Heavy winter rains have taken a toll on the water quality of the hundreds of beaches across California, according to a recent report from the nonprofit organization Heal the Bay.

The major concern: The level of poop in the water.

“An alarming 45 million gallons of sewage were spilled into the ocean and coastal waterways, in part due to the increased rainfall. Sewage lines are commonly flooded with rainwater causing them to overflow,” the report, released this week, said.

Storm drains often overflowed during the rains, releasing contamination and sewage into creeks or rivers that empty out to these beaches.

San Mateo County, in particular, has many of these — and five of the state’s ten dirtiest beaches are listed among the report's worst offenders, on the "Beach Bummers" part of the list, according to KNTV. That includes popular spots like Redwood City’s Marlin Park, Foster City’s Gull Park and Erckenbrack Park, and Half Moon Bay’s Pillar Point.

Even the home of the prettiest Taco Bell in the world, Pacifica's Linda Mar Beach, made the list. KTVU dubbed it “Poo-cifica” because of its high levels of the bacteria enterococcus.

Heal the Bay determines these A-plus to F grades by evaluating the water quality, based on water samples tested for bacteria and pollution, including fecal matter. It assigns those grades to 500 beaches from Tijuana, Mexico, all the way up to the Canadian border, according to the SF Examiner. A higher grade indicates a lower risk of individuals contracting illnesses while using the ocean.

The report differentiated grades for the recent wet months and summer dry months — when water is at lower risk of exposure to pollutants. All 16 beaches in San Francisco received high marks for water quality, during these dry months. But nine of these received a C, D, or F during wet months.

The report attributes these poor grades to one spill over the winter that apparently sent 2.3 million gallons of sewage into the Bay near Crissy Field and Aquatic Park, closing both for many days. Luckily, SF has a combined sewer system, which means that rain runoff flows into that and gets treated instead of flowing into the ocean.

Bean Hollow State Beach in San Mateo County was one of only two California beaches to receive an A-plus rating for water quality in both dry and wet conditions throughout the year, earning a spot on the cleanliness "Honor Roll."

Beaches north of the Golden Gate also got generally good ratings — only 25% of Alameda County's beaches for C, D, or F grades during the wet weather, and only 4% of Marin County's did. Still, Marin County just announced that the central section of Stinson Beach has high levels of enterococcus bacteria and shouldn’t be used for water recreation, per the Chronicle.

Feature Image via Wikimedia Commons/Bob n' Renee.

The latest SF political mailer drops a provocation in the old San Francisco street poop debates, and it’s largely paid for by a union that may gain some members under a Department of Sanitation and Streets.  

The San Francisco street poop discourse has long been effective clickbait for the local and national media, and poop has popped up in politics too. In a 2018 District 6 supervisors candidate debate, poop zingers featured prominently in the debate between Matt Haney Sonja Trauss, and Christine Johnson. Haney would win that election, and after the Mohammed Nuru-DPW scandal broke, he rode that poop-complaint powered sentiment to establish a Department of Sanitation and Streets.

Yet in July, a post-Haney Board of Supervisors puzzlingly put forth a November ballot measure to cancel the as-yet unformed Department of Sanitation and Streets, even though voters just approved the department with a 60% majority vote in November 2020. That ballot measure to eliminate the department and fold it back into Public Works is called Prop. B, and it’s strongly opposed by labor unions,

Which leads us to the shitty political ad above, which is now being dumped into mailboxes all over town. “Don’t kill the Dept. of Sanitation!,” the ad declares, alongside comical but highly charged images of a pile of poop (complete with a fly) and a syringe. The above-named CleanStreetsNow.com website cleverly places a rat next to its Mohammed Nuru-referencing “FBI Idictments [sic] for Bribes” section.

And well, well, well, the fine print on the back of the ad tells us that the No On B campaign is financed to the tune of $59,228 by San Francisco Laborer’s Local 261 PAC.  

That $59,000 is chump change in this local election. As seen above, the tech-bankrolled YIMBY housing measure Prop. D is rolling in $2 million in donations. Heck, Dede Wilsey wipes poop off the sidewalk with $59,000 checks.

