Urine Trouble

Amending Vancouver’s Parks Washroom Strategy is essential to make public spaces more inclusive and accessible for the people of Vancouver. Vancouver’s current public washrooms are on average 60 years old, with 95 public washrooms in parks compared to the 11 on the street. There is a gap in Vancouver’s Park Washroom Strategy for those who need to use a washroom with short notice in public because new, accessible sites are not suggested. A significant aspect of accessibility includes having more public toilets available with inclusive designs. Our framework addresses this gap by advocating for more washrooms around transportation hubs, urban plazas, and parks. Public washrooms are a provincially designated essential service and should be within a 5-minute walking distance from key pedestrian nodes to make cities fully inclusive for pedestrians. Placing toilets along populated pedestrian networks makes them more inclusive for various citizen needs. We suggest considering these key stakeholders when designing public washrooms: – Women – People who use drugs – People experiencing homelessness – People with visible and invisible disabilities This framework suggests contracting private partnerships to share maintenance/installation costs, and selling advertising space in highly trafficked pedestrian areas will help reduce costs while providing services to local stakeholders. Placing public washrooms around transit hubs, like the Commercial-Broadway SkyTrain station, is important because these sites experience heavy daily foot traffic, meaning essential services such as washrooms should be available to this population. Our proposed sites are: – WC Shelly Park – Southeast corner of the Commercial Drive/North Grandview Highway Intersection Each site would consist of a different washroom design to accommodate different use values. This methodology ultimately centres the expansion of Vancouver’s public washroom network and advances recommendations for future washrooms that include higher standards of maintenance, harm-reduction principles, hygiene products/disposal, enhanced safety mechanisms, adequate floor space, and a web app.