Una nuova puntata di Planet Money, il podcast di economia di NPR.

Why is it so hard to find a bathroom when you need one?

In the U.S., we used to have lots of publicly accessible toilets. But many had locks on the doors and you had to put in a coin to use them. Pay toilets created a system of haves and have nots when it came to bathroom access. So in the 60s, movements sprung up to ban pay toilets. Problem is: when the pay toilets went away, so too did many free public toilets.

Today on the show, how toilets exist in a legal and economic netherworld; they’re not quite a public good, not quite a problem the free market can solve.