Oh, the possibilities for so many bad and tasteless jokes. Sandy James picked this up in The Telegraph:
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Hamburg fights back against urination on streets with walls that ‘pee back’
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An area of the city of Hamburg known for its nightlife is fighting back against drunken revellers who relieve themselves in the streets – by modifying the area’s walls to “pee back”.
A neighbourhood association has begun repainting walls along the famous Reeperbahn street, in the heart of the city’s St Pauli nightlife district, with a water-repellent paint.
The offending urine bounces straight off the wall – and on to the shoes of the perpetrator.
Signs have been put up around the district that read “Don’t pee here. We pee back.”
The menace of what is known as the Wildpinkler, or “wild urinator”, is something of an obsession in Germany.
I have never understood why public washrooms and toilets are few and far between. Every person alive, man, woman, and child, has biological requirements to dispose of waste. This will never change.
Here is an area where it is common for people to urinate on the wall. While I don’t agree with their actions I understand completely why the urinators resort to it. What is stopping this neighborhood association from installing a public toilet in the areas where urination is most frequent? I get that the paint costs less, especially in maintenance costs but the reality is if this neighborhood is a place they actually want people to frequent, it should have facilities for disposing of this waste we all create.
Reeperbahn men wouldn’t use public toilets. Sidewalks are much easier and more fun for them.
So in this case you’re saying that there are public toilets and these these fellows choose not to use them?
It’s funny but the wrong approach for the long term. Like anything else that can be a problem there are two approaches. One is to punish it, the other is to provide an outlet for it.
If it’s a nightlife area, then people will still need to pee after they’ve left the bar and will just do it somewhere else a little further away if they can’t do it right there.
What some other tourist areas do is have more public washrooms and even have portable urinals that are brought out on Fridays and then taken away on Sundays.
Perhaps a combination of both approaches would be useful. The area clearly needs public toilets and as Antje suggested some of the people are peeing on the walls because this amuses them.
By using both the toilets and paint, you can provide a place for people who genuinely need to go and at the same time punish those who feel joy in urinating on other people’s property.
I suppose but the assumption that the Reeperbahn men are peeing for fun could be wrong. It could be an assumption in someone’s mind based only on what they’ve observed. Sure drunk guys are rowdy and all and pee on the wall sometimes if it’s the most convenient thing and there’s no alternative but that doesn’t mean they’re doing it on purpose.
But the only way to find this out is to provide a way to have their needs met in a convenient way and then see what happens.