. Daniel La Spata (who used to be my alderman before the wards were rearranged) wrote in a newsletter. “I’m excited to see the city work with such an experienced operator and hopeful that we can determine appropriate locations in the very near term. It’s a great opportunity to bring new services to our residents.”
The city will be working with French Company JCDecaux to place four ready-to-be-installed public bathrooms in highly trafficked neighborhood corridors in locations to be settled upon in the near future.
JCDecaux is responsible for installing and operating over 2500 public restrooms in 28 different countries — including the “sanisettes” in Paris. Among a few other things here and there, Paris is notable for being the city with the highest concentration of public restrooms — 435 in total, with an average of 6.72 toilets per square kilometer.
Via Block Club:
The program is a big win for La Spata and Ald. Rossana Rodriguez-Sanchez (33rd), who have been pushing since 2021 for accessible public bathrooms to benefit everyone from transit workers to people experiencing homelessness.
A 2021 Tribune investigation found fewer than 500 structures in the city “contain free public restrooms with few or no barriers to entry, such as security checkpoints or client-only access.”
The program will increase access to public bathrooms — which are the norm for major European cities — and will follow in the steps of other American cities. […]
“This is a basic human need. It’s something that everybody needs. Yes, we have people that have a higher need because people are unhoused, or because people have particular conditions,” Rodriguez-Sanchez said in 2022. “But this is something that benefits everybody, that makes our public spaces more humane, and something that I think that we need to adopt.”
This is especially necessary right now as many of the bathrooms in public parks have been closed for a while now, and the port-a-potties that have replaced them are, I must tell you, really not okay.
Illinois does have Ally’s Law, one of the few laws named after a white lady that doesn’t murder anyone’s civil rights. Rather, it requires stores that don’t have public restrooms to let customers with eligible medical conditions, like Crohn’s disease, IBS, or ulcerative colitis, use their employee restroom. The law is named for Ally Bain, an Illinois resident who, when she was 14 years old, had a flare-up of her Crohn’s while shopping in a retail store, was denied use of the employee restroom, and ended up soiling herself. (Can you fucking imagine? Jesus)
But that’s not the only reason people need accessible public restrooms. Unhoused people have to go somewhere and so many places require that people buy something (or at least look like they might buy something) in order to use a restroom. There are also CTA employees who are also often stuck with no place to go, figuratively. Not to mention Amazon drivers.
Then there are those of us who have already hit 3PM on our half-gallon water bottles … and also literally every human being on earth at some point or another, as far as I know.
Hopefully this will work out and we’ll get even more popping up around town, and we’ll see it happening in other cities as well.
I love that American cities are finally starting to get with the program. Public restrooms are a necessity, and I say this even as somebody that has a bladder the size of a camel's.
Word of warning, though. With those self-cleaning models, don't rush right in after the previous occupant. Gotta give the machine a chance to finish the wash cycle. My mother, not understanding what the nice lady was trying to tell her in French learned the hard way.
My grandparents had a store in Jim Crow-era North Carolina. One day, some fine gentlemen from the White Citizens' Council stopped by to ask my grandfather why he had only one restroom and one water fountain in the store (local law required THREE of every public facility-white, "colored", and Indian). My grandfather replied that it wasn't a public restroom, it was there for employees, but he wasn't going to tell anyone who needed not to use the restroom. I guess his answer was satisfactory, since the KKK didn't firebomb the store.
Grampe was a good ol' guy.