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Idle Technology

San Francisco's Public Works Agency Tests Paint That Repels Urine 210

Posted by samzenpus from the keeping-it-clean dept.
monkeyzoo writes: San Francisco is testing an ultra-water-repellant paint on wallls in areas fraught with public urination problems. The paint is designed to repel the urine and soil the offender's pants. "It's supposed to, when people urinate, bounce back and hit them on the pants and get them wet. Hopefully that will discourage them. We will put a sign to give them a heads up," said Mohammad Nuru, director of the San Francisco public works. A Florida company named Ultra-Tech produces the super-hydrophobic oleophobic nano-coating that was also recently used with success on walls in Hamburg, Germany [video] to discourage public urination. Signs posted there warn, "Do not pee here! We pee back!"
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San Francisco's Public Works Agency Tests Paint That Repels Urine More

San Francisco's Public Works Agency Tests Paint That Repels Urine

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  • Hurr durr (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 30, 2015 @02:08AM (#50212319)

    Wont they just pee on the ground in front of the wall then?

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Yeah, was thinking the same thing.

      So you're drunk enough to piss on some poor bastards wall. You start pissing and something unexpected happens. Do you:
      a) Stop pissing;
      b) Piss on the sidewalk; or
      c) Get creative, bring Pythagoras into the fray, and see what interesting effects you can achieve with small angular corrections...

      Put more public troughs (yes women do it, just not as much as men) or stalls into problem areas.

      They can be temporary.
      They're made of plastic or stainless components and are easi

      • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

        by TheCarp ( 96830 )

        > So you're drunk enough to piss on some poor bastards wall

        See there you go, trying to see the perspective of the person causing the problem and understanding how they might reason it.... you sir, are unfit for public office.

        Seriously though I wonder if the people who come up with these ideas have just no life experience at all, or are they just con artists trying to funnel budget money into their own pockets? (Or a little of both)

        > You start pissing and something unexpected happens.

        For example... let

        • I don't know, I have been drunk enough (or wanted to smoke) that I have pissed in my own backyard instead of my perfectly good bathroom inside.

      • Here in San Francisco, almost all the public toilets not inside a building with security are immediately infested with homeless, drug addicts etc using them for whatever. I've never gone into one that wasn't absolutely flooded and disgusting -- in the rare instance they're available. Many homeless just decide to live in them and break off the door/close it etc. In public transit, they have signs that say "Restroom closed due to terrorism concerns." -- Yes, blame terrorism, not the homeless!
        Basically

    • Nah, people are like dogs in this respect. They need a vertical surface.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by TheCarp ( 96830 )

        So....trees. I would go as far as to fully support a constitutional right to be left in peace while pissing on any tree not planted in a container or on private land.

        Problem solved....plant more trees and take advantage of natures original urinal.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by LWATCDR ( 28044 )

      Or find another wall.
      Why not just electrify the walls randomly.
      "Yes I am just kidding"

      • Mythbusters tried that, unless you piss like an elephant, you don't have to worry about an electrified fence, or even third rail.

        • That was the third rail that didn't work. The electric fence definitely did work if you were close enough and/or unlucky.

          Having a full thin conductive sheet would vastly improve the odds over a thin wire as well.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by nytes ( 231372 )

      Then we'll paint the sidewalk so it repels upwards!

      (Although levitating urine puddles could become a bit of a hazard, I imagine.)

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by nult ( 3522097 )
      Ha! Exactly.. Ill just opt to piss on the street.

  • Super cool (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    San Francisco is super cool to the homeless.

  • If only it could repel shit... (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward

    ...most Slashdot posts and would bounce right back at their authors.

  • sigh (Score:4, Insightful)

    by DNS-and-BIND ( 461968 ) on Thursday July 30, 2015 @02:22AM (#50212355) Homepage
    This is a technical solution to a social problem. I learned this on Slashdot. The problem isn't urine, it's the fact that filthy people - sorry, MEN - are pissing all over the city. All the paint in the world won't fix that. Installing clean, publically accessible bathrooms would fix the problem permanently. Men who already piss everywhere aren't too worried about a little splashback.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I live in an ally in a major city with no toilets. Its mostly men that come here to pee but also women. I can't blame them though, the distance to the nearest toilet is pretty big in this area.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by x0ra ( 1249540 )
      I'd assume that those men have no other choice than walking the street due to the lack of proper social shelters. Women have plenty of space, but men, no, don't care about them. And then, you blame them for something they had no choice on.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        If you're assuming the problem is public urination by the homeless, you're mistaken; it's mostly drunk people.

    • It's not a technical solution; they'll just throw a handful of leaves on the ground and piss on that.
    • Publicly accessible bathrooms that will end up full of junkies strung out on heroin who don't want to sleep out in the rain?

