On Twitter, Matthew Yglesias of Vox has been arguing with people about why San Francisco smells so much like urine. Some people think it’s because it’s a dry city, so such smells aren’t washed away so often, while others have opted for a much more straightforward reason: people in San Francisco pee in public a lot.

(I don’t know San Francisco well—does it really smell like pee?)

The debate has had one clearly important positive by-product, which is that it introduced me to the existence of this utterly amazing map, put together by a data visualization enthusiast who goes by simply “William,” which illustrates all of the sightings of “human waste” in San Francisco from the summer of 2008 until the present day—and there are a lot of them.

Amusing as it may be, the map does serve an absolutely useful purpose, which is to help make the case that cities need more public bathrooms—but perhaps San Francisco especially so.

Yglesias’ final words on the subject are worth quoting:
 

I conjecture that street pooping and street peeing tend to be closely correlated and that in San Francisco’s case the underlying cause is an epidemic of homelessness—an epidemic generated, in part, by overly restrictive zoning that prevents the construction of enough new homes to accommodate the number of people who want to live in the Bay Area.

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
South Korea’s poop-themed coffeeshop
You stepped in something: Smiling poop emoji shoes