When a visiting friend asked if I wanted to go running in Philadelphia, I made a lot of plans. Not only our route, but also where we have to go to the toilet. It didn’t go well.
I took the rapid transit PATCO Speedline, which has no toilets on trains. The station I left from in southern New Jersey didn’t have one either, and neither did the station I arrived in Philadelphia. When I arrived at my friend’s hotel, the bathrooms in the lobby were locked.
Fortunately, I was able to follow a woman with an access code to the bathroom. But that was a matter of luck. Trusting the vagaries of fate was my only option, because the United States – and much of the world – has a problem with public toilets.
On average, the United States has only eight public toilets per 100,000 residents the public toilet index, a 2021 report from British company QS Bathrooms Supplies. That’s far behind Iceland, the country with the highest density of public toilets: 56 per 100,000 people. That number drops to four per 100,000 in New York City. Madison, Wisconsin led the way for US cities, at 35 per 100,000.
It wasn’t always like that. In the 18th century, before indoor plumbing, bathrooms were common and generally communal, said Debbie Miller, a museum curator at Independence National Historical Park. In Philadelphia, one such octagonal outdoor toilet was located in a public garden behind what is now known as Independence Hall. “You could have shared it privately with George Washington,” she said.
Acceptance of public and shared bathrooms shifted during the Victorian era, Ms Miller said, as bodily functions became more taboo. The temperance movement to limit alcohol consumption led to cities building public toilets in the late 1800s and early 1900s: the thinking was that men didn’t have to go into a bar to use the bathroom. Investments through the Works Progress Administration and Civil Works Administration were added in the 1930s more than two million latrines in parks, public lands and rural areas, as well as “comfort stations” in cities, including Central Park.
But as city budgets dried up in the 1970s, so did funding for maintenance. Movements arose to end the practice of paid toilets, which were seen as both sexist (urinals were often free to use, but stalls were not) and classist. Cities responded by removing public toilets altogether.
Bathrooms are “challenging spaces because ultimately, not infrequently, they are the places where people get needs they can’t meet anywhere else,” such as sex work, drug use, or sleeping, said Lezlie Lowe, the author of “No Place to Go: How Public Restrooms not meet our private needs.” “These are all social concerns that have nothing to do with bathrooms, but because of the nature of those spaces, bathrooms are ultimately used to meet their needs, whether it’s dependency or desperation.”
When public restrooms closed, establishments such as coffee shops, museums, libraries, and department stores—which are generally only open during certain hours—had to become gatekeepers of restroom access.
“We’re dealing with a problem where the demand for public restrooms far exceeds the supply,” said Steven Soifer, president of the American Restroom Association, a group that advocates for better public restrooms. “This comes in, who is responsible for providing public toilets?”
There have been several approaches to answering that question. Some European cities have tried public-private partnerships, says Katherine Webber, an Australian social planning researcher who traveled the world in 2018 to study toilets on a grant from the Churchill Fellowship. She said the strongest programs had local governments play a role in determining the best restroom locations. “A city or a place will do better if they take into account the different needs of both residents and tourists.”
In 2022, Berlin completed an expansion of public toilets, doubling the number of public toilets from 256 to 418. The city looked at their existing toilets and identified where the gaps were – then partnered with Wall GmbH, a street furniture company that also builds constructions builds such as bus shelters and kiosks.
That same year, London introduced the Communal toilet arrangement, where for a small fee shops and restaurants could list their toilets as open to the public on the City of London website. Entrepreneurs believed that window signs advertising toilets would attract customers.
However, each of these approaches has drawbacks: Berlin’s toilets cost 50 cents per use, and the London Community Toilet Scheme is only useful during the open hours of the companies that sign up.
Some cities have adopted French “pissoirs” – essentially wholly or semi-private public urinals, which have been around since the early 1800s. In 2011, Victoria, BC, installed urinals that doubled as street art called Kros urinals, which have four spots per unit and can also be moved to special events or bars.