      Cities have found out that these public resources tend to get abused, vandalized, or otherwise misused such that the general public doesn't want anything to do with them. Spend the money solving the poverty issues that tend to ruin implementations like that instead, and it turns out that many of the other problems which required those implementations tend to vanish as well.

      You'd

    • Men who already piss everywhere aren't too worried about a little splashback.

      Ok, nice generalization.

      You're ignoring some key points; this has been tried in Germany (this is where San Francisco got the idea) and it seems to be completely successful. And as a man who lives in SF neither me, nor anyone I know, has ever peed on a wall in a public place in the city to the best of my knowledge. The behaviour is really relegated to the homeless, whom I have seen doing this. For all the talk about piling on the poor homeless they really don't appear to give two f*cks about other people. T

  • Simples (Score:5, Insightful)

    by maroberts ( 15852 ) on Thursday July 30, 2015 @02:25AM (#50212359) Homepage Journal

    Pee at an angle to the wall.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Just like every male human being learns from the age of 3 onwards. You only pee on your new boots once.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Holi ( 250190 )
      That's what I do, keeps the splashing off my shoes.
    • The penchant is to pee into corners [youtube.com], since that provides some privacy and reduces your likelihood of being seen. If you can make the walls bounce a urine stream, those two walls at 90 degrees work like a partial retroreflector [wikipedia.org]. Regardless of what angle you hit the first surface, any urine sprayed at them is directed back towards the source (just not vertically, which wouldn't happen anyway due to gravity), .

  • Don't warn them (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Don't warn them, people who piss all over the place deserve to get the splash back.

  • Preferably track 9 from Freeze Frame.

  • Night-time pop-up urinals (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Trevelyan ( 535381 ) on Thursday July 30, 2015 @02:52AM (#50212451)
    Why don't they just install night-time pop up urinals, like other cities have done.
    I know them from London, Paris and Amsterdam, but here's a video for one in Watford [youtube.com]

    Fairly straight forward solution, and no more stinky city.

    • Re:Night-time pop-up urinals (Score:5, Informative)

      by jittles ( 1613415 ) on Thursday July 30, 2015 @07:54AM (#50213503)

      Why don't they just install night-time pop up urinals, like other cities have done. I know them from London, Paris and Amsterdam, but here's a video for one in Watford [youtube.com] Fairly straight forward solution, and no more stinky city.

      Have you been to San Francisco? There is a HUGE homeless community there. They used to have public toilets 24/7. Free ones at that. Then the homeless people started living in them. So then they started charging a small fee (I think it was originally around $0.50) to try and keep the homeless people from living inside of them. Eventually, they removed the public toilets because the public was unable to use them anyway. They need to solve the homeless problem until they can solve the public toilet problem.

  • you are all missing the wall ... er, point! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 30, 2015 @02:59AM (#50212479)

    Main improvement is not that wall pisses back; that is just a comical twist. The important part is that the wall doesn't get soaked in smelly urine. Street washing trucks and machines will take care of the pavement.

  • Solutions? (Score:3)

    by GeekWithAKnife ( 2717871 ) on Thursday July 30, 2015 @03:23AM (#50212539)

    As I see it the problem is deterrent. People drink too much, cannot hold it in and need to pee. Given their drunken state they no longer care about how it looks or what others may think and they just piss anywhere.

    IF fines were high and CCTV footage or pictures were published to name and shame I'm pretty sure we'll have far less people doing this!

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Zuulie ( 1167315 )
      In London, the local councils, in their great wisdom, removed practically all public toilets. They were the flabbergasted when they had a problem with people urinating and decided that the solution was to punish people (£50 on-the-spot fine) rather than admitting removing all those public toilets was a huge mistake.

      When you drum up support for surveillance and harder punishments, you seem to completely forget that our tax money should be used for public services, not for new ways to monitor and puni


      • Local councils are funded with tax payer money yes. The establishment in which you buy drinks is not funded (entirely) by tax money and by purchasing a drink the use of the facilities, lightning, heating, space AND toilets is factored in.

        In reality what you are asking is that your tax money is used to create/fund toilets (naturally close to areas of drinking where most pissing takes place). Except of course that you have already paid for the use of a toilet when you bought a drink. So really you want to p

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Zuulie ( 1167315 )
          We're going further down the rabbit hole on this one, but then again, it's Slashdot commentary after all. I'm not sure why suggesting that a public service that is clearly needed and shouldn't have been removed causes such a strong response, including getting personal. Try taking a family with 3 children into central London for a day as an example, rather than the flamboyant example of a drunk staggering home. If incorrect decisions made by the local councils are rewarded by the ability to use the averag

          • What makes you think I do not have children?

            Let me tell you that you can always find a McDonalds, Starbucks or some such in central London.

