Dutch cleaning up after filthy Canadians?

The Dutch are widely regarded as the world's best hydrological engineers for having created windmills to pump out their land, and for the gates protecting Rotterdam and Amsterdam from storm surges, as well as numerous other achievements. So of course when Victoria, British Columbia had a problem controlling the amount of urine flowing through their streets, of course they turned to the Dutch for help.

Nobody likes a stinky urinal or port-a-potty just sitting around on the street, next to some cafe serving lunch, and larger public toilets are notorious havens for gay sex and drugs, so the obvious solutions were really out. Fortunately, the problematic pissers in Canada and Holland are nocturnal, and only fill the streets with urine under cover of darkness when the bars and clubs close up, so the Dutchies came up with a nocturnal solution.

They created a urinal which rises up out of the street via remote control after dark, and retreats back underground when normal people are up and about. I just think this is bizarre enough to comment on, the fact that Victoria and other cities now have remote control pissoirs rising up out of the pavement. To answer one question that seems to come up, of how come there's a urination system that works for men but not for women: women didn't piss in the street before, and any woman who would use an open toilet on the street will long since have worked out how to piss standing up. There are more pictures and video of this thing here on John Chow's blog.

Hup Holland, indeed.