This outdoor urinal stall lives on the sidewalk in Victoria, BC. When somebody's in there, you can only see him from the waist up (so guys can't get away with too much funny business—like overdosing on heroin) and it only fits one person (further limiting capacity for funny business—like two people overdosing on heroin). To its disadvantage, it only accommodates dudes and is no place for a number two, but—let's face it—most of a city's problems with, uh, public discharge stem from men pissing.

In Seattle, business owners in the Pioneer Square neighborhood are so frustrated with the torrents of piss flowing through the alleys, out from behind bushes, and underfoot that they have been building their own vigilante porta-potties. "It's not an ideal solution," one activist worker recently told me. "We will show the city we want something to change."

The mayor and city council are talking seriously about buying a Portland-style loo. But, because this is Seattle, we can't just install a few loos. The mayor talked about building one loo, the council talked about it, the land-use committee met this morning to talk about it some more, and then the full council is going to get around to talking about it even more, and hopefully voting on it, in mid-September. You know, because there's no urgency or anything while that embattled neighborhood suffers another summer of homeless people living in the park and tens of thousands of beer-swilling sports fans with ABSOLUTELY NOWHERE TO TAKE A GODDAMN LEAK. Part of the Sisyphian process results from the complex funding relationship between a developer and neighborhood group, a process that involves transferred development rights from another property. If and when the city gets around to it, we will have, again, just one loo. The loo won't be near the park and it has a door that locks—allowing people to wander in, lock the door, and have all the funny business they like.

Whether we build a loo or not (and obviously, we should), it seems like installing a few urinals down in Pioneer Square—at least by next summer—would do wonders for Seattle.