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
“Dont tread on me. Dont pee on me either.” So sayeth the small sign at the bottom of the wall.
Don’t pee directly at the wall. Turn 45 degrees. Problem solved.
A problem? Government will go to all ends to create “problems” out of thin air all the while ignoring the real problems that it also has created.
San Francisco, while pretty on the surface….stinks when you have to get up close and personal.
There is sh*t in the streets, piss all over the place. Trying to commute and take public transportation to work was a challenge. You had to huddle together at the street car stop for safety from the staggering bums and aggressive panhandlers who usually reeked of urine and feces and often had a literal load in their filthy pants. Dash onto the streetcar as fast as you can to get away from the feral stinking bums. If you were lucky your commute put you on schedule before the bums and beggars had woken up from their drug and alcohol induced stupors. It was like the night of the living dead sometimes.
Then you get to walk past more filth and garbage to get to your place of work and repeat the process on the way home.
Parking, if you drive a car….fuggetaboutit. It is so costly you can’t afford it IF you can even find a parking garage near your work.
After a while, my company provided taxi cabs for all of us to commute in when even the guys were being attacked and raped at night while trying to get to their cars in the expensive parking spaces that you have to rent or buy. Never mind standing at night on a street to catch your bus or streetcar. Take a cab, if you can get one.
Even the parks are filthy. Golden Gate and other parks look pretty, but up close…..yuck. Animal crap, human crap and urine. Garbage all over the place. Drug paraphernalia under the bushes and out in plan sight. People sleeping off their drugs and booze under the trees. Mentally ill people who should be in a hospital or care facility for their OWN safety wandering around.
Public restrooms. portapotties? Are you crazy. The filth, the danger the SMELL, the diseases and drug paraphernalia. Crap smeared all over the place. I’d rather pee my pants than go into a public restroom in SF. If you needed to use a restroom, you went to a restaurant or bar……BOUGHT something and then used their facilities. You can’t use their restrooms unless you are a paying patron. Thank God!
Piss bouncing off of a painted wall, still has to go somewhere. This is why the cities have to spend big bucks….to steam clean the filth and smell from the sidewalks and streets. Because the feral homeless, druggies and bums are pissing and crapping all over the place. Not to mention spitting and blowing their noses onto the streets. Tuberculosis anyone???
Yes….indeed. A very pretty city….from a distance or for those who live in their expensive ivory towers, isolated by their privileged wealth and security systems. The rest of us who had to work and trudge through the city had the experience of dealing with the crud and danger.
Paul, On Netflix is a good documentary on the history of General Tso’s Chicken. It was interesting and informative to me. I think you and your bride would like it.
Nick – saw Mr. Holmes this weekend. Superb. Watching the end of Sherlock Holmes. It is really a film for adults and about starting to lose your memory.
Isaac, lol. BarkingDog will certainly put his mark on this discussion.
My next invention, a fire hydrant that glows in the dark, placed just out of sight in alleys near bars, with a sensor that triggers an overhead shower to wash away all the sins. This is a perfect project for a fine arts student in Berkeley.
Urine can be quite caustic, ever have some neighbor’s dog come wandering over and pee on your favorite rose bush day after day? It doesn’t take long to burn up foliage, but that urine can fell a tlamp post, that’s caustic.
Where’s barkingdog when you need him. If ever there was a post ripe for a dog’s perspective, this is it.
Bruce, Darren pointed out a while back that porta potties were put up in Seattle. They ended up being used by drug addicts and crack whores for activities other than #1 and #2!
Madison is a very liberal city w/ a liberal mayor. He is trying some COMMON SENSE tactics to stop homeless from using public areas as one big urinal and motel. And, he is being vilified by the idiot liberals. The problem w/ the liberals in Madison is most are govt. employees and are hostile to businesses. This mayor sees this is hurting business. There are liberals who are not anti-biz, but they are a distinct minority, particularly in Madison.
Wouldn’t porta potties slove the problem of people peeing in the streets?