But it is darned curious that every penny of the current $104,929 that No On B has raised is from labor unions. There are a few cropped out in the image above, but the donors are still all labor unions or labor advocacy groups, like San Francisco Building & Construction Trades Council Issues Committee and Laborer’s Local 67 PAC.

Yet if their opponent Oversight Done Right, Yes on B were to criticize them for getting all their contributions from special interests, that would be like Eddy Street calling Turk Street “shit-covered.” All of Yes on B’s current $99,499 in contributions comes from large real estate developers, or PR firms that represent real estate developers. Again, the above image crops a few donors out, but there are sizable donations from Boston Properties ($10,000), Seven Hills Properties LLC ($10,000), and the San Francisco Apartment Association PAC ($5,000).

It’s obvious why labor unions want a Department of Sanitation and Streets. More public employees means more dues-paying public-sector union members. But why are developers and their PR firms against the Department of Sanitation and Streets? Are they just trying to cozy up to Mayor Breed, who supports Prop. B? Are they pining for the old Nuru-style “pay-to-play” days to come back?

If you have theories on why the developers don’t want this street cleaning department, feel free to talk shit in the comments below.

Related: Poop Complaints Are Down 30% In the Tenderloin! [SFist]  

Images: Joe Kukura, SFist

In the name of fecal data journalism and clicks, the Chronicle is back on the poop beat this week — and there's some good news for the chronically poopy streets of the Tenderloin!

In the period from 2011 to 2015ish, the Chronicle's newsroom — and subsequently local TV stations — was obsessed with poop. Perhaps it was because so many new people were moving into the city for the tech boom and complaining, perhaps this was just the beginning of Mohammed Nuru's failures at the Department of Public Works, or perhaps there legitimately was an unusual boom in street defecation, but mapping the poopiest parts of the city became like a bimonthly affair. SFist crunched the numbers via Department of Public Works data on St. George Alley — which seemed to be everyone's favorite al fresco toilet in the Tenderloin — and there were at least 30 piles of human shit found in the alley weekly, with DPW getting there about once a week to hose it off.

Fast Company got in on the "SF is poopy" tip, writing a story about the Tenderloin Pit Stop program in 2015 — which installed mobile toilets and wash stations in the neighborhood on the regular. And then SFist did a whole poop-story timeline in 2019, just by way of explaining to newcomers how old and repetitive these maps and stories were getting — and again, maybe it was all Nuru's fault!

The Chronicle got Nuru on the record in May 2019, approximately seven months before he was brought up on federal corruption charges, saying of the poopiness of the city streets, "It‘s not just about the money anymore, it’s about also needing to deal with the people who are creating the problems. Cleaning the same area three, four, five times a day is not the best use of our money, but it is necessary until the behavior changes."

That kind of sounded like blame-shifting to another chronically criticized city department, the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing. Then-Supervisor Matt Haney responded, sounding like he was pointing at Nuru and DPW, saying, "I’m for accountability, but I haven’t seen any plan for how to do it. The city should be accountable as well."

Well, now the Chronicle has crunched the numbers from 311 calls again, and what do you know!? The poop problem is still a problem, but not so much in the Tenderloin. And the paper credits the Pit Stop program, probably, as the strategy that helped the number of 311 calls about feces in the Tenderloin decrease 29% between 2012 and 2021. The data shows that 311 calls about poop went down 37% on streets near three particular Pit Stop locations.

As long-suffering Public Works spokesperson Rachel Gordon puts it, "If you have a toilet, there's a chance that people might avail themselves to that and not go on the streets or sidewalks." And she added, of the Pit Stop program, "We also wanted to improve the… livability of a neighborhood.”

The sheer number of shit-related calls to 311 in the last decade and a half is pretty staggering — 1,465 per 1,000 residents in the city. But, as the Chronicle points out, DPW made it a whole easier to make complaints in the last couple of years — you don't actually have to call in a complaint, you can also just tweet it to 311 or submit it online — which may have effectively skewed the data.

Also, the pandemic may have exacerbated things, with fewer fast-food and hotel bathrooms available to those walking in off the street. And perhaps all the complainers found better apartments outside the Tenderloin in recent years, or they left the city, thus fewer complaints in that 'hood.

