Bizarre! The launch of 'satlav', just SMS to find the nearest toilet!

This is a bizarre, although very practical, news story from London...

The UK's first SMS service for finding the nearest toilet launched in London today. Just text the word "toilet" and SatLav, run by the Westminster City Council, points you the nearest public toilet. Someone should build a recommendation system on top of that and name it George, after the Seinfeld character who knew the location of every good bathroom in Manhattan. From the Associated Press:

The system, which covers 40 public toilets, pinpoints the caller's position by measuring the strength of the phone signal. The texts cost about 50 cents, and most of Westminster's toilets are free.

The council said it hopes the service will stop people from urinating in alleyways, saying some 10,000 gallons of urine ends up in Westminster streets each year.

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Technorati tags: satlav, toilet

Comments

[Psychotic Cow]

This is such a good idea for people like me who, because of Murphy's law, will require a toilet when you can't find one for love or money. Very clever!

[Steve Hayes]

Very much needed in London.

When I visited a couple of years ago one of the differences I noticed from 40 years previously (when I had last been there) was the shortage of public loos.

Back in the sixties you could buy a Good loo guide, in which public loos were reviewed like restaurants. Tongue in cheek, of course.

But now you can't even find loos at railway stations, or if you do, it is a single-seater plastic contraption that costs a quid (about R12.50) to get into -- if you can get into it at all.

Back in the sixties there were multi-seaters on every platform of the bigger stations. Now they have all closed. No wonder tyhe streets have been turned into a pissoir.