BFM, Would not what the person drinks effect the urine composition? I can’t believe we’re having an intelligent conversation on urine. It is possible to have intelligent, fun, even pointed conversations here as long as trolls don’t ruin it.
Nick – if you can use urine to check for drug consumption, it could change the pH. However, I have to ask, is there a difference in the pH of animal urine and human urine?
@Nick: ” Would not what the person drinks effect the urine composition?”
Good question, Nick, and beyond my limited expertise. I think we will have to wait for a comment from a reader who knows more human biology than I do.
And Paul is also on to something when he asks about the difference between human and animal urine: “There are three primary reasons why dog urine burns grass: alkaline urine pH, the concentration of the urine, and its nitrogen load. The most important of these factors is urine pH. The best way to find out which is the causative factor in your dog’s situation is to drop a urine sample off at your vet for a urinalysis.”
So Annie and her roses might be telling us something important about dog urine.
But still, with a ph range between 6 and 8, with 7 being perfectly neutral, I have to wonder how much of a contribution urine is making to corrosion of light poles. Where are the engineers that read this blog now that we really need them?
Finally, I can’t wait for one of our readers to relate ph of urine to the failed social policy of the political party they love to hate.
“Concerns about San Francisco’s decaying light poles were ignited Monday night after one corroded by urine toppled onto a car, narrowly missing the driver.”
Does anyone have any data on the difference in corrosion of water and urine?
The nominal ph of water is 7 with a range of 6 to 8.5. The range of ph for urine is 6 to 8.
One has to wonder if urine made any contribution at all to the corrosion of an aging metal light pole.
Perhaps this is an urban myth that is just too wonderful for serious consideration.
“The normal range for pH in surface water systems is 6.5 to 8.5 and for groundwater systems 6 to 8.5. Alkalinity is a measure of the capacity of the water to resists a change in pH that would tend to make the water more acidic.”
“Urine pH values: In a pH balanced body. urine is slightly acid in the morning, (pH = 6.5 – 7.0) generally becoming more alkaline (pH = 7.5 – 8.0) by evening in healthy people primarily because no food or beverages are consumed while sleeping.”
Jack, I do find it interesting that human males like to pee on vertical objects like lamp posts, trees, etc. just like dogs and other animals. We are still marking our territory. And this just reminded me, this is a micro aggression against males. Although, some females do pee in public, it is almost exclusively a male thing. That said, I was doing a surveillance in Milwaukee once and saw a homeless woman take a dump right outside my van.
Nick – there is a video from China of woman taking a dump in a public elevator.
Lamp post destroyed by urine falls in street, just misses driver
“Concerns about San Francisco’s decaying light poles were ignited Monday night after one corroded by urine toppled onto a car, narrowly missing the driver.”
http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/City-lamp-post-falls-and-urine-was-a-factor-6424634.php
JT, where have you been going while going on those hiking trips? I see a nice redwood tree.
I think that SF cannot grow any larger than it is, that is why all the growth is across the bridge in Marin County. Since they are now officially a ‘sanctuary city’ maybe urinating on walls has become a real problem.
However, if the paint really repels liquids, it would also repel rain meaning that it would splash rain on passer-bys. This is a lawsuit waiting to happen in SF.
I cannot say with any authority, but I suspect the “splashing back on the source” part is being greatly exaggerated in most of the reports. The paint does not allow the urine to stick and therefore means no cleanup is required, which is actually its sole purpose. Some writer imagined that a degree of splashback might happen and the new purpose thus evolved from the feverish imagination of some writer seeking drama.
I can’t imagins a paint manufacturer saying to his design staff, “design a paint that will splash back.” I can certainly imagine him saying, “design a paint that will not absorb moisture.”
Always love a Lt. Frank Drebin reference. However, this is an obvious micro aggression against poor men w/ enlarged prostates, people w/ weak bladders, and the homeless. I am shocked @ the insensitivity.
The San Francisco Board of Commissioners don’t have enough to do. How about before that first lunchtime cocktail they looking at why people are peeing in public.