Daily BART riders such as Sunday Parker, who rely on the system's spotty, sometimes unpleasant elevator service had good news last month: The transit agency announced plans to coat elevator floors with a new spray-on coating, making — er, liquid spill issues — easier to resolve. Parker, who identifies herself on Twitter as an "advocate for all disabled people who have to endure shit covered elevators to get to work," appeared to welcome the change, which may lead to fewer posts like this:

Or this:

Per a press release from BART, we now learn that the $340,000 investment for 80 of the system's elevators involves a two-part Polyurea epoxy that will make elevators easier to clean and prevent liquid seepage. In fact, some elevators are going to shut down as soon as today in order to receive their new glaze.

One curious detail from the release picked up by the Verge: In addition to the reflooring effort, Civic Center Station is getting a "bacteria-eating enzyme misting system," a prototype that could be misting an elevator shaft near you in due time. Elevator shafts — dark, damp, and inaccessible for cleaning — are microbe hotbeds, as the Verge explains, the source of BART's elevator odor issues. Misting is set to occur hourly and own't interrupt service, BART writes.

This is all a bit of a stopgap: BART hopes to reopen some of its underground restrooms that have been closed since 9/11, really solving the problem. Naturally, that project, announced last year and reiterated last month, is moving about as fast as 10-car train at rush hour with an equipment failure during a medical emergency.

Previously: BART Spends $340K To Pee-Proof Elevators

For many people, BART elevators are something to be avoided — even if they do happen to be working. For others, they're a necessary means of accessing the public transit that we all depend upon to get about our daily lives. And so, according to the East Bay Times, BART officials have announced their latest campaign to keep the stuffy metal boxes moving: A spray-on anti-urine coating.

It is no great revelation to the many daily BART riders that station elevators are frequently used as bathrooms by those who do not have access to functioning toilets. However, it may come as a surprise that much like with the agency's poop-clogged escalators, human waste can damage the elevators leaving them inoperable. In their infinite wisdom, BART officials have decided to respond with a spray-on coating that should prevent urine from soaking into the machines' inner workings.

This was not the first solution tried by the agency. Rather, officials originally went with aluminum flooring before changing their mind. Next came stainless steel, but those floors were found to separate from the wall in a way that wasn't conducive to the goal of keeping pee out. Lastly, the spray-on floor was selected.

According to ABC 7, the new floors will cost $340,000 and will be applied to only 80 out of the total 127 system-wide elevators. (The other 47, we assume, are fated to a urine-soaked existence.)

BART, meanwhile, is working to open at least a few station bathrooms by 2018. For those of you who can't hold it for a year and a half, however, the new elevator floors will just have to do.

Related: BART To Tackle Broken, Poopy Escalators With Newly Approved Funds

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• Fisherman's Wharf should be swamped tonight, but not with tourists. That's right, you guessed it — there's a Pokemon Go crawl scheduled for this evening. [Hoodline]
• Instagram's latest corporate party featured at least one woman acting as a table for guests. [Erin Burr]
• Oakland police arrested the man they believe fired at an officer this past Saturday. [Chronicle] [KRON4] [CBS 5]
• Facebook will now let you request refunds for Facebook Credits. However, they'll only refund the purchase of the in-app currency if a minor made it. [Chronicle] [Cnet]
• Uber drivers claim that if they refuse too many rides, the company will automatically lock them out of the system for a short period of time. A timeout, if you will, until they can learn to play nicely by Uber's rules. [Consumerist] [CNN]
• A budding photojournalist snapped a pic of a coyote defecating on the Presidio Golf Course. [Richmond District Blog]
• A local artist created a spin-wheel of awful Trump quotes. [Mission Local]
• Oracle just paid $9.3 billion (in cash) to buy cloud-computing company NetSuite. NetSuite was co-founded by Oracle's executive chairman, Larry Ellison. [USA Today]
• The Oregon State Fair, which usually displays weird fruit and vegetables, will this year feature a marijuana plant competition. [CBS 5]
• Surprise! Roughly one third of renters in San Francisco are crowded into apartments that don't have enough bedrooms. [Curbed]
• Medium's downtown SF office has a lot of typewriters. [Hollywood Reporter]
• A man was beaten unconscious Thursday morning after he confronted someone publicly urinating near Mint Plaza. The man is hospitalized, but is expected to recover. [Chronicle]

The Chronicle simply loves to cover the poop beat. After giving us a bunch of handy street-feces statistics back in May, they're back today with a new human-feces map of the Tenderloin that the Department of Public Works used in determining where best to locate three new mobile restroom units, mounted on flatbed trucks, that will operate during prime hours of the day and be staffed by attendants starting today (July 15). Supervisor Jane Kim has been pushing for the program for two years.