            Public urination is an offence that is committed by adults. I don't recall any children getting hit with a £50 fine.

            You, parent/responsible adult are doing it wrong if you cannot factor in your kids needing to pee on a trip anywhere. -which is beside the point as this was originally about adults getting drunk and urinating in public.

            A strong response becaus
            • It's like a lot of people in this thread have never gone pee before after drinking a lot of any liquid. You pee before you leave the establishment, then 30 or 40 minutes later you have to pee again. Now all the places are closed and you sure aren't going to just pee yourself. Or maybe you would choose to do that, but it is still public urination and the pee is still on the street either way.

      • At current exchange rates 50gbp is 78usd. In San Francisco, that's seven cocktails at an average bar, or a $20 cover plus three or four drinks at a place that's slightly on the fancy side.

        How do you go from a fairly trivial fine for a quality-of-life infraction that is both unsanitary and disgusting to hanging? I'm not sure if that's a strawman or a slippery slope, but it's pretty far out there.

    • The problem is the lack of social responsibility/potty profit seeking in tourist cities and European cities. I was appalled by the lack of public restrooms in Europe when I visited, and its similar in some US tourism cities. Where I live, which is a decent 1m+pop city, every single store has a restroom, and you are allowed to use it, for free. Even secure locations like office towers always have accessible restrooms on the first floor to the public, where they typically have a shop/restaurant floor. A l

      • It's tough. I've lived/visited numerous cities with different approaches, and things seem to gravitate to one of two stable arrangements: Ubiquitous bathrooms or Scarce bathrooms. Middling arrangements put so much use on the available restrooms that the business owners become frustrated and restrict access.

        I'm not sure what the difference is, but for some reason nearly all of California has scarce restrooms. Places like Denver are the opposite.

  • won't splash back. I've seen this stuff, it isn't magic. What are they relying on people being too drunk or stupid to know how things bounce?

    It's super expensive paint. So what they get is that the sidewalk smells instead of the wall.

    • What they also get is every drunk idiot in the area coming to look and pee at that new magic pee repelling wall. Maybe someone will come up with a fun drinking game for it.

      • Amen. Pubs in Sydney had to remove breathalyzers because it turned into a contest to blow the highest number. Considering the laws there, I think that was the wrong response as they could simply cut off every bloke or sheila (yes, Aussie women also try to drink each other under the table) that blew say .1, win win.

        • Seems like it would have been easiest to change the breathalyzer to only display "drunk" and "probably not drunk" lights. That takes the fun out of it.
  • Pissoff? Or perhaps it only comes in a pea green shade so it is called Peaoff

  • This is the real issue in these situations. There really isn't a good place to pee in a lot of places. People often as not rely on restrooms provided by businesses and they only let you go in there if you are a customer. So if you're not... or they're closed because it is late... then where are you going to pee?

    The issue with public restrooms is that that is realestate that is valudable and you have to police and maintain them to keep people from selling drugs for blow jobs in them or rubbing shit into the

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dj245 ( 732906 )

      This is the real issue in these situations. There really isn't a good place to pee in a lot of places. People often as not rely on restrooms provided by businesses and they only let you go in there if you are a customer. So if you're not... or they're closed because it is late... then where are you going to pee?

      The issue with public restrooms is that that is realestate that is valudable and you have to police and maintain them to keep people from selling drugs for blow jobs in them or rubbing shit into the ceiling.

      The Solution there is to have them be public but make their maintenance the responsibility of locals rather than some city workers that will be under staffed, unmotivated, and unaccountable when they don't do their jobs. Local businesses will want those facilities to look good and be good and so they'll task someone to deal with it.

      Regardless, anyone that thinks they're stopping people from peeing by putting funny paint on the walls is an idiot.

      1. You can still pee on the ground.

      2. Stand back and pee at an angle and you can pee on the wall.

      3. Women are responsible for this far more than you'd realize and they pop a squat and pee.

      So... yeah. You're not stopping anything with your paint. Put in more public bathrooms or get used to the smell of urine.

      Maintenance doesn't have to be a problem for public bathrooms. Unless it is in a remote area, a 1st-world public bathroom requires water and sewer connections. Make the whole thing out of plastics / stainless / tile and put in sloping floors and a floor drain. Put some retractable rotating water jets in the ceiling, and have them go off at 3AM every day and with an occupancy sensor. I'm thinking like a soot blower [diamondpower.com.au] (PDF) kind of device, but with water. To reduce complexity you could power the rotation w

      • That's a good point. I hadn't thought of self cleaning bathrooms.

        Assuming you did that, that would work.

        Regardless, the issue with people peeing all over the place is that there isn't any place for them to do it besides the wall. And that's on the city. Every block or so you need to have a little easement for a public restroom with signs that point out where it is... and if you can't be bothered to do that... then have fun with people peeing anywhere.

