I thought this sort of thing was what CEPTIA successfully campaigned against?

Also, what is the public commons that's being eroded in this scenario? Public toilets are few and far between but also kind of don't seem like a commons. I'd imagine a commons is something like a fishery or something. Pretty easy to control access to toilets. They have doors and as most European countries have proven, you can charge for the access to those doors.

In 1974 (about) I was at a Greyhound terminal in NY City. The large, attended restroom was almost all pay stalls, except for one free stall, and I really did not want to use that one.

Yeah I’m sure there would be a regulation against it, and you’d need to brand them as rest centers or something.

And I think public access to toilets, at least in NYC, should probably be something more like the subway system than a service just for those that can pay a lot. Even then, the subway isn’t really a life need in the way a toilet is. (Yes I’m aware that it costs money to ride the subway, but it’s not very expensive.) I can imagine the service I described being branded by the press/public as bathrooms only for the rich.

As I said, norms around this aren’t the same around the world. It’s normal to pay for a toilet in Europe but many Americans have a negative reaction to the idea.

As of about 15 years ago, Rudford's diner in San Diego (El Cajon Blvd) had pay toilets with the real authentic coin boxes on them. You didn't actually need to pay your own money; any waitress could provide you a coin when you asked. IIRC, they may have run on tokens only, so that it would be a closed ecosystem.

That may have been the only place I ever saw the real pay-toilet coin boxes. Anywhere else was simply gatekept by being a patron of the restaurant or store. Of course, in 1980s San Diego, there were zero public toilets of any kind, anywhere in town. All of the toilets were inside businesses, maintained by those businesses, and 100% closed to non-customers.

My friend, handling the waste of all the people that live in a city is one of the most basic examples of the public commons I can imagine lol. What are you talking about?? It is a bit fundamental to the concept of a city!