But like the classic pissoir, they are usually only usable for people without disabilities and for those who can easily go to the bathroom standing up. “They solve a little problem for people who already have fairly good access,” said Ms. Lowe.
Asian countries have taken a different approach, partly because of different cultural norms. While Americans may be hesitant to go to public restrooms because of past experiences of dirty or broken facilities, in China, Japan and Singapore, they expect their bathrooms to be clean, said Jack Sim, the founder of the World Toilet Organization. More than 68,000 toilets were built in China between 2015 and 2017 in what became known as the “Toilet Revolution”, with a government directive to keep toilets clean.
Tokyo turned its toilet program into public art. The Nippon Foundation sponsored the redesign of 17 restrooms in the Shibuya neighborhood, featuring striking designs including a white hemisphere and glass walls that change from clear to opaque when the bathroom door is closed. They will be cleaned and maintained in conjunction with the Nippon Foundation, the Shibuya City Government and the Shibuya City Tourism Association. (A looming question is whether it can be scaled up to cover the large sprawling city.)
US governments have tried a patchwork of solutions. Some cities have been more successful than others, although none have overcome the problem. In 2008, New York City bought 20 self-cleaning toilets that cost 25 cents per use. But installing it stalled because the Department of Transportation is working to find the right places for them to meet an extensive list of requirements. Five are currently in operation, and the department is suggesting locations for the remaining toilets—possibly a recipe for complaints about NIMBY (“not in my backyard”).
San Francisco started the Pit stop program in 2014, after learning from children in the Tenderloin district that they were stepping on feces on their way to school, said Rachel Gordon, the director of policy and communications for San Francisco Public Works.
They started with three bathrooms and now have 33, with hours varying by location. (The number expanded to 60 sites when shelters for homeless people closed during the pandemic, Ms Gordon said, but the temporary shelters have since been removed.) Each has running water, soap, needle bins and dog waste bins, as well as one or two servants on duty work. This is according to a study conducted by the University of California, Berkeleyfecal reports dropped by 12.47 per week in the Tenderloin district for the six months after the first Pit Stops opened.
Public restrooms in Portland, Oregon, are available 24 hours a day. The Portland Loo is a gender-neutral, wheelchair-accessible single bathroom that costs $100,000 per unit.
The city created the concept in 2008 with the aim of building a simple structure that could not be destroyed. Each bathroom is connected to the mains drainage and has running water and electricity (sometimes supplied by solar panels). The units are lit up in blue, which makes it difficult to find veins and discourages drug use, said Evan Madden, the sales manager at Portland Loo.
The toilets are ventilated to prevent odors and overheating; the vents also provide just enough privacy for the toilet’s purpose, but not enough for sleeping or sex work. It is “intended to be inconvenient for the resident,” Mr Madden said.
In 2013, after Portland transferred sales and manufacturing operations to Madden Fabrication, 180 units were installed in North America.
Vancouver, Washington, installed three Portland Loos in a 7,000-acre waterfront park in 2018 — a response to typical problems: The city’s public toilets “have really taken a beating and our police can’t control what goes on inside them.” said Terry Snyder, the landscape architect for Vancouver’s Department of Parks, Recreation and Cultural Services.
The Portland Loos have worked well enough that Mr. Snyder said the city would install three more this summer at Esther Short Park, replacing a 22-year-old brick bathroom building.
Philadelphia also plans to install six Portland Loos over the next five years, with the first opening sometime this year in Center City.
Mr. Soifer of the American Restroom Association believes that the problem in the US should be addressed at a national level rather than a patchwork of individual solutions. His group has had multiple meetings with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services hoping it would step in to manage public restrooms — much as the Occupational Safety and Health Administration is responsible for workplace restrooms — but to no avail.
“Since this is really a public health issue, someone has to take responsibility,” he said, “and no one.”