        • That's what they have in Paris... free, self-contained public toilets that have one toilet and that spray themselves down inside between each use. They have a little sensor that detects when people pass in/out. Very forward thinking! (But a low throughput because of the cleaning cycle between users.)

  • "...The paint is designed to repel the urine and soil the offender's pants. "It's supposed to, when people urinate, bounce back and hit them on the pants and get them wet. Hopefully that will discourage them"

    Discourage? You're expecting to fight a drunk with logic? Clearly you've never had to deal with the logic of an alcoholic, which is generally the type of person you're dealing with who has a problem of urinating in public.

    You've got about as much of a chance of "discouraging" drunks with this as you do stopping ISIS by saying "pretty please".

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Rain usually falls downwards, thus sparing walls (and ceilings for that matter) from impact. LOL
      If it's blowing rain, well your pants are already as wet as the walls to begin with. (You do realize that legs are walls share the same angle of incidence to any falling rain, right?!)
      It's called physics! :-)

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dcw3 ( 649211 )

        You do realize that if the wind is blowing directly toward the wall, a person could hold their umbrella directed away from the wall, and not be hit by the direct rain, and it would be bouncing off the wall back at them. It's called geometry.

    • San Francisco doesn't really get rain, a few storms a year. They get earthquakes more often than rain. When it rains the whole city freaks out and floods.

  • wear an adult diaper. That way, when I get wasted and can't control my bodily functions, I'm OK. Maybe bars should start putting diaper machines in restrooms- the product will probably get a lot more use than the other products that the machines sell.

  • They should just put on the lights and normal people will not pee on the wall... Abnormal people don't care about wet pants... btw. what if they pee under an angle to the right or left? All that design money going to waste...

  • So city slickers need something to piss on?

    Any farm boy can tell you all you need is the wind at your back and you're good to go. Literally. :P

  • ...wall pees on you!

  • Face sideways a little instead of straight at the wall ought to let the reflected pee bounce away from us, right?

  • First world problems... (Score:5, Informative)

    by mpercy ( 1085347 ) on Thursday July 30, 2015 @07:53AM (#50213493)

    First world problems caused by other first world problems (like closing or failing to provide public restrooms).

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      ...apparently in the third world they don't piss...

    • Yes and no, discouraging unsanitary actions is not just a first world problem. Though the solution seems decidedly first world to me when that doesn't seem necessary...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by RyoShin ( 610051 )

      (like closing or failing to provide public restrooms)

      Which usually stems from another first-world problem, homeless people.

  • Stupid solution (Score:3)

    by macson_g ( 1551397 ) on Thursday July 30, 2015 @09:03AM (#50213917)
    In the meantime, other cities (Amsterdam, NL for instance), simply put free, public toilets everywhere. I think it works a tad better.
  • If I saw a sign saying they had a special paint that bounces pee back it would make me want to try it out. I have plenty of curiosity and interest in new technology that hearing about this would have the opposite effect. I bet others out there feel the same way. It would also be interesting to see if there is a way to angle against the wall and have it bounce off further away from you and still not get splash on.

  • Why would they give a warning? IMO there should be no warnings at all, and just let them be surprised.

    By giving warnings, you're indicating where they can and can't pee cause they'll just look for an unpainted wall. If you don't warn, then the gambling effect kicks in and they will be wary of peeing against anything that isn't a toilet or foliage.

  • The paint repellent urine is not that it bounces back like a wile e coyote gag (how would it? You would have to make the urine and wall a near 100% elastic collision and as a liquid against a solid good luck) in fact video make it clear that he is only projecting the test liquid with force and it barely backs a bit (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tacicbV4aI). No the things is that the urine is much easier washed up. It is highly hydrophobic, but ti does not change that the water will not have an elastic c
  • Few public restrooms, high homelessness, urination as a biological necessity leads to 1 possible outcome: people will piss on things. Coat it with paint, coat it with spikes, the problem still exists, you just fuck the people who already have no options. If you can't address the cause, you can't solve the problem, period. I don't understand why politicians think shitting on those who have no choices available to them is an effective policy.
  • This would be better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
  • I think I would intentionally pee on a wall (at an angle of course) just to see how well this stuff works.

  • "Bars, pubs and restaurants, I'm told, have toilets."

    I'm sorry to see so much hatred toward the homeless. Do you see lots of homeless people in bars ordering $6 drinks? No. College kids, perhaps; and yes they pee in alleys after closing sometimes.

    In the US we have liquor stores where people carry out bottles of far more affordable liquids. They rarely allow use of toilets. Yes, we have lots of homeless who drink, but we have many more who do not drink. Many who don't do drugs. Many who are simply way down o

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