And while complaints in the Tenderloin proper may have gone down 29% in nine years, we should make sure we're defining our terms — like what is the "Tenderloin" in this analysis? Poop complaints rose 481% in the same period in Lower Nob Hill, or whatever the paper is using to define that area. And they went up 187% in "Downtown/Union Square," 212% in Polk Gulch, and 284% in the Financial District. So yes, still a lot of street poop.

The Pit Stop program may still expand, but Gordon says that each location costs between $100K and $600K annually, to operate — with labor being the biggest cost. The city currently has 33 Pit Stop locations, with at least 15 of them added since 2020.

So, we may not be getting that Department of Sanitation and Streets that we all voted for, but maybe, someday, the streets will get cleaner, slowly but surely.

Related: A Brief History Of Poop On The Streets Of San Francisco

Photo: Annie pm/Unsplash

A new department would have one job — keeping our haggard sidewalks clean — under Supervisor Matt Haney’s proposal to break up the scandal-plagued Department of Public Works.

Not long after the Mohammed Nuru kickbacks, corruption, and lavish gifts scandal broke, we wondered if the perennial poop on the sidewalks problem might be connected to Nuru’s alleged corruption. The thinking was that the gigantic, no-oversight budget over which he had control was being used disproportionately to just placate the mayors he worked under (one of whom he slept with) to empower his hold on the Department of Public Works purse strings while the San Francisco “poop problem” remained a persistent national media obsession.

But with Nuru’s cronies now cooperating with feds and copping plea deals, there’s clearly a public appetite to shake up business as usual at the DPW. We informed you in February that District 5 supervisor Matt Haney wanted to break up the DPW and create a new Sanitation and Streets Department whose sole job would be street and sidewalk cleaning. Now the Chronicle reports that Haney is trying to put that proposal on the November ballot, and the tea leaves indicate he’s got a pretty clear path to doing so.

“I believe this should be done to clean up our streets and to address what has become an international embarrassment for San Francisco — streets covered in feces, trash and urine,” Haney told the Chronicle. The DPW would still exist, but as a smaller entity focused on engineering, design, and infrastructure.

This would of course cost more money, at a time when we’re back in deficits as far as the eye can see territory. An analysis from the city controller says that if passed, Haney’s plan “would have a significant impact on the cost of government, ranging from $4 million to $10 million annually beginning September 2021 depending on future implementation decisions.”

Current interim DPW director Alaric Degrafinried is against the move, unsurprising considering it would represent a significant loss of clout and budget for his position  “These types of estimates — very rarely do they wind up on the low end,” he said in an obvious understatement to the Chron. “We lowball the costs, and years later we realize we understaffed, so we have to build more and more.”

In response to the budget concerns, Haney has pushed the implementation of the change out to to July 2022, in hopes the economy and tax revenues would be in recovery mode by then.  

Haney’s proposal went before the Board of Supervisors Rules Committee today, a subcommittee obligation for new laws like this. But the measure has five co-sponsors, and therefore needs only one more vote to pass the full board. So it's likely to make it to the ballot, in a year when we’ll have fewer ballot measures just because there hasn’t been much petition-signing or signature gathering under shelter in place. But November’s election is something we’ve been waiting for awhile, so local turnout is likely to be at historic levels.

Related: City Attorney Is Investigating Private Companies That Allegedly 'Funneled' Money to DPW Holiday Parties  [SFist]

Image: @sfpublicworks via Twitter

With the help of a pilfered package of Quilted Northern toilet paper, a man was caught in the act of pooping — and wiping — in an aisle of the Marina Safeway over the weekend. The photo has gone viral on Twitter and sparked a whole lot of smug retorts from Republicans about San Francisco going to hell because of its progressive politics.

KRON4 first reported on the incident and got the photos from a local resident who only gave a first name, Mike. There are three photos in total, including one that shows the toilet paper 12-pack. The dude just popped a squat in what may be the cleaners and detergents aisle. Mike says he saw the man leave the store and head to Starbucks — maybe to wash his hands?

What's ensued is a fresh round of hating on San Francisco on social media and Fox News, naturally.

"Vote Democrat and this is the shit you get!" writes one Twitterer.

And of course there have been a lot of "Cleanup on Aisle 10" jokes.

KRON 4 also quotes Supervisor Matt Haney as calling the city's poop problem a "national embarrassment" last month. But clearly when you photograph it happening live in a Safeway, it gets a little more disgusting/embarrassing.

