My first ever independant public restroom use was with one of those trough-style urinals (in kindergarten). After leaving the fairly ancient facilities of my hometown school system behind, I’ve seen very few of them, excepting one variation that was basically a wall with a channel dangerously near foot-level to collect “runoff”. Have these infernal community urinals been abolished or abandoned? What has become of this, the greyhound bus (or, if you like the things, the stretch limos) of urination?
I see them quite a bit. IIRC, there are some in Wrigley Field in Chicago. I myself never use them. I will wait for a stall or a wall-mount to open up. I refuse to use the trough. Call it guy insecurity. Flaccid, I will admit to be a little paranoid.
I refuse to use urinals period. The bar I use to bounce at, some the folks there figure out the best time jump someone you want to do bodily harm to was when they were standing with thier face a few inches from the wall, and thier pants unzipped. Doesnt take much to drive someones face into the tile from behind in that situation. Its been an sometimes irrational parinoia of mine to this day. I find a stall, or dont go at all. Even at work, church or wherever. Just one of those things, I guess.
I see the troughs alot at bars and sporting events. You won’t come across many anywhere else, and it seems that they’ve gone out of fashion in most public facilities. You’d think with the volume of pissing people that airports, train and bus stations, and other municipal places have there would be more of these. Perhaps goofballs like Superdude make the city try and be as accomodating as possible. 
Oh, and I used the grandest of all troughs twice yesterday in the bleachers at Wrigley. 
The last time I saw this kind of urinal was about 3 years ago at a bar in Atlanta called Dottie’s. It’s a dive. A gay friend of ours went to the restroom there and apparently made a “friend” while peeing at the trough. I guess some people like troughs!
Just for fun, did you know that if you go into some really old places, there are women’s urinals? Not just men’s rooms with a “ladies” sign stuck on the door, but real, honest-bejeesus urinals for women. A little lower on the wall, and sticking out a bit more…Wonder why they fell out of fashion? 
Arwen
There are pee-troughs downstairs at La Track, a local gay bar, and I refuse to use them. I’m already so pee-shy that using a urinal is an ordeal unless I really have to go, and sharing a urinal with someone would be even worse.
All you pee-shy guys are totally blowing (no pun intended) the results of my SLO-Dope Penis Poll[sup]TM[/sup], in which it was hypothesized that all guys try to sneak a peak at their neighbor’s goods while at urinals - simply out of curiosity.
I stand by it.
And by the way, the Oakland Colliseum has troughs. I use them – when you gotta go, you gotta go.
Camp Randall Stadium in Madison, Wis has lots of them, some up to 25 yards long, and they are just packed. Everytime I use them I just feel so animalistic, if that’s a word. The word that always come to mind is BIBO, beer in, beer out.
But they are overhauling the stadium and I hear the troughs will be going.
Slight hijack, when they tore County Stadium in Milwaukee down last winter, they auctioned off everything, including the urinals…
Crass Aussie checking in here:
Urinals are still so common here, that I didn’t realise this as an issue. Some smaller places (restaurants, etc) will tend to install the porcelain urinals, but in larger places (pubs, schools, sports grounds) the stainless steel ones are still used.
There are two contradictory rules to prove that (I’mnotgaynosirreenotthatthere’sanythingwrongwiththatmindyounotatall) you’re a straight guy:
- You must not take a peek at your neighbour’s fire fighting equipment.
- You must use the urinal. It’s a male bonding thing. Allows you to say nonchalant things to the other guys like,“Aaah, better out than in”, or “A bloke’s just a go-between, isn’t he? Dunno why we pay for beer”, or even (if you want to brag), “geez, that metal’s cold”. Blokes who use the stalls to urinate are considered a little odd.
If like urinals. If it weren’t for urinals, I’d never have had the experience (when I worked in a department store) of taking a leak with Santa Claus.
I happen to know several people from Hopkinton, Massachusetts, which is where the Boston Marathon starts. According to them, their town’s true claim to fame was that for the 100th running of the Boston Marathon in 1996, the world’s longest urinal trough was set up on the town green for the 35,000 runners to use. I think it was over 125 feet long.
OK, time for Piss Experiences from Hell. You think it’s bad at La Track? Try Tracks, in DC, ca. 1988 (I think it’s still there, albeit misspelled into Trax). No troughs - just ordinary one-man urinals. But - BACK TO FUCKING BACK, so that when you’re trying to pee you’re staring INTO ANOTHER GUY’S EYES. It’s a times like these that I, at least, would willingly have somebody steal my kidneys so that I wouldn’t have to deal with the problem anymore.
And I didn’t suffer from Bashful Bladder at all until I was 15 and went to a Seahawks game at the late-and-unlamented Kingdome, a/k/a the Concrete Orange Juicer. One of the main reasons people hated the damn thing (besides being the fugliest stadium known to man) was Not Enough Toilets. So you make it to one of the three men’s rooms (or was it four?), and confront a single 30-foot long trough, 8,000 guys on line behind you, and several iced teas pressing into a teenage bladder. I was scarred for about ten years.
I think they were shipped off to England. I went to England for the first tiem recently, and the English are, ah… casual about public restroom hygiene.
just a guess:
could it be that they are not handicap compliant?
I was at Heinz Field for the Steeler’s pre-season home opener. All of the bathrooms have large stainless steel pee-troughs. I think this was because at Three Rivers if the bathrooms were full, guys would piss in the sinks.
Slight hijack, but this is MPSIMS so bite me.
Union Station in Indianapolis, when it was a shopping centre, used to have the only totally sexist museum exhibit probably in the world. In the men’s room on one of the floors, they had preserved the antique urinals behind glass for us to see in all their glory.
AFAIK the troth can accommodate more people at one time than urinals installed in the same space, but it uses more water to wash away the waste & doesn’t self-clean as well. Good for places which handle large crowds, but not for the average bar or restaurant. Also, an errant stream has a much wider field of fire when not hemmed in by the urinal walls.
[hijack]
A manufacturer of urinal equipment discovered a means to significantly reduce the number of misses. They etched a picture of a fly on the porcelain; men using the urinal would aim at the fly in an attempt to hose it down and wash it into the drain.
[/hijack]
They use them at the Pomona Fairplex grounds in Pomona, California.
I’ve never been overly shy about using them, but I tend to shy away from them anyways because the thought of some icky weirdo wanting to molest me gives me pause.
I tend to attract icky weirdos. Why can’t I ever attract any -good- men?!
so that’s what they’re called? pee-troughs? in Taiwan, just about all public bathrooms (including ones in restaurants and schools) have about five pee-troughs and only one “regular” toilet. drives me nuts, because i’m always deathly afraid that i’ll pee on my feet and embarrass myself.