One of my rules of thumb is that successful cultures have good public lavatories and can prevent public urination and defecation from becoming a problem.  The fact that Boston’s transit authority is trying to figure out not how to stop people from urinating in the elevators, but just how to track urine so that the transit authority can clean it up speaks both to societal decay and to modern America’s helplessness in the face of this decay.
In my travels through Europe, Asia, and parts of the Middle East, when a country was in good shape or ascending toward prosperity, it had clean, safe, and functional public restrooms.  (Japan, of course, consistently has the best public restrooms, complete with heated seats and toilets that play pretty music to hide more earthy sounds.)  When a country is heading downward or is already down, the public restroom situation is dire, and the streets become the bathroom of choice for many.
When I first arrived in New York in the early 1990s, the chi-chi Upper East Side smelled like a giant urinal.  When I was there about halfway through Rudy Giuliani’s administration, that odor was gone.  When I was last there, in 2018, during the de Blasio years, the city again smelled like a giant urinal…
