Public toilets in Ho Chi Minh City generally fail to meet users’ expectations of hygiene and safety although they have improved recently, according to a small survey conducted by Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper.
Of 100 people asked, 26 percent replied that they felt pleased with public toilets while 31 percent were dissatisfied, with the remaining 43 percent saying they could temporarily accept it.
In general, most of the people surveyed said that hygiene standards in public toilets needed to improve.
Besides hygiene, users complained about other factors including location, poor access and unfriendly staff.
The city has recently built new public toilets including those in 23/9 Park, Tao Dan Park, and on the Nguyen Hue pedestrian street in the heart of the city.
Those facilities are generally thought to be of high quality and meet the needs of users.
However, these are an exception rather than the rule among a total of 208 public toilets in a city with a population of nearly ten million.
One South Korean tourist named Han Dong Ho described a restroom he used as having a nasty smell at the entrance and its walls smeared with stains.
“It seemed that the person before me forgot to give it a flush or at least the flushing mechanism didn’t work,” he said.
“Some toilets didn’t even have a wash-basin.”
Authorities said they have been planning to build more public toilets and upgrade the current restrooms in the city in the near future.
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