Image via KRON4/Twitter

The Pit Stop pilot program keeping public bathrooms around SoMa and the Tenderloin open 24 hours has been renewed and declared a success, but Mayor Breed and Sup. Matt Haney are now in a pissing match over who should get the credit.

Redundant hysteria about San Francisco’s poop problem has become quite the movement in national media coverage. But in reality, City Hall has squeezed out a few solutions that we can all get behind. The movable Pit Stop public bathrooms, complete with attendant “potty-sitters,” were introduced in 2014. In August of this year, three of these locations expanded their hours to provide 24/7 relief (at Sixth and Jessie Streets in SoMa, Eddy and Jones Streets in the Tenderloin, plus the Market and Castro location). That pilot program will continue, as the Chronicle reports that the 24-hour bathrooms will keep their round-the-clock service for, well, at least one more budget year.

For her part, Mayor Breed is saying that she’s the whiz who deserves the credit for a decrease in steam-cleaning requests at the three 24-hour loos. “When people have access to a clean, safe restroom, they will use it,” Breed said in a statement reported by KPIX. “We have seen what happens on our streets when people don’t have a place to go, which is why I fought to include funding in the budget for seven new Pit Stops, and well as expanded hours at existing locations.”

But a careful read of Breed’s press release reveals that this expansion is just a continuation of the status quo; no new locations are getting 24-hour service. The release does announce “expanded hours at existing locations,” but makes no mention of which locations these are, nor what the expanded hours would be.

District 6 Supervisor Matt Haney meanwhile is becoming the number one driving force behind making all Pit Stops citywide 24-hour facilities. Curbed reports that Haney held a rally Monday in front of the Tenderloin’s Boeddeker Park public bathroom, and pushed for all Pit Stops to be open all night. Haney purports to be responsible for the 24-hour pilot program, and two-thirds of the money came from his district budget (and that makes sense, because two of the three 24-hour locations are in his district).

There are seven new Pit Stops in Breed’s budget this year, though we have not been told where they will be placed. Mayor Breed’s announcement noted that about 25 percent of flushes at the all-night locations were during those extended nighttime hours, and yes, these units do flush automatically after every use. They are far more high-tech than a standard porta-potty, and a completely acceptable washroom experience for anyone.

There are a number of other cool and commendable aspects to the Pit Stop program. Many of the attendants are formerly incarcerated people getting a new opportunity in life. And one of the mobile Pit Stops is designed to look like the Painted Ladies! You can find the location and hours of all 25 Pit Stops on the DPW website, and here’s a Google Map detailing each one’s location and hours.

Related: A Brief History Of Poop On The Streets Of San Francisco [SFist]

Image: SF Public Works via Twitter

The elevator attendant program in effect at Powell Street and Civic Center will extend to two more stations, a move which seems to assume the elevators at those stations will actually be working.

Perhaps you’ve noticed a friendly BART station agent hanging out pretty much in perpetuity in the elevators at Powell Street and Civic Center stations. That’s not an accident; the elevator attendant program has been a structured thing since April 2018, based on the premise that having staff present in those elevators will go a long way to prevent, shall we say, “illegal dumping.” Apparently they think it’s working, as the Examiner reports that the BART Board of Directors voted to expand the use of elevator attendants to the Montgomery Street and Embarcadero stations.  

These aren’t the only changes the BART board approved Thursday. According to KPIX, they also elected to expand the Homeless Outreach Team presence to more stations in Alameda and San Mateo Counties, including the SFO station. They also awarded a $32 million upgrade to the 19th Street BART station in Oakland, which is expected to begin in early 2020.

But the attendant program, which basically just involves stationing people as greeters in the elevators, seems to have generated the most goodwill. BART Board of vice president Rebecca Saltzman claims to have received the rider feedback, “This is amazing. Do this everywhere. This is the best thing you’ve ever done.”

The elevator attendants are from Urban Alchemy, a nonprofit that helps the formerly incarcerated get jobs and get back on their feet. They merely greet people and keep a log (haha!) of how many people use the elevators, how many of these people have disabilities, how many have strollers, and how many are carrying luggage.

