I’ve just spent an awesome year in Melbourne, Australia. The city is a lot like Toronto: similar population, excellent cafés, diverse culture.

But one of its most unexpected assets is also its most convenient: It’s always easy to find a clean public toilet. This makes it eminently relaxing to wander, without needing to “go” before you go.

The actual City of Melbourne covers only the downtown core, ringed by dozens of independent suburbs. The core alone boasts 48 public-toilet centres — each with several toilets, running water and soap, and boxes for used needles. Half the facilities are on street corners; the rest are in parks and gardens. They’re cleaned every day and locked every night. Two are 24-hour facilities with attendants. Not once did I encounter a public toilet half as grungy as what you’d find in any Canadian doughnut shop.

The suburbs boast hundreds more public facilities, just as clean. My neighbourhood had several within a five-minute walk of home. One is a large 1950s-style underground washroom in a busy Italian café district (with all those lattés going down, it is well-used). Few Torontonians would enter a street-corner alcove like that, let alone sit on a seat there — but in Melbourne, it’s both safe and socially acceptable.

Possessing reasonable bladder control capabilities, I don’t worry a whole lot about the whereabouts of the closest bathroom, although when my kids are in tow, planning’s essential. For many Canadians, the dearth of toilets is a real problem. Not so in Melbourne: Just sally forth, and it’s there.

Being an economist, I investigated the fiscal and social aspects of Melbourne’s toilets. Each station costs all of $16,000 a year to maintain (the two attended centres cost more). The city allocates $800,000 to its annual loo budget, one quarter of 1 per cent of annual spending. It’s not a lot, and when you need them, they’re priceless.

Apart from the obvious convenience, the ready availability of this public service generates several trickle-down benefits (excuse the pun). Public health improves with cleaner hands, streets and parks. And since toilets are common, they rarely get overused or rundown — reinforcing their acceptance as a normal feature of urban life. The reverse occurs in Canada; public toilets are few and far between so they quickly get filthy, and few want to use them. Hence political will to provide them also deteriorates.

Economists have a term for this type of cycle: “cumulative causation.” Things start out bad; people respond in ways that make them worse. It takes an overriding intervention — in this case, government willingness to provide a critical mass of public facilities — to break the self-reinforcing cycle of individualized behaviour.

Indeed, Canada’s non-provision of public toilets is a parable for what happens when any essential public service (transit, recreation facilities, community supports) is absent. Individuals respond in ways that further undermine cohesiveness (peeing in parks, gated communities, driving solo to work, avoiding public spaces altogether).

Melbourne’s public loos even help private businesses, relieving the pressure on their own facilities. Of course, restaurants have washrooms, too. But they needn’t worry about barring non-customers. Never did I experience the humiliating Canadian experience of being “buzzed” into a bathroom.

Given the nasty job of cleaning and controlling access to their toilets, one would think Canadian restaurateurs would be the first to propose raising taxes (by one-quarter of 1 per cent) to finance a public network. But, ironically, small business is the most rampantly anti-tax jurisdiction in society. They are obsessed (thanks to relentless competitive pressure and short-sightedness) with minimizing their immediate private costs, no matter what.

But they can’t escape the logic of potty economics. When you’ve gotta go, you’ve gotta go. And one way or another, we pay for it. Melbourne’s public toilets prove that paying for it collectively is a lot less painful.

Jim Stanford

Jim Stanford is economist and director of the Centre for Future Work, and divides his time between Vancouver and Sydney. He has a PhD in economics from the New School for Social Research in New York,...