Parks and Public Restrooms

Parks should have a mix of benches and picnic tables. If you have picnic tables, you must have trash receptacles, ideally far enough from the tables to be hygienic but not so far as to be inconvenient. 

If people eat, they generate trash. If you do not give them a means to dispose of it on site, you either encourage littering or you implicitly are excluding pedestrians.

When people eat, they need a restroom, both to use the toilet and to wash up. If you have toilets, you need sinks with running water.

Motion activated sinks are both more hygienic and prevent people from leaving the water on. Win/win.

Hot water is a nice to have but is not essential. Paper towels and/or hot air hand dryers are also nice to have but not essential. Ditto soap.

But if you have toilets without sinks with running water, you are de facto spreading disease.

I far prefer individual bathrooms to men's and women's bathrooms. This gives greater privacy and eliminates various forms of social friction for a variety of reasons.

Here are a couple that come to mind:

It's trans-friendly. Individual bathrooms eliminate the question of "Which bathroom should I use?" entirely. Your gender or where you are in your transition is irrelevant while not making anyone else uncomfortable. 

It's homeless-friendly as well. Giving homeless people opportunities to clean up a little bit in private is not merely "charity" or kindness to them. It protects public health.

Rest assured, I know from long experience that housed people can do things like brush teeth in a public bathroom and not be hassled over it while homeless people have to live in fear of doing the same and being seen by anyone who realizes they are homeless. 

Private bathrooms allow homeless people to tend to small details like anyone else might do and they have much greater need to be able to do so in a public bathroom without being banned or suffering other negative consequences for it.

Very remote bathrooms that get serviced infrequently can be kept low cost and low maintenance by having cold water sinks and toilets only. If you want to be slightly more luxurious while still low maintenance, add a hot air hand dryer. (Ideally, motion activated, not too loud, works reliably without excessive wild hand flapping to get it to see you.)

It's nice to have both paper towels and hand dryers because they can be used for different things, but that's definitely luxury territory.

If you need ideas for how to do public bathrooms well, visit a few Walmarts. Most of them have excellent bathrooms and they usually have one or two men's rooms, one or two women's rooms plus a family bathroom -- aka a private, individual bathroom.

Public parks should have water fountains, the kind that provide drinking water (not decorative fountains). All public parks should have at least one fountain, even if it is a very small park.

Rest areas should also have fountains. If you are on BLM land full of rest areas, you should never be in any danger of dying of dehydration, even if you are stranded, on foot with no cell phone signal for miles.

FYI: I have reason to believe that BLM lands full of picnic tables with no trash receptacles and similar "amenities" are seeing relatively little use by the general public and essentially serve as free resources for rafting businesses who know the drill and are prepared to bring what is needed and take all the trash out again.

I see no reason such sites couldn't have vending machines for things like Gatorade and even soap. If people really want soap to wash up with and didn't bring any, sell it to them instead of trying to keep the bathroom fully stocked under difficult conditions.

Surveys and testing (aka trial and error, plus going over the data) could help determine what else might prove popular at such places. From what I gather, modern vending machines can provide enormous information on what is selling well, when things need to be restocked, etc. 

It may not have made sense in the past to place vending machines in such remote locations, but it looks extremely workable to me now.

Footnote 

The above was originally published elsewhere on July 21, 2024. Below are edited notes I made later and never managed to clean up and publish.

Yes, I do realize that in the mountains at thousands of feet above sea level in the dead of winter, pipes freeze etc.

That's outside the scope of the post and a technical issue. It absolutely doesn't excuse having no such amenities in JULY.

I've had other thoughts since hitting PUBLISH, like you could have tons more tent campers and hikers if the rest areas had water fountains, trash cans and vending machines.

If you know you can get free water and buy other drinks, like Gatorade and sodas, you can fill your pack with FOOD instead of drinks. Drinks take up tons of space and are heavier than all hell

It takes at least two weeks to starve to death. You can die of dehydration in two days or LESS depending on factors like extreme heat and being at elevation and not acclimated. 

It would be better for the environment and for human health to facilitate more hiking vacations to visit nature instead of putting a gun to everyone's head to DRIVE out to "pristine" nature and then provide no trash cans for anyone.