There are a few other cleanup measures the BART board also approved. Most significantly, those mobile “pit stop” bathrooms have been funded for three more years at 16th Street, 24th Street, and Powell Street stations. But according to BART’s plan, you can expect to see elevator attendants at Embarcadero and Montgomery later this fall.

Related: Muni Dumps Water On BART, Shuts Down Embarcadero Station [SFist]

Image: Sharon Hahn Darlin via Flickr

Local media, along with the general public, have made a fair amount of repeated fuss in recent years over the presence of human waste on our city's streets, which despite some not insignificant cleanup efforts by the city continues to be a mess not easily wiped away.

Today — as we learn that a city Supervisor, the Mayor, and the Department of Public Works are debating whether to throw more money at the problem or to make different efforts to curb the behavior of those on the street who openly shit there on the regular — SFist takes a look back at scourge of feces that has plagued the city longer than we care to remember, and the ways in which "poop in San Francisco" has become a sort of stand-in example for all that is wrong with liberal America. (If you want to do your own search, just take a look at the "poop" tag on SFist over the years. This is not a new story, people. Outlets just like to pretend it's new every 18 months or so, and there is some evidence to suggest it's worse than it was a decade ago.)

2008 - The Department of Public Works (DPW) begins specifically recording calls to cleanup feces.

March 2008 - Right around the height of the financial crisis and nearing the end of President George W. Bush's term, a "commission" was formed to rename San Francisco's Oceanside wastewater treatment facility after Bush. A measure to do so failed at the ballot box.

July 2009 - Then-mayor Gavin Newsom and wife Jennifer Siebel Newsom had only just moved into a new home in the Upper Haight when their front stoop was promptly defecated upon.

2010 - The percent of weekly "human waste" calls to SF's 311 hotline ticks up from 2.5% to 3.5%.

2011 - DPW reports 5,547 incidents of human waste cleanup for the year.

September 2011 - The city begins talking about creating "pooplets" in street parking spaces in the Tenderloin and in SoMa alleys — a playful take on the parklet trend then sweeping the city.

March 2012 - A story about a mentally ill homeless woman who regularly used one particular Nob Hill bus shelter as her personal toilet prompts a local news story after residents complain.

July 2012 - A story goes viral about how the sheer volume of human excrement in BART escalators is causing widespread machinery breakdowns. This story is later revised to add in the context that, systemwide, BART's escalators were all reaching the end of their 40-year lifespans and all will require replacement.

December 2013 - Public Works reports a total of 8,793 human waste cleanups, a 59% increase over two years earlier.

May 2014 - The Chronicle's C.W. Nevius publishes a piece about the city's most-poop-filled street, St. George Alley in the Tenderloin. SFist breaks it down by the numbers, and notes that in the first four months of the year, DPW had already received 5,585 steam cleaning requests, mostly for poop and pee.

July 2014 - The city begins mapping human excrement reports by street, in order to determine priority locations for new mobile toilets. Tenderloin Pit Stop launches to provide extra toilet capacity for mid-city streets. The Chronicle notes that "For decades, feces on streets and sidewalks has been one of the biggest quality-of-life issues for San Francisco residents and visitors," this despite every media outlet treating the problem as brand new.

November 2014 - Web developer Jennifer Wong wins a hack week contest with Human Wasteland, an interactive map about feces cleanup efforts in San Francisco that Wong says was meant to be a way to educate people about homelessness. The map would later be co-opted by the conservative media to excoriate San Francisco's liberal policies toward the homeless. (She has since shut the map off and posted a marquee saying, "[This map was made] not to insult people or places. Not to further political agendas not related to homelessness.")

January 2015 - Fast Company picks up on the story of the Tenderloin Pit Stop, and a barrage of national stories begin flowing about how wealthy San Francisco is drowning in human shit. Many of these come from conservative publications.

July 2015 - Cranky conservative Chronicle columnist Debra Saunders chats up DPW about why the streets around the Chronicle building seem so suddenly poop-laden, to her. She writes, "Downtown San Francisco feels like a large public toilet without enough janitors."

August 2015 - SF Travel head Joe D’Alessandro tells the Chron's Matier & Ross, of the poop problem, "People come here thinking of this as the center of innovation and entrepreneurship, and they see a street scene that looks like something out of a Third World country."

