In the movie Naked Gun, one scene showed Detective Frank Drebin (Leslie Nielsen) watching a demonstration of a wall that could protect itself from graffiti by spraying teenagers who try to spray paint its surface. San Francisco has come up with a similar solution for those who urinate on city walls and streets. Public urination continues to be a serious problem in cities, even though New York politicians recently moved to decriminalize the offense. The city is testing a pee-repellant paint on walls in areas with high public urination problems. The specially treated walls cause the urine to spray back onto violators.
The paint has been used in Hamburg, Germany in its nightclub district and is called Ultra-Ever Dry — sold by Ultratech International Inc. The product is a superhydrophobic coating that will repel most liquids. The city hopes to save money with the paint to reduce the current costs of having to send out crews to steam clean streets. It receives hundreds of such requests every year.
In Atlanta, the problem of urination in elevator has become so bad that the city has installed a urine detection device (UDD). Any splatter of urine will set off alarms and alert police to get to the elevator for arrest.
Presumably, most people do not want to expose themselves by urinating in the middle of a street to avoid the walls.
In sounds like the latest skit from Yakov Smirnoff, “in America, you don’t pee on walls, the wall pee on you. What a country!”
Source: Yahoo
Oh, I’m so sorry. I forgot to blank out the author’s expletive in the first paragraph of the quote I copied and pasted.
My apologies. That was negligent.
zRants:
From your article:
“Really though, think about this: San Francisco has a program that makes it so that developers of all big projects in downtown and the surrounding neighborhoods have to give the equivalent of 1% of total construction costs to public art. But who wants to look at public art that has been shit on (and I don’t mean by an art critic). So that’s where my new POOPS plan comes into play.
What if all these developers also had to give 1% of total construction costs to creating and maintaining public bathrooms? Look how many cranes are in the SF skyline right now. Let’s just say there are seven projects being built right now for $100m each (these are conservative guesses). That would be $7m that would go directly into creating public bathrooms and hiring attendants to keep them clean.”
In a nutshell, SF is making construction more expensive in one of the most expensive places in America to live, just for fun. Making construction more expensive by 1% to force people to subsidize art??? My relative lives in SF, and has been looking for a house to buy for so long. It costs millions of dollars to buy a run down fixer upper. Everything is out of your price range unless you’re a millionaire. And even then, you might get a nice apartment. There are bidding wars where houses go for 30% above list prices of millions of dollars, for tiny houses built in the 40’s with original decor and appliances.
SF public policy has encouraged homelessness to be so rampant that the city has become infamous for its human excrement, drug paraphernalia, and used condoms littering streets and parks. The Liberal solution is to make private businesses pay the cost of public policy. For most of us on the outside, it is reprehensible to keep driving up the cost of real estate, but that is exactly what this fee blithely proposed by this journalist would do. We’ve discussed at length what happens to these free public restrooms – they get used as impromptu brothels and places to shoot up, and they’re smeared with feces, urine, and blood and body fluids inside. But a Liberal believes that the perfect solution is to make builders pay for the restrooms, AND provide staff to constantly clean them, thus rendering SF an even more prohibitively expensive place to buy or rent a home or business space.
THIS is what drives fiscal conservatives like me to distraction. We should invest in giving a calculator and enrollment in a basic Kahn Academy arithmetic course to all journalists and politicians in SF.
I think this quote from the above article encapsulates the realities of homelessness in CA cities, where the weather and the policies attract them in droves:
“My savvy city kids know to steer clear of needles. They first learned this lesson at ages 3 and 4 on a hike behind the Randall Museum. My curious son picked up a dirty needle and playfully pointed it toward my face, “What’s this, Mommy?” The moment was unsettling but led to an important discussion around one of the realities of city life.”
I used to love San Francisco, but it has become the City of Human Excrement. Their policies as Sanctuary City and efforts to make them friendly to the homeless has attracted illegal alien criminals and hordes of homeless. Living on the street is not a viable option, because as thousands of years of history have definitively proven, human excrement spreads disease it the perfect petri dish of a city. That is why homelessness should not be encouraged, but rather the focus should be on improving mental health and shelter options.
