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Urine luck: urinals a low-cost trial

The Guelph Mercury, 6/17/2009

Ahh, Sunday morning in downtown Guelph. Birds chirping. Families strolling about. The delightful smell of pee on the sidewalk.

Yep, such is life in a town with so many bars packed into so few blocks. Any man who’s honest with himself can tell you public urination is all about simple, lazy physics — what goes in must come out. Too bad it has to come out on business owners’ front steps, in gardens and on public sidewalks.

But what a relief: the city thinks it may have found a way to deal with the problem of drinkers who can’t hold it until they get home. Within a few weeks, we could see open-air urinals popping up Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights on downtown streets.

The urinals would be removed each morning, cleaned and sanitized and reinstalled the following afternoon.

The Downtown Guelph Business Association is all for it, and supports a full campaign to go along with it to teach drinkers the difference between a toilet and a sidewalk.

Still, some residents are grumbling about the city pandering to drunks, wasting money on weak-bladdered drinkers who have probably never had to hose down their doorstep when they open for business in the morning. Others complain the pee depots are ugly and encourage public urination.

What a silly thing to debate. Plenty of places don’t seem to have this hang-up on public peeing depots. In China, urinals are often no more private than a trough running through the middle of an open room. Public toilets dot the streets of Paris, Amsterdam and Tokyo. Even here in Guelph, we throw up porta-potties at every public event in the city; they’re at the edge of soccer fields and ball diamonds, and no one blinks an eye.

At any rate, this is only a test run; if it doesn’t work, the urinals will be removed. And it’s a relatively low-cost experiment. Good on the city for trying something new.

The money doesn’t need to take funds away from other departments, either. City police have issued $240 tickets 131 times under the anti-fouling bylaw in the past 12 months, Guelph Police Sgt. Doug Pflug says. That’s $31,440 paid by the, er, pee-ers themselves — far more than the $700 to $1,200 a week the city expects to spend during this summer trial.

Heck, with that kind of pee revenue, the city could also afford to put out disposal units for all the late-night takeout food that gets dumped on the sidewalks. We could even call them “garbage cans” and ask people to put their trash in them rather than on the ground. Imagine that.

Those slapped with a fine for emptying their bladder on someone’s property should be happy to be hit with such a relatively minor punishment. In Detroit, a man was shot in February, apparently for peeing against a building. And last month, two Yellowstone National Park concession workers were fired after a live webcam caught them urinating into the Old Faithful geyser. One of them was fined $750 and placed on three years of probation.

And if the police keep up their crackdown on public peeing, the city could afford to hire the same engineers who rigged the International Space Station to recycle astronauts’ bodily fluids while they float 200 miles above Earth, turning pee into water.

“The taste is great,” American astronaut Michael Barratt reported last month. I’ll take his word for it.

But think about that for a minute: we could call it Guelph’s Gold, and sell it on street corners on Saturday nights. For a city that once had a waste recovery program that rivalled the best in Canada, it would be the ultimate recycling project.

Just an idea.