Improving Highway Hotels

A woman from the Eastern Province wrote to me about two problems she would like to see addressed. The problems have to do with the poor conditions in our motels and the other with the graffiti on the walls of public toilets. She was particularly concerned about the conditions of restrooms and of toilets found in these motels.

People in the Kingdom regularly drive from one part of the country to another; distances are great and they need places to stop where they can rest, wash and pray. The need for these stopping places increases during Umrah and Haj when hundreds of thousands of people are on the move at the same time.

Imagine a bus full of passengers on their way to Makkah or Madinah — or any other destination — stopping at a motel along the highway only to find the restrooms and toilets smelly, unpleasant, unclean and in bad need of both maintenance and cleaning. Some of them have not been maintained at all, let alone renovated, since they were built some years ago. Needless to say, this does not create a good impression on anyone forced to use these facilities.

I do not mean to say that there are no clean places to stop; there certainly are and they are generally run by a company. To use the facilities there, however, one has to rent a room and pay something like SR30 per hour. Not many travelers are willing to rent a room for one hour when all they require is a clean restroom for 15 minutes.

The Ministry of Transport should build healthy and clean toilets along all our highways and charge users a small fee with the proceeds going to keep the toilets clean and properly maintained.

The other problem concerns the graffiti on the walls of the public toilets. She noticed that instead of writing names and romantic observations, people are writing comments reflecting their frustration at being unemployed. She read one by a young person who said he had graduated from college 10 years ago and was still without a job. Though she felt that writing these complaints on the walls of public toilets was not the way to solve the problems, she felt very strongly that some action should be taken to address these issues and so remove from our lives the reason for these particular graffiti.