Stiny! Keep flushing those toilets!

As many members of my miniscule readership know, I have a fairly intimate acquaintance with public transit. This trend stems from two factors: a) I am cheap and b) my parents are also cheap. The latter point caused my family to settle in a bucolic town just close enough to Toronto to make commuting practical, and just far enough away to make it expensive; the former point (coupled with c) Toronto is even more expensive than commuting) means that I now live with my family, and take the train into the city on a daily basis, joining thousands of others who blearily trudge through Union Station between the hours of 6:00 am and 8:30am.

So what, you say? Public transit isn't all bad. Sure, the GO Train looks like something from a Duplo set, the Greyhound bus is smelly, and VIARail operates trains about as often as the Leafs win Stanley Cups, but on the whole, it works. There is however, one thing I have to decry about all modes of urban transport: the deplorable state of transit vehicle washrooms.

There's nothing more awful than being forced (on a Friday night, say) to venture to the washroom of a packed Greyhound bus, bumping its way along Highway 401 - stepping over sleeping passengers with their belongings and feet spilling into the already tiny aisle, feeling the eyes of those passengers unlucky enough to be sitting close to the washroom at the back of the bus judge you as you pass ("yep, that one's gonna be ripe"), trying to get the door of the washroom, slightly larger than a catflap, open. But that, my friends, is just stage one of the horror, the horror.

Once you actually get into the washroom, a new set of challenges present themselves. For instance, do you stand or sit? My female colleagues are generally relieved of this choice, though that's frankly more of a curse than a blessing. Inevitably, the toilet (essentially a high tech outhouse on wheels) smells awful, and even more inevitably, the toilet seat, surround, and floor are coated in a thin layer of urine. There's never any toilet paper. Heaven forbid there be water to wash with. And the little dispensers of moist towelettes are always out.

Finally, as many of you may have experienced first hand, urinating in a moving vehicle doesn't do much for the ol' internal organs' relaxation. You think stage fright at the ballpark is bad? There's nothing to aggravate shy bladder syndrome like being bounced around in a tin closet the size of a bathtub and thinking of the multitude just outside the plastic door who can hear your every movement (or lack thereof) and are alternately questioning your ability to perform, and wondering when they can use the washroom themselves. If the faucet does eventually "turn on," there's the added problem of spraying the cubicle with your own distinct odor.

Trains aren't much better. And don't even getting me started about #2.