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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   2558 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 4, 2025

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When is it acceptable to pee on the side of the road?

I've got 4 small kids (3 boys + 1 girl; only the girls is in diapers). We do a 2 hour road trip down to the grandparents about every other weekend. We always make them go to the bathroom before we leave, but we still have pee emergencies pretty much every trip.

For us, peeing on the side of the freeway is basically a must. If we try to find a proper bathroom, that's easily a 20+ minute detour. Driving to the bathroom is maybe 5 minutes, but then wrangling the problematic kid(s) is much more difficult in a dirty garage bathroom than on the side of the road. (I can't count the number of times I've had a kid wipe their junk on a public restroom toilet and then I have to do a serious disinfection...)

So my policy for side-of-road peeing is:

  1. It has to be safe to stop.

  2. There shouldn't be pedestrians around that can see us. (So this means no peeing on non-freeway type streets, and certain sections of freeway are also off limits.)

  3. There has to be "nature" to pee on. Some amount of grass/dirt is okay, but a tree is best. If we're on the stretch of the I5 in Irvine, where there's concrete everywhere, we won't stop. (This is partly related to pts 1+2.)

I realized on this week's roadtrip that I've never seen another car parked with the kids out peeing. Am I breaking some sort of major taboo here?

I'm also not sure what I'll do once the girl isn't wearing diapers, and whether I'll allow / force her to pee on the side of the road.

Roadway peeing is fine but does incrementally degrade the commons.

Also, it's unnecessary. If you have four kids, you're in an SUV or a minivan, so get a folding potty seat like a Potette and have the kids use it right in the back seat of the car. Potty gets lined, trash-can-style, with a plastic shopping bag (double up for security) plus an absorbent puppy pad or leftover diaper in the bottom of the bag, tie up the bag for easy discarding when everybody's done, and it's surprisingly tidy. Advantages are that it allows toilet paper use and works with #2 as well as #1.

fyi for when you're on foot, they also make pee pals for girls!

Pissing in a can in the back of the car feels more gross to me than people pissing on roadsides.

I do not long for these days, but there were times when my dad would have my brother or I pee in glass Coke bottles, presumably to save the time and keep driving. These bottles we would have to then balance carefully until he did pull over, at which point the pee-filled bottles he would have us place gingerly on the roadside, for some hapless cleaner-of-highway-shoulders to dispose of, I guess.

Ah, the 70s.

Whenever you need to.

Off of a rural lightly travel highway, exercises the ultimate freedom of living in a state of nature.

On a freeway, especially in heavy traffic I'd probably go for a large capacity wide mouth bottle. The large capacity is critical. You do not want to be at 90% full trying to cut off the stream. The main advantage, in addition to discretion, is you can possibly avoid having to exit and reenter traffic that way.

I have no experience trying it with kids, but it seems just unpleasant enough that they might heed your warning to limit fluid intake before the next 2 hour road trip. Not so unpleasant that it just seems mean.

For girls past training potty age, a fancy funnel might be an option? It can also be useful for nasty public bathrooms or when popping a squat is not a desirable option. e.g. peeing in the woods in the extreme cold. There are disposable versions that are basically cardboard with a plastic or wax coating. We keep a couple in the car for emergencies. My impression is that a reusable one called the "Shewee" is generally viewed favorably.

If you want a fancy bottle, "portable urinals" are surprisingly cheap. Some include an attachable funnel adapter. If you don't want to have to deal with dumping and rinsing a container at your destination, you can also buy pouches with absorbent gel. They seal when you are done with them and can be thrown discreetly into most ordinary trash.

When is it acceptable to pee on the side of the road?

Per my Alaskan upbringing — including a childhood where a 6-7 hour roadtrip across 220+ miles of road (one way), much of it winding two-lane mountain roads where it can be 80+ miles between gas stations, and there's often nowhere to pull off the road except the occasional gravel pit, was a common summer weekend activity — the answer was "whenever you can get far enough into the trees/bushes that someone on the road can't readily see you're doing so."

For me it's rather simple: It should be in a place no pedestrian would walk, independent of whether a pedestrian is currently present. Whether a pedestrian can see you from a distance doesn't matter, I wouldn't care.

