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Notes -
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:
It has to be safe to stop.
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.)
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.
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).
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