The new DPW study happened over four days in April, monitoring the number of piles of shit that were found on various blocks in order to best know where to put the new porta-potties. (As you can see from the map, the greatest concentrations of feces were found on Turk between Leavenworth and Hyde, and on the two blocks bounded by Jones, Mason, Eddy, and Ellis Streets.)

The effort follows on this 2011 map which was also created in conjunction with a push for new "pooplets," or public toilets that would be located in street parking spaces, like parklets. The new survey found that many of the neighborhood's addicts and/or homeless denizens did seek out some kind of privacy when pooping — either between parked cars or in alleys or doorways — so, the availability of new toilets might actually be a useful thing.

The fully realized pilot program, called Tenderloin Pit Stop and running through January, features mobile bathroom units mounted on trucks and parked at three separate locations. They'll operate from 2 p.m. to 9 p.m., Tuesdays through Fridays, hours which were chosen, it seems, because they represent the most active waking hours of drug addicts, and days when social benefit checks are typically paid out.

Drug use in the toilets will be tolerated — it's an inevitability that has been well documented with the existed, French-designed public toilets on our city streets — as doors can be locked from the inside and there will be needle disposal bins. But attendants will knock on doors after five minutes to say time is up, and the toilets will be removed for cleaning each night, so they won't be available "for late-night shenanigans," as the Chron puts it.

Jane Kim is pleased to see this program come to fruition, and says, "We're championing our residents' right to clean streets and a safe place to do their business with dignity."

Hopefully the limited-hour program will make Tenderloin streets less poopy, but only time will tell. You can see these mobile toilet trucks roll out at Golden Gate Avenue between Jones and Taylor streets (a block from the St. Anthony Dining Room); Ellis Street between Jones and Taylor, across from Glide Memorial Church; and on noted "hangout" block, Hyde Street between Turk and Eddy, which is also a much-frequented pooping area.

[Chron]
[Tenderloin Pit Stop/DPW]

Will your walk to work this summer become like a fun video game in which you have to side-step and hop over piles of poop and puddles of urine? The city of S.F. is a little worried that sidewalk power-washing could become a fine-able offense under new, drought-related water restrictions that are set to be approved this week.

Some SFist commenters already pointed out this potential pee problem last week when we covered the State Water Resources Control Board's impending restrictions, which could include the washing of hard surfaces like sidewalks, and watering of lawns to the point of runoff.

The board is meeting Tuesday to likely approve those restrictions, and now the city's Department of Public Works is getting concerned that it would face the same $500 fines as any water users caught in the act of hosing their driveway. The difference, though, is that there is kind of a public-safety hazard with fecal matter dotting our sidewalks, and that's something the DPW takes pretty seriously.

As SFist quantified for you back in May, there are quite a lot of complaints about feces and urine on S.F.'s city streets. DPW's Steve Mahoney said then that they get about 8,500 special requests for steam cleaning of sidewalks, most of them feces- and urine-related, and today DPW spokesperson Rachel Gordon tells the Chron that there are almost twice as many total reports of streets and sidewalks in need of cleaning, with 16,164 last year — a great many of those related to human waste.

What in holy poop-covered hell will St. George Alley look like if the department is forbidden from heading there to clean up the 30 piles of shit it claims to find on a weekly basis — it is basically a block-long toilet, earning it the moniker "San Francisco's filthiest Alley."

Per the Chron, "City officials say they've already reduced the amount of water used in their street-cleaning trucks in light of the drought, and they don't spray the sidewalks unless necessary." But, obviously, some spraying is going to continue to be necessary.

Because, like, come on.

[Chron]

Previously: San Francisco's Feces-Covered Streets By The Numbers

• 1: The number of blocks St. George Alley, aka "San Francisco's Filthiest Alley" runs


• Once: The number of times San Francisco's Department of Public Works manages to clean St. George Alley per week, according to DPW's Steve Mahoney


• 30: The number of piles of shit Mahoney says his crew and he cleans from St. George Alley on their weekly visit


• 14: The number of years Mahoney has been power washing SF streets


• 250: The number of gallons of water a DPW spray tank carries


• 2-3: The number of times those alley-cleaning crews must refill those tanks daily


• 2: The number of crews San Francisco's Department of Public Works currently devotes to cleaning SF alleys


