Signal 3: Poop Map and Mobile Bathrooms in San Fransisco
When people talk about San Fransisco, what comes to your mind at first? Silicon Valley? Billionaires? The thing I am going to talk about is avoiding stepping on poop.
Recently, San Fransisco’ mayor London Breed told NBC that she “never seen as many human feces piled on the sidewalks as she did.” To solve that problem, she launched the “Poop Patrol” plan, hiring more employees to clean up the street. As SF Chronicle reported, those staffs’ salaries are more than 18,500 dollars per year ( the average salary of an experienced coder in Silicon Valley is 15,000 dollars). What’s more, Jennifer Wong set up an online map that plotted locations of feces, data comes from 311 calls, and people can upload data on that website. However, Jennifer stopped upgrading the data because people and publication used that map in a wrong way. Her purpose was bringing attention to the homeless instead of insulting.
There are 7,499 homeless individuals live on the streets without access to a public restroom. To relieve this problem, the government set up a series of mobile bathrooms that each comes with a sink, two toilets, a dog waste station, and a needle disposal bin. The model I introduced in signal 1 can help to determine where needs those bathrooms the most by using it to locate those places in SF which is far away from living amenities. On the one hand, a mall or a park already provides public restrooms, and it is a waste if we set up one more just beside it. On the other hand, a large homeless-bathroom has a negative impact on the neighbor and might cause crime. It is better to find more places and build more small public restrooms.
It is true that government can build some public restrooms like they already constructed supervised injections site to solve “needle on streets” problem. Although it sounds plausible and practicable, the real issue is still here — lack of affordable housing.
References
San Francisco Spends $30 Million Cleaning Feces, Needles. (2018). Retrieved from https://www.nbcbayarea.com/investigations/Diseased-Streets-472430013.html
Finally, San Francisco Is Dealing With Its Poop Epidemic. (2018). Retrieved from https://www.fastcompany.com/3040824/finally-san-francisco-is-dealing-with-its-poop-epidemic