January 2017 - The point-in-time homeless census finds that there are around 7,500 unhoused individuals on the streets, virtually unchanged in number from two years before.

July 2017 - The poop-ocalypse goes dormant for a bit after the city sees a little more rain. Then comes word from Rec & Parks that they are moving to ban all sandboxes from the city's playgrounds because all too often they are receptacles for feces, both human and animal.

February 2018 - A year into the Trump administration and after Rush Limbaugh has falsely stated that Wong's poop map was a city project (even though the city was doing some tracking of its own), Wong turns the map off and posts her message.

July 2018 - Mayor London Breed clocks the word "feces" in her swearing-in speech.

August 2018 - The city establishes a special six-person "poop patrol" unit.

August 2018 - Citylab publishes a piece about the politicization of the poop problem, writing, "All of this extra scrutiny could provide the political pressure to finally find policies and programs that address one of the city's most intractable challenges. But homeless advocates also fear that poop hysteria could also end up pushing this historically compassionate and permissive city into a more punitive stance towards its most vulnerable residents."

October 2018 - The New York Times reports on the "dirtiest block in San Francisco," again playing up the rich v. poor angle, noting that the 300 block of Hyde Street had received 2,227 complaints about street and sidewalk cleanliness over the course of a decade.

October 2018 - A tech bro who, perhaps, isn't aware of any of the above recent history creates an app called Snapcrap, allowing users to quickly photograph and report feces to DPW. This gets media attention.

April 2019 - YET ANOTHER MAP crops up, published on Forbes, showing the 132,562 feces reports recorded by DPW in the 11 years since it began recording. Once again, this may serves no particular purpose other than to say SF has been cleaning up a lot of shit for a lot of years. Vice picks up the story, noting that the count of cleanups has risen exponentially, to over 28,000 in 2018, indicating that the problem has only gotten worse. Pundits also note that as more affluent people move into a neighborhood, demands for cleanliness tend to rise.

May 2019 - The Chronicle's Phil Matier takes up the poop torch anew, getting quotes from DPW director Mohammad Nuru ("It‘s not just about the money anymore, it’s about also needing to deal with the people who are creating the problems. Cleaning the same area three, four, five times a day is not the best use of our money, but it is necessary until the behavior changes.") and Supervisor Haney ("I’m for accountability, but I haven’t seen any plan for how to do it. The city should be accountable as well."), who is calling for 10 new Pit Stops, five of which are open 24 hours. Tenderloin Housing Clinic Executive Director Randy Shaw tells Matier that it's the drug dealers, not the residents, who defecate in the streets instead of in public toilets. Mayor Breed seems to be pushing for more "quality of life" citations, but of course homeless advocates say that's only criminalizing homelessness.

And the cycle continues! If you know anyone skilled in the cajoling of the mentally ill, drug addicted, and un-housed to use city-sanctioned public toilets instead of the nearest alley or bus stop to do their business, the city would I'm sure would love to talk to them.

Related: San Francisco's Feces-Covered Streets By The Numbers [2014]

According to a Facebook fan who sent me this photo, the person who was caught using @SFBART as a public 🚽 has struck again. pic.twitter.com/jQgYJvCU5K

— Stanley Roberts (@SRobertsKRON4) October 20, 2017

Faithful newshounds might recall last month's tale of a seemingly troubled woman who repeatedly used BART's trains as restrooms. We now have an update, it seems, as BART has announced they've nabbed the alleged culprit.

Back in September commuter Allen Nunley went to BART with video he captured of the woman copping a squat as she rode the train, but after no response from the transit agency he took his video to the media, saying “As BART riders, we pay a lot of money to ride BART, and it’s just really ridiculous that BART staff cannot do anything about that."

"Everyone on the train is just covering their mouths and everything. They just can’t deal with it either. This particular time I just had enough.”

Nunley is likely pleased, then, to hear that BART staff has done something: According to KRON 4, the woman was arrested by BART police Friday, after yet another rider posted photos of the suspect as she went about her business.

This time, it was BART rider Susan Greenlee Edwards who caught the suspect on camera "after watching her urinate at around 5:53 a.m. on the Pittsburg-Bay line heading into San Francisco." She sent the photos to KRON 4's Stanley Roberts, who posted them to Facebook and Twitter.

