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Most of these complaints are not from/about truckers (though they probably pee in bottles too), it's about the delivery van drivers. The issue is that the route

by opencl 6y ago

Most of these complaints are not from/about truckers (though they probably pee in bottles too), it's about the delivery van drivers. The issue is that the route schedules they are given are so tight that there is no time to stop at a bathroom. It is true that a lot of public toilets have been closed for the past year but these complaints go back to long before that happened.

crazygringo 6y ago
> there is no time to stop at a bathroom. I don't know where you live, but where is there a bathroom to stop at? The US isn't filled with public restrooms everywhere along driver's routes with convenient parking right outside. To use a public restroom could easily mean a 10 minute drive, 5 minutes to find parking and walk to the bathroom, a 10 minute wait in line when it's separate bathrooms like a Starbucks, and another 10 minute drive back to resume your route, like 35 minutes total. Yikes. I mean sometimes you might get lucky where there's a gas station right along your route and you can pop in, but most delivery routes snake through residential neighborhoods. There aren't any public bathrooms to be found anywhere.
- opencl 6y ago
  There are definitely a lot of cities that do not have enough bathrooms available, and there is not much Amazon or other employers can do about that. Where I've lived in several smallish cities in the Midwest it is generally not hard to find bathrooms. I've had jobs that involved driving a van between customers' houses and never had trouble finding one. They're not in the residential neighborhoods but the routes would always go reasonably close to at least a few gas stations a day. But even here where we do have bathrooms fairly readily available the drivers still pee in their vans. I know because I used to work in one of the local Amazon warehouses and we would find bags the drivers had returned with pee in them.
- mindslight 6y ago
  During Covid, why would you want to use a public restroom if you can avoid it? In fact, thinking about this makes me want to put an empty bottle in the car in case I end up needing to go sometime on the 2 hour routine trips I've been doing, despite there being plenty of rest stops. I'm not defending Amazon's general financial screw-turning, but I think the "peeing in bottles" has only become a meme because the idea seems gross to everyone who hasn't spent a long time alone in vehicles.
- cush 6y ago
  It's funny that in America, we consider a Starbucks toilet public. In most countries, there are real public toilets, not tied to a business. Sometimes they take a coin, but some are free too.

by opencl 6y ago

crazygringo 6y ago

> there is no time to stop at a bathroom. I don't know where you live, but where is there a bathroom to stop at? The US isn't filled with public restrooms everywhere along driver's routes with convenient parking right outside. To use a public restroom could easily mean a 10 minute drive, 5 minutes to find parking and walk to the bathroom, a 10 minute wait in line when it's separate bathrooms like a Starbucks, and another 10 minute drive back to resume your route, like 35 minutes total. Yikes. I mean sometimes you might get lucky where there's a gas station right along your route and you can pop in, but most delivery routes snake through residential neighborhoods. There aren't any public bathrooms to be found anywhere.

opencl 6y ago
There are definitely a lot of cities that do not have enough bathrooms available, and there is not much Amazon or other employers can do about that. Where I've lived in several smallish cities in the Midwest it is generally not hard to find bathrooms. I've had jobs that involved driving a van between customers' houses and never had trouble finding one. They're not in the residential neighborhoods but the routes would always go reasonably close to at least a few gas stations a day. But even here where we do have bathrooms fairly readily available the drivers still pee in their vans. I know because I used to work in one of the local Amazon warehouses and we would find bags the drivers had returned with pee in them.
mindslight 6y ago
During Covid, why would you want to use a public restroom if you can avoid it? In fact, thinking about this makes me want to put an empty bottle in the car in case I end up needing to go sometime on the 2 hour routine trips I've been doing, despite there being plenty of rest stops. I'm not defending Amazon's general financial screw-turning, but I think the "peeing in bottles" has only become a meme because the idea seems gross to everyone who hasn't spent a long time alone in vehicles.
cush 6y ago
It's funny that in America, we consider a Starbucks toilet public. In most countries, there are real public toilets, not tied to a business. Sometimes they take a coin, but some are free too.