Local public transit
Dec. 22nd, 2022 07:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mtbcI find railway travel to be fairly pleasant overall, especially as it means that I need not drive or park. This morning, my seat on the carriage affords me a view of sunrise over the North Sea, there are some lovely coastal routes for quite some distance north and south from here.
One thing that didn't amuse me was that one must pay to use the station toilets. Unfortunately, this seems common at bus stations as well as railway stations. I am all for their covering maintenance via what they charge operators or whatever, money for overheads must come from somewhere, but charging people in transit who may have many small children or continence issues or whatever just seems mean to me, especially where they demand exact change. I find this as disappointing as town councils who like to encourage visitors at times when they have locked up the public toilets. I am not going to be lingering in your retail area if I don't have easy access to toilets.
Another bother is that the
One thing that didn't amuse me was that one must pay to use the station toilets. Unfortunately, this seems common at bus stations as well as railway stations. I am all for their covering maintenance via what they charge operators or whatever, money for overheads must come from somewhere, but charging people in transit who may have many small children or continence issues or whatever just seems mean to me, especially where they demand exact change. I find this as disappointing as town councils who like to encourage visitors at times when they have locked up the public toilets. I am not going to be lingering in your retail area if I don't have easy access to toilets.
Another bother is that the
wrong traincame: the seat reservations are a mess so I may lose a chunk of work time in giving my seat up for somebody more deserving, we shall see. This train is slower than the one planned but I am not on a deadline. It tends to be ScotRail with the issues, I usually have more luck with LNER, but I am not a frequent traveler so the sample size is small.
no subject
Date: 2022-12-24 06:10 pm (UTC)Well, sort of. There are no pay locks on the doors, anyway. Toilets exist everywhere in the city, but they're usually not accessible. That's something we learned quickly during the Occupy movement. Businesses who said we were free to use their toilets were rare, but even then they had their operating hours. I get why businesses want them to be "for customers only". There are costs to operating them: water, electricity for lights, paper, soap, and staff time for cleaning. It's something I bring up at city/park planning meeting, on the rare occasions that I attend. They offer water fountains but no public toilets. What exactly do they think will happen? (Unspoken answer: "Don't stay here. Just visit briefly, thanks.")