It was shortly after that that BART says they arrested the woman, taking her "into custody for a no-bail warrant."

But while BART tweeted happily regarding the catch...

...it turns out the arrest us un-pee-related. Instead, Roberts reports, she was arrested by BART police for "active warrants" including the no-bail one, which was for "fire related crimes."

She also had "methamphetamine products" on her person, BART spokesperson Alicia Trott (who, interestingly, says the situation only came to BART's attention "about a week ago" despite a September report on the woman's alleged behavior) says.

But since the suspect wasn't ticketed for her alleged bathroom behavior — according to Roberts, despite the ample photographic evidence BART cops won't ticket her unless they see her dropping a load in person or riders make a "citizen's arrest" — she won't be banned from the system. That means that when she's released from jail, there's nothing stopping preventing her future pit stops on one of the transit agency's trains.

Previously: Outraged Commuter Records BART Rider Using Train As Restroom

Aww, some nice PR for BART for a change. BART just posted this video, apparently produced by their in-house communications team, highlighting the work of the guys who power-wash all the grime (and poop!) off station stairwells and other surfaces in the BART system.

Per BART:

You may have seen them before in downtown Oakland or San Francisco, covered head-to-toe in protective gear and wielding a heated high-pressure washer wand. They’re BART’s brightening crew, and they’re on a deep cleaning mission to blast away the dirt (and blood, and vomit, and human waste) mucking up our stairwells.

"Every day at least five to ten people say 'thank you,'" says one of the guys.

They say they concentrate on "the heart of the system," and this video they're power-washing the often very gross stairs at the entrances to Civic Center Station.

The video itself is very satisfying to watch, and as one of the crew puts it, the job is "instant gratification."

Related: Sheer Volume Of Excrement In Machinery Breaking BART Escalators

A months-old feces smear — or should we call it a fresco? — on a block of Russian Hill is now a work of public art thanks to a small museum-style label, likely placed there by a big fan of Marcel Duchamp.

According to the tipster who sent these images to SFist, "the people who live there haven't bothered to clean it up, even though one of the condos just sold for $2 million." Who cares about the condos — what's this piece selling for?

Have a tip for SFist? Send it along!

Related: Photos: One Guy Turned His Roommates' Mess Into A 'Passive-Aggressive Art Gallery'

San Francisco is home to roughly 7,000 homeless residents, and, just like the rest of us, those individuals need to use the restroom. Instead of griping about this fact and blaming the homeless for lacking a private space to engage in a basic human act — resulting in individuals being forced to defecate on the city's streets and sidewalks — the Examiner reports that several Minerva University students are petitioning the city to install 10 additional self-cleaning toilets in the Tenderloin.

"Doing some research into public restrooms around San Francisco reveals that, though there are a significant number of public restrooms, in the areas most affected by homelessness, there are few to none," the petition reads. "Being homeless means a lack of consistent access to restrooms, and often being turned away at customer only establishments for which they do not have the money. This can result in public urination/defection and inadequate personal hygiene, to which everyone should have a right."

San Franciscans have a complicated relationship with the city's 25 public toilets. Installed in 1995, the Chronicle reported back in 2011 that the Parisian-style, enclosed bathrooms frequently lacked consistent maintenance from their operator, JCDecaux, and were often found to be filthy and used for purposes outside of their intended use (think drug use and prostitution). It was hoped that a 2015 plan to employ "potty-sitters" to watch over and maintain the toilets would help to turn things around, and at present the Pit Stop program maintains 13 of the toilets and has been deemed a success by the city.

”The more Pit Stops we open, the more places people have a safe, secure and clean place to go,” SF Public Works Director Mohammed Nuru explained in a press release last summer. “Since the Pit Stop began - with the strong support of Mayor Lee and the Board of Supervisors - we have seen a steady increase in usage and a reduction in steam cleaning requests."

Assuming this program could be expanded to include any new toilets — which, given the program cost reported by the Chronicle of roughly $1 million per year, is not a given — additional toilets in areas known to have a high concentration of homeless residents seems like a no-brainer.

At present, the over 15,000 people who have signed the petition seem to agree.

Related: The Best Public Restrooms In SF

It's that time of year again! 2003's Prop C mandated that the beautiful City of San Francisco issue an annual report on the state of our dear sweet streets and sidewalks, and here that is, once again: The Street and Sidewalk Maintenance Standards Annual Report.

