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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   1754 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.

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