Neighbors Say SF Tesla Supercharger Lot Has Become Urine Dumping Ground

https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/tesla-supercharger-lot-lombard-22080348.php

by randycupertino • 4 months ago

39 27 4 months ago

The urine thing is startling. I'm not much of a car person, much less an electric Tesla person. Is urine a large part of the Tesla sub-culture?

throwaway-blaze• 4 months ago

Rideshare drivers

jerlam• 4 months ago

It's also hard to park and find public bathrooms in San Francisco.

rsynnott• 4 months ago

Presumably simply following Dear Leader's lead: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/elon-mus...

milleramp• 4 months ago

So it's cleaner than the sidewalks?

rationalist• 4 months ago

Considering another comment talks about someone taking a dump on the sidewalk; maybe.

empressplay• 4 months ago

I'm honestly amazed there isn't a toilet there? Like, there's toilets at gas stations, why wouldn't they (by default) put toilets in a supercharger lot?

That's pretty cheap! I mean, does Tesla expect people to use the toilet at a gas station when they're not even buying gas?

fragmede• 4 months ago

Costs money to operate.

bombcar• 4 months ago

And anything remotely close to a public toilet in SF is doomed to disaster.

phil213• 4 months ago

It’s really not that cheap at all in major city cores.

Gas stations around me do not generally have a public restroom due to the sheer amount of abuse they are subject to. The very few that do are the “get a key from the attendant after purchase” variety and you’d only use those in a very very dire emergency. You also have to know to ask and likely be known by the attendant since they all have “no public restroom” signs.

It’s a tragedy of the commons sort of situation. Any business that provides it requires 24x7 on-site personnel willing to get into fights with the homeless, drug addicts, and mentally unwell folks. On top of the normal abuse the general public puts on such facilities. The police will be unlikely to respond to such trespassing calls in a timely manner.

An unmanned charging station would be an epic shitshow in a major city if it had public restrooms. You would be talking multiple six figures a year to maintain such a thing. It’s not a “send a cleaning crew once a day” sort of enterprise.

Hell, even with only ride share and delivery driver demographics it would be untenable. My alley is near a major commercial corridor but not crazy busy - with literally hundreds of trash cans lining both sides of it. Every weekend I’m picking up a couple bags worth of trash tossed out of the windows of DoorDash drivers, and every single night I have multiple drivers on my security cameras taking a piss behind my garage. The latter I understand and I “get it” - but the former is inexcusable since it would take literally 15 seconds to get out of your car to toss the McDonald’s bag into a can if you were assed enough to do so. Heck if it’s too cold out you could simply reach out your window and make it happen if you were so inclined.

watwut• 4 months ago

Meanwhile, gas stations with toilettes are completely normal and standard.

If you have a business that involves people staying fir long, you have to have wc. They will need to piss and shit, that is given.

expedition32• 4 months ago

The first time as a child going to the big city the toilets had blue lights! This was in the late 1980s.

That memory has always stuck with me.

Foreigners often complain that public toilets in the Netherlands cost money to use. Apparently in other places people enjoy cleaning toilets for free?

HWR_145• 4 months ago

You would be talking multiple six figures a year to maintain such a thing.

A trillion dollar company can afford it, as can the profits from a supercharger station. Plus, you can limit it to people who are paying to charge their cars (or their passengers).

joshribakoff• 4 months ago

SFs de facto stance (in practice due to the dynamic between law enforcement agencies) seems to be that generally an individual has right to relieve themselves even on a sidewalk (even pretextually) and being visible does not in itself arise to a crime like indecent exposure, without additional factors (such as the stereotypical “trench coat flashing” without pretext).

Thats the way SFPD worded it to me after repeatedly failing to act on my reports (such as a woman urinating in front of my child on a sidewalk near an sf muni bus stop). Nudity is legal. People have a right to bodily function. Another factor is response time, for this priority the response time can be over 12 hours (if they respond), and obviously they’re not gonna skip trace someone for urinating on a sidewalk after they left the scene.

Most event organizers like bay to breakers race or outside lands provide facilities to mitigate burdens on the community. The city provides its own portable facilities in hotspots. Tesla could easily do it, but is notorious for ignoring regulations or just doesn’t care.

HWR_145• 4 months ago

Thats the way SFPD worded it to me after repeatedly failing to act on my reports (such as a woman urinating in front of my child on a sidewalk near an sf muni bus stop). Nudity is legal.

Section 154 generally made nudity on public sidewalks or at bus stops illegal since 2012. Either your story is old or the cops are misinformed.

b0rtb0rt• 4 months ago

and this is somehow notable for san francisco?

Neighbors Say SF Tesla Supercharger Lot Has Become Urine Dumping Ground

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