As a adult man with no kids, I don't think there really are any hard and fast rules, only preferences.

My preference is already to pee in bathrooms. If that's impractical for some reason and I really need to, then I'll do it somewhere else. I would also prefer to do things like only on nature, at least a few yards into some woods, reasonably hard for others to see, etc, but then necessity and lack of availability of good options can override that.

Best recent example was during Covid times in NYC. For a while, it was legal for bars to serve drinks to pedestrians, but not to let anyone inside, so my friends and I would all walk around drinking. No bathrooms open anywhere means when you need to pee, you try to find somewhere reasonably low-traffic and discrete and do it. If you think this doesn't make a lot of sense, I agree, but I didn't make the rules. I guess that's the price for temporarily sort of containing a disease with a 99.9% survival rate (/s).

I have a daughter and a horror of many gas station bathrooms. We traveled (5-9 hour trips. Bathroom stops were required) with her training potty until we could be assured she could hold it long enough for us to find an appropriate bathroom. A girl sitting on a training potty on the side of the road with two car doors open is pretty much invisible to passers by.

I was taught to pee outdoors similarly to my older brother. Walk off the path / away from the road. Drop trou, squat and pee, paying attention to where your shoes are. If you need to, use a tree for balance. The annoying bit is packing out toilet paper. You really aren't exposing all that much when you do this. But if it really bothers you keep your daughter in dresses or skirts and teach her to squat, pull aside her undies, and go. Nothing gets bared. Girl swimmers are fantastic at this because taking off a wet racing suit is annoying.

Two hours isn't that long. If your daughter is old enough to be out of pull ups, she should be old enough to hold it for two hours. Don't give her a big cup of juice.

Don't give her a big cup of juice.

I imagine that the parents around here will laugh at me, but I had to learn this the hard way with my nephew. I took him to a monster truck show a couple years ago (so he was 6), and I was given the OK by my brother to let him have soda if he wanted. Which of course he did. So I let him drink a 20 oz soda, and then get started on another at intermission, and... yeah we went to the bathroom about every 10 minutes the entire rest of the show. It just never occurred to me how small of a bladder kids have, and how if you let them drink too much they're going to have to pee constantly. Live and learn!

Little boys can pee anywhere that nobody will mind, ideally with cover; adult men can pee outside where the bathroom would be an inconvenience and there’s sufficient cover and nobody will mind. Neither men nor boys can poop outside.

Girls and women can’t pee outside unless it’s a true emergency.

I don’t know anyone would be upset about your boys peeing into a bush on a rural property, as long as they’re not trespassing.

You probably do see cars pulled over but don't notice people peeing.

I typically aim for a space of at least 30-50 feet to walk off the road into nature to pee, and prefer the kind of cover where even a sharp eyed passerby would be unlikely to see my penis. This is an adult male consideration.

I do have friends who said they have never and would never pull over to the side of the road to pee so opinions differ. I've never in my life gotten into trouble over it. I laughed that my friends are very very occupied with setting up driving routes and times in order to manage bathroom breaks, where I am unconcerned.

My personal belief is that one of the main advantages of being a man is the right to pee pretty much anywhere as long as you're discreet. It hurts nobody and I actually think it's enjoyable. I wouldn't pee on a stranger's lawn but that's about my only limitation.

That said I am perplexed that you have an emergency every trip. My children regularly handle 10+ hour road trips with no issues, and they have their own water bottles. It's also never a 20 minute detour for a gas station for me, maybe 3 minutes.

I think some kids/families are just biologically different. When any of my kids were under 4, I was nervous when we hit a stretch of highways with more than 30 minutes until the next gas station. Some people just gotta go when they gotta go.

My younger kid is like that - she doesn't want to go unless she's actually experiencing the "gotta go right now!" feeling, and will argue and get mad if any adult tells her, "go now regardless, we'll be on the road two hours and I don't want to have to make pit stops."

The arguing is what drives me nuts. It's surely karma for my behavior at that age.

kids are the ultimate karma - no matter what pissed off others about you, you will get to experience it all day, everyday, in a mini-mirror.

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