• 8: The number of hours in their shift


• 5: The number of days a week these crews work


• $1.6 million: The additional amount of DPW funding Supervisor Scott Wiener wants the mayor's office to approve


• 11: The number of new positions that funding could add to DPW cleaning crews


• 2: The additional number of steam cleaning crews that funding could provide


• 8,502: The number of steam-cleaning requests DPW got last year, most of them to clean up urine and feces


• 5,585: The number of steam-cleaning requests DPW has gotten so far this year (through May 5), again, mostly to clean up poop and pee


• 4,600: The number of requests DPW has received to clean (mostly human waste from) Mission District streets in the last nine months

All facts and figures: Funds short for S.F.'s No. 1 and No. 2 issue: filthy streets, SF Chronicle, May 15 2014

A 20-year-old man ended up in the hospital Saturday afternoon after using another man's carpet in lieu of the bathroom.

The Lebowskian crime scene occurred on Matthew Court in the Bayview, where the victim was found lying unconscious on the sidewalk around 1:40 p.m. Saturday. The carpet urinator was suffering from life-threatening head and facial injuries and had to be taken to San Francisco General Hospital to be treated.

The suspect, 23-year-old Demarea Barnes, was caught fleeing the scene on some nearby surveillance video and was picked up by police about half a mile away on Ardath Court. Barnes admitted he knew the victim and that the fight began when the younger man pissed the carpet. Barnes was booked on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon.

[BCN/Appeal]

More bad behavior unveiled itself at Candlestick Park on Sunday. During the Niners victorious opening game, a (presumably intoxicated) man was pinched by stadium fuzz for trying to pee on other fans. SF Examiner reports: "According to police, security reported the man was 'attempting to urinate on people in the bathroom and trying to incite fights with other fans.' It took several officers to get the man handcuffed and on the ground, but the man kicked one of the security guards in the shin, police said."

How very Power Exchange.

While being escorted out of the area, the suspect spat in an officer's face and tried to break free, which caused the golden shower fan and the cops to fall down a staircase.

This most recent incident comes on the heels of a parking lot assault during a Cal-Fresno game and a violent preseason game.

Tamara Barak Aparton, current Communications and Policy Assistant with the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office, writes the best crime press releases. Take, for example, the case of residential motel resident Willie Smith, 42, who was accused of pushing his way into a neighbor’s room, spraying the male victim with an air freshener (and yes, it's Glade), stealing his Snickers bar, and then threatening to urinate on him.

To the press release:

Smith was arrested March 22, 2010 in his room at the Kean Hotel in the 1000 block of Mission Street. Neighbor Gordon Gantz, 73, told police that Smith had knocked on his door and pushed his way in when Gantz opened it. Gantz said Smith pushed him once in the chest and slapped his face while telling him he needed money. The men had been friendly before the incident, visiting each other’s rooms and Gantz occasionally giving cash to Smith. When Gantz told Smith he didn’t have any money, Smith allegedly took a Snickers bar off his table and began eating it. Though the door was open throughout the incident, Gantz said he felt trapped in his room. Gantz suffered no injuries in the incident.

Gantz told an investigator that at one point during the struggle, Smith pretended he was going to urinate on him and sprayed him with air freshener.

During the trial, however, jurors didn’t believe Gantz. Why? Because he was "a felon with multiple convictions for making false bomb threats." For what it's worth, Mr. Gantz also informed police that Mr. Smith had, on several different occasions, helped himself to Ganz's cookies and Walgreens-brand mixed nuts.

Well, everyone, this is our last, pre-renovation summer of Dolores Park fun (how fenced off it will be by next summer remains uncertain), but the good folks at Dolores Park Works are claiming at least one small victory: Recreation & Parks has agreed to provide five porta-potties (and a hand-washing station!) throughout the summer to supplement the measly couple of toilets in the center of the park. The activists in this case were pushing four eight, but they say five will do. The ladies, especially, should be pleased. Let's just hope the toilet torcher doesn't feel inspired. [Dolores Park Works via Mission Local]

While known as a problem in the Panhandle or Richmond District, a few of this year's Bay to Breakers participants were notably thoughtless in South of Market, using the 400 block of Tehama Street (between Fifth and Sixth) as a toilet. Urinating in public, of course, is illegal.

Some of these images, while admittedly funny, are downright disgusting -- not to mention NSFW. Ideally, San Francisco will position a few more porta-potties in other parts of the city during the day of next year's race, especially since most of the runners are completely wasted.

Urination situation and a reported near fatality notwithstanding, this year's Bay to Breakers was a success, with a "relatively peaceful" vibe throughout the day.