… Money, Cost & Value

**Postscript: What seems to have happened is that rather than covering ‘money, cost & value’, I’ve written 1100 words on whether you should charge people for the loo or not (??!). So let’s call this Part 1**

I’ve not posted in a while, because I needed to put more effort into doing something rather than just writing about it. It’s quite scary and I’m not sure that it’ll pay off, but at least I’m having a go…

Anyways, it’s Christmas soon and I really wanted to fit in a festive blog post on MONEY.

Funding public toilets is probably the biggest concern for councils (right now it’s their biggest concern for everything).  But there are ways that you can generate revenue from public toilets. And even more ways to generate value.

… Crime

I’ve just gone through our 100 user interviews about public toilets from the research stage of TACT3 and found 59 references relating to Crime or Fear of Crime, from 29 different people.

This was not just for kicks, but because we have a new 6 month research project looking at Public Toilets and Crime.

It’ll come as no surprise that people associate one with the other, and for good reason. There’s plenty of evidence of crime being committed in public toilets and therefore every need to research the reasons why and consequently Design out Crime.

And as well as a fear of crime, I have a fear of design.  A fear that some design interventions that aim to design out crime may disadvantage the general public. One example that I’ve heard a few times is that providers avoid heating public toilets in order to discourage people from ‘hanging around’. Brrr!