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San Francisco's Public Works Agency Tests Paint That Repels Urine
monkeyzoo writes: San Francisco is testing an ultra-water-repellant paint on wallls in areas fraught with public urination problems. The paint is designed to repel the urine and soil the offender's pants. "It's supposed to, when people urinate, bounce back and hit them on the pants and get them wet. Hopefully that will discourage them. We will put a sign to give them a heads up," said Mohammad Nuru, director of the San Francisco public works. A Florida company named Ultra-Tech produces the super-hydrophobic oleophobic nano-coating that was also recently used with success on walls in Hamburg, Germany [video] to discourage public urination. Signs posted there warn, "Do not pee here! We pee back!"
First world problems caused by other first world problems (like closing or failing to provide public restrooms).
Why don't they just install night-time pop up urinals, like other cities have done. I know them from London, Paris and Amsterdam, but here's a video for one in Watford Fairly straight forward solution, and no more stinky city.
Have you been to San Francisco? There is a HUGE homeless community there. They used to have public toilets 24/7. Free ones at that. Then the homeless people started living in them. So then they started charging a small fee (I think it was originally around $0.50) to try and keep the homeless people from living inside of them. Eventually, they removed the public toilets because the public was unable to use them anyway. They need to solve the homeless problem until they can solve the public toilet problem.