$3 for the toilet: good or bad?
A woman with a hair salon near Villa-Maria metro has been charging $3 a pop for access to her bathroom. This scandalized one user, but I can see the reasoning. There are no public facilities anywhere near the station, but nothing obliges this woman to offer her bathroom to anyone who asks, with the attendant risk of unsanitary outcomes. Her slightly salty dialogue comes across in this account.
Blork 19:34 on 2019-11-12 Permalink
I am almost 100% certain that there is a Montreal bylaw that says any business that has a washroom available to the public does NOT have the right to refuse people access to it. I saw this a number of years ago and even had the bylaw number, but I lost track of it. I don’t know how or where to try to look that up. (It might be a Quebec law, but I’m pretty sure it’s municipal.)
Kate 20:21 on 2019-11-12 Permalink
Maybe so, but wouldn’t the key phrase here be available to the public? There is a law saying any business that serves food has to have a bathroom available, so people can at least wash their hands before eating. But in most smaller stores and service businesses the bathrooms are normally only for the staff.
As the woman says in the article, when she allows people in, sometimes they complain about not finding soap or paper towels, but she isn’t maintaining the bathroom for anyone but herself and whoever works for her, which in a small salon (and the salon in the block south of the station is tiny) would be at most one or two people, who can wash their hands in the salon’s sink, not something the bathroom “customers” are going to be able to do.
EmilyG 20:22 on 2019-11-12 Permalink
There are hardly any public bathrooms anywhere near any metro stations. And many restaurants/businesses won’t let you use the bathroom unless you’re a customer.
Being someone with health conditions who sometimes does need to use bathrooms when I’m out in public, I might not mind paying for it, though I know not everyone is in the situation where they can pay for it.
The hair salon owner brings up the point that not many STM stations have bathrooms. Even the new blue line stations are being built without bathrooms, where I would’ve thought that having them would be a basic human need.
And back when my health was better, I didn’t realize just how bad the lack of available washrooms is in most parts of Montreal, so it’s an easy problem to miss.
jeather 10:22 on 2019-11-13 Permalink
I remember hearing about that bylaw too, Blork — if you can find the link, please let me know.
Surely if you have a salon, your bathroom is available to the clients of the salon, like a restaurant has a bathroom available to clients of the restaurant. So I’m not sure how it differs, assuming that bylaw is still in force. (Though I think she’s not doing anything really wrong.)
I was in L-G with a friend and her daughter had a bathroom emergency, and the only nearby one was the gas station, which I am told was filthy.
CE 11:51 on 2019-11-13 Permalink
In Montreal, I often find myself having to sneak into chain restaurants and hoping the door isn’t locked if I have to use the washroom while out and about. Something I liked about Colombia when I lived there is you could walk into pretty much any store or restaurant and ask for “servicio de baño” and they’d name a price (usually no more than the equivalent of a dollar unless you needed to do more than pee, then they’d “charge you for toilet paper”). It would have been nice to pee for free but it saved me a few times to know that I could walk into almost anywhere in the city and use a washroom with the change in my pocket.
EmilyG 18:15 on 2019-11-13 Permalink
I once tried to use the bathroom at a McDonald’s, intending to buy something after, but an employee followed me into the bathroom and actually chased me out of the toilet stall.
Since then, I’ve been wary about trying to sneak into restaurant bathrooms.
Michael Black 18:26 on 2019-11-13 Permalink
Malls work well, since the bathrooms are separate from the stores and restaurants.
So downtown is well served, other areas a lot less.
My friend Helen, who was homeless, kept track of suitable bathrooms, and sort of kept their closeness in mind when she had a chance to drink something. To far or too late (because they’d close) she’d not have as much to drink as earlier in the day.
Michael
Blork 18:36 on 2019-11-13 Permalink
Supposedly pharmacies are pretty good at having publicly accessible washrooms (I mean PJCs and Pharmaprix etc., not so much the hole-in-the-wall places). Large grocery stores also usually have public washrooms.