Actual construction guy here. A jobsite porta pottie costs $200 -300 a month here in Alberta. That includes weekly servicing. I doubt it is much more expensive anywhere else. That’s cheap compared to man hours lost going offsite or unhappy contractors.
Big developers building track houses in the suburbs are often cheap and put maybe one per block. Sometimes there are nasty consequences that someone has to clean up. Big builder developments are among the worst paying and working environments anyway and once you are good you do not work for them.
I do not think any municipality is going to accept a situation where sanitation is not properly provided for. A few guys taking a leak out back is one thing, multiple crews working in a area with out proper facilities is a health hazard.
As a burner I am quite familiar with portos, as we call them; there are a couple thousand of them in Black Rock City. For the 2015 burn, the latest report available, $1,137,839 was spent for them (page 9, United Site Services). It’s kind of a big deal. The banks in the city proper, where everybody sleeps, are serviced twice a day, the ones by the playa art and other outlying areas less often.
I worked on the crew for the expansion at my church. No portable toilets because the main crew was just church members. The main contractors were a group of other Lutherans who spent their summers living in RVs and being contractors on Lutheran church building projects. We of course had subs for a lot of the big stuff but they were in and out quickly enough to not warrant their own bathrooms. And, they could use the church bathrooms, and quickly enough could use the new bathrooms in the expansion.
Anyway, I’d venture to say that not every project requires a portable toilet. Especially not an expansion, where it’s cheaper to let the crew use your existing toilets and have your janitor clean them every night than it is to hire a porta-john.
It’s similar here - monthly rental is $175-400 in the States. Common Tater is correct that a one-day rental can be a few hundred dollars, but you can’t extrapolate that to your typical construction job site. Most of the cost is delivery and pickup.
Delivery costs to the Black Rock Desert are obviously going to be a lot more than to a local construction site, so you can’t really compare the Burning Man expenses.
True that; it’s about 120 road miles to Reno, which I assume is where they are coming from. OTOH, there are a couple thousand of them so they can be transported in bulk as opposed to the one or two more typically needed. I’ve seen porto trucks with two strapped to the back and a large tank of blue stuff to fill them once they’re on the ground.
Finally, on the gripping hand, the twice-daily servicing most of them need far exceeds the weekly service others have mentioned on construction sites. All in all it comes to about $20 per head (heh) for the participants.
I am kind of surprised that running coach gave the reply that he did, because as an early morning distance runner, I can assure you that plenty of construction zone porta-potties are left open (at least in suburbia). Sadly, I need to plan routes with that accommodation in mind.
church construction I mentioned above does have a potty, guess I missed it when I looked first time.
Also there is construction nearby on both sides of a road and they put potties on both sides of the road. It’s not a big site but I guess it’s big enough for 2 potties.
I’ve noticed in my state, Missouri, when the DoT has crews working along the hi-way they have a portable toilet on a small trailer behind their work truck. Two guys fixing a loose sign? A big truck with tools and a small trailer behind with a toilet. I didn’t see a wash up station though.