Although the paint is a good first step, as long as city policy encourages homelessness, they will just find other places to urinate on the streets and parks. Here in CA, we have a serious homelessness problem. I’ve spoken before about what happened to my husband’s workshop, how he had to remove the hose bib because the homeless were washing excrement off their backsides and getting it all over the faucet. The police’s hands were tied because of the city’s policies protecting the homeless. It took a prostitute setting up shop on a couch right outside for the police, finally, after 2 more weeks of Johns lining up, to finally roust them all out. So far, it hasn’t gotten too bad again. But this is a common news item across CA, where children’s parks and walks to school can be littered with used needles and condoms.
Here is a picture of drug debris a half a mile from a preschool, right on the street, as well as used needles found in a sand box at a playground:
http://blog.sfgate.com/sfmoms/2015/07/30/needles-in-sandboxes-parents-upset-over-drug-litter-at-s-f-s-schools-and-parks/
Protecting the homeless sounds like such a good thing to do, until you realize what the consequences are. We should not encourage homelessness, but rather seek a better, humane solution that does not endanger the public or these vulnerable people.
One of San Francisco’s mayoral candidates, “Broke-Ass” Stuart Shuffman, has an answer for pubic bathrooms that is similar to the way they handle it in Paris. He is calling the idea Privately Owned Open Pooping Spots (a.k.a. POOPS). He writes a column in the Examiner: http://www.sfexaminer.com/private-money-to-assist-public-pooping/
@NickS
Plus, I am trying to be good while JT is on vacation, unlike one of the people here. BTW, did you see where Mick Dumdell is ranting on about prematurely burying oxygen in our landfills??? He wants everybody to to take the lids off bottles and jars. He calls it FOMENT, the Free Oxygen Movement. Good for pansies, but bad for the national IQ. What a maroon.
https://pansiesforplato.wordpress.com/2015/08/06/the-premature-burial-of-oxygen/
Squeeky Fromm
Girl Reporter
@NickS
I didn’t want to be accused of hate crimes!
Squeeky Fromm
Girl Reporter
Squeek, Your song should be named the Polish Golden Shower since it’s about peeing on Poles.
Oh, we are all so anthropomorphic here! Hmmm. I am thinking of a parody song. . .
Let’s Pee On Poles!
A Short Parody Verse by Squeeky Fromm
Birds do it. Squirrels do it.
Lots of tranny shemale “girls” do it.
Let’s do it.
Let’s pee on poles!
Bugs do it. ‘Coons do it.
Doggies baying at the moon do it!
Let’s do it!
Let’s pee on poles!
Squeeky Fromm
Girl Reporter
You go girl, act naturally!
You can also see in the video that many of the offenders are well-dressed men. German men like to pee outside. I caught my washing machine repairman taking a piss in my flower bed. I opened the window and told him that we have a toilet, he need only ask. Got a new washing machine repairman after that!
http://wirpinkelnzurueck.de/
Here is a video, albeit in German, of how this paint was used in the St. Pauli district of Hamburg as mentioned in Prof. Turley´s post above. They painted the foundations of buildings in the area and put up signs on them that said “Don´t pee here, we pee back!” In the video you can see that the urine splashes back onto the person urinating, which would perhaps deter others from urinating against the walls and prevent repeat offenders, so that possibly someday they won´t need to steam-clean the streets as often.
I don’t see that the paint will do anything for the street. Unless the paint absorbs the urine, it’s still there, just not on the wall.
bettykath – also, how close do you have to be to the wall to have it splash back. It may all end on the sidewalk anyway. However, this could be a shock to you male dog.
The bluest blue cities are indeed the best for enjoying man’s return to his primeval roots, just as Rousseau desired.
It will be interesting to see if it actually works. It smells like a urinal on hot days in New York City or Santiago, Chile while walking around the city. I’d love for this to have some kind of impact or just build some public restrooms. 😷