Thats a fiction. Driving pollutes your pristine nature and there is plenty of litter throughout the park for various reasons. 

Start by supplying sinks and fountains that work in summer, put out a request for proposals or ask NASA to do research or something to solve having running water at altitude in extreme cold.

Start with the most easily reached rest areas, closer to existing towns and such. Or research how to provide off grid water.

Sink water doesn't have to be potable. You can post warnings "Not potable. For hand washing ONLY."

From what I gather, Amtrak uses non potable water in the sinks on board.

Look up the standards. 

Make it POSSIBLE to walk that section of highway without dying or being rescued by law enforcement at least part of the year, spread the standards elsewhere, word will get out.

You can begin setting the standard. It's a walkable highway -- unlike our interstate system that was dreamed up as defensive infrastructure during WW2 and NEVER gets used that way or even thought of that way anymore -- and has abundant rest areas. They just all SUCK.

If there were trash receptacles, water fountains and sinks, it would be enormously more walkable. Add vending machines at rest areas and it no longer matters that there are no convenience stores, restaurants etc for miles. 

Vending machines can take debit cards these days. Let them take EBT for the ones that sell food and drink and even poor people can do a hiking vacay. 

The BLM lands in question have changing rooms (no roofs) but no showers. Do people really NOT want to rinse off after rafting, before changing into street clothes?

FYI: I never saw the changing rooms used. The fat and skinny pasty white tourists show up by the bus load already dressed and with a life vest on. 

No one respects the 15 minute loading limit. The PUBLIC lands are 80 percent free resources for rafting businesses. There's a few fishermen who go there. Once in a great while, someone not part of the rafting bus loads and van loads takes a cooler full of food and grills out.

Oh and people just passing through using the highway as an actual highway use the toilets.

I grew up going to pools and beaches and lakes and I thought showers and changing rooms were the norm because I didn't realize how upper class my mother's expectations are. I just thought that stuff was everywhere. 

Some places had summer only, cold water only outdoor showers, but they let you rinse off before putting your street clothes back on.

So I can change clothes in your rest areas, presumably in or out of swimwear of some kind, but I can't wash my hands after using the toilet or rinse off after taking my bathing suit off before putting street clothes on.

No wonder the tourists pay rafting companies. Your system is broken and doesn't work without a middleman smoothing over all the shit that doesn't work.

You want to be all fancy? Work on figuring out how to add wifi and electric outlets to picnic tables. Future goal after you get basics down like letting people wash their hands at least part of the year and throw away trash at the rest areas.

Also, if you can solve water supply at your rest areas, you can potentially then use that solution to improve small villages in remote places like Alaska. 

Though it depends on the solution. Some parts of Alaska have no sunlight for months, so passive solar design is not really functional in parts of Alaska.

But if you have some other answer, you can start civilizing Alaska without having to pave paradise to do it.

Clues for the clueless: all your rest areas are right next to a RIVER.

Maybe you can get water from the RIVER for non potable sinks. Then you just need to figure out what happens with outgoing water that needs treatment and can't be sent directly back to the river without harming fish etc.

Earthships collect rain water on the roof and treat it to supply water. Start there and then figure out what needs to happen in extreme cold to keep it operational. 

It's okay to add a single sink possibly outside at existing toilets. It needs some shelter from wind etc, but you don't necessarily need to add a sink inside every bathroom.

Some bathrooms with two separate toilets in the same small building? Add one large sink with two faucets between them or whatever. 

Get an architect on it. I don't know everything. Someone somewhere is qualified to design add-on solutions to improve existing facilities without tearing it all out and starting over.

Also also: solving basic infrastructure issues like water supply in extreme cold at extreme elevation is a stepping stone to colonizing the moon.

That's part of why I say "ask NASA to research it" as one possible avenue of solving it: Because the garden spot of the moon is the poles that hover around the freezing point instead of fluctuating hundreds of degrees in sometimes a single day.

And there's no atmosphere currently and less gravity than Earth. I imagine solving issues at altitude will be a step in the right direction for coping with those issues.