To produce the report, issued last week for Fiscal Year 2015-2016, inspectors from contractor JBR Partners walked 183 selected routes in town — about half of them commercial, half of them residential — at the midpoint in the week between street cleanings. Compared to FY 2014-15, these inspectors found less litter and grime on streets, with about twice as many routes free from "excessive" litter.

That's the good news, here's the bad: The big three hazards on streets — feces, needles, and condoms, or FNC as they're known in the biz — were spotted more often than last year along residential routes, though inspectors found conditions to be roughly the same on commercial routes.

For another metric, the City’s SF311 customer service center fielded an increase in reports about feces and the like on streets, suggesting a palpable uptick in "FNC" sightings. In fact, 311 calls grew by 25 percent in FY 2015-16 to reach an average of 34,480 requests per month.

Going by 311 calls, reports of needles saw a 41 percent increase across the city, moving the proverbial needle quite a bit. Last year saw 2,527 reports of needles, and this year there were 3,551. The SF Public Works "Hot Spot" team, which actually performs needle cleanups, also noticed a big uptick here, counting internally 16,000 needles picked up in FY2015 and then 23,300 in FY2016 — an increase of 40 percent.

Human waste reports were up 39 percent, with District 6 bearing the brunt of that.

via the Office of the Controller

311 requests regarding broken glass were also up, tied to car break-ins, by 24 percent this year. That includes an astronomical jump after April and May media coverage brought attention to the issue of broken glass and car break-ins, possibly skewing the numbers.

via the Office of the Controller

Graffiti was also up according to the report. So who's responsible for cleaning up this mess? Mostly the answer is Public Works. Per the report, "among the twenty-two street and sidewalk standards evaluated, the Public Works department is generally responsible for the maintenance of the streets and Public Works assets located on the sidewalks." To keep up and help "operationalize" findings, the report recommends that the number of street and sidewalk evaluations each year be increased.

But trash, needles, and shit on city streets don't just spontaneously generate: A large factor in all of this is that San Francisco's population is up 8 percent since 2010, with 60,000 more residents as of January 2016. "This continued growth of people living and working in San Francisco places additional demand on the City’s service systems," the report explains. More people means more trash, and maybe it also means more people to complain about crap on the street. However, the report notes that the increase in 311 reports far outmatched the increase in new 311 users. Aw, crap.

Previously: Report Cites Fewer Needles On Sidwalks, But Complaints About Them Rise Anyway

For dog owners across the city, it's a familiar routine: Stand around while your canine poops, try not to stare lest someone walk by and think you're a weirdo, lean over with a plastic bag to pick up the goods, and then find the nearest trash bin to dispose of Precious's leavings. According to the Chronicle, however, that could all be about to change. Perhaps sick of letting all that good stuff go to waste, officials have launched a program to encourage the environmentally conscious to compost what was once considered mere garbage — likely ensuring a much richer terroir for our Napa and Sonoma vintner friends.

The program kicked off this past weekend in Potrero's Star King Open Space, and is remarkable for its straightforwardness. A company called BioBags is providing park-goers with compostable dog bags, a specialized receptacle, and a pickup service to haul away the future-fertilizer.

“We tried to start this dog waste collection initiative at Duboce Park and BioBag even offered to pay the cost for the first year but the city department in charge of the park would not allow it,” BioBag vice president of market development Mark Williams told the Chronicle. “So we’re happy the folks at the Starr King Open Space took us up on our offer to demonstrate this is an effective way to reduce landfill for Zero Waste objectives.”

Company officials told the paper that they believe this is the first such program in California, and that they hope to expand it to parks across San Francisco. With an estimated 120,000 dogs in the city, that's a lot of poop.

And, with the recent news that roughly half of the contents of our city's black bins are actually compostable or recyclable, the latest effort will helpfully get us a bit closer to the goal of zero waste by 2020. Or, at the very least, means less poop to step in at our city's parks.

BioBag and @sfenvironment are LIVE at @starrkingopenspace Block Party unveiling the FIRST compostable dog waste station in California! 🐶💩♻️

A photo posted by BioBag (@biobag) on Sep 25, 2016 at 2:48pm PDT

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