If anything, you have to be careful with this in New York specifically, because some of the little boutique hotels have tiny lobbies that don't have a bathroom. Make sure to go for a big brand-name hotel.
The outer boroughs are trickier, but I've found that McDonald's and KFC generally have open bathrooms. And gas stations with attached convenience stores, which do exist in Queens.
Nice restaurants were also a good place to go because they had good customer service habits. Any bar or places that serves alcohol has to have a bathroom.
In NYC iirc, 20 seats or more and built before 1970 or so also required it. I looked this up once after getting sick of being told there was no bathroom at places that seemed likely to be lying.
At a corporate level there was an open bathroom policy instituted a few years back [0]. I’m not aware of that changing but I’m also not surprised that a local outlet might not comply with that policy.
I went to a bar to use the bathroom and ordered an orange juice. The orange juice made me want to pee again in the NY train and had a nightmare on the way home. You can guess what happened lol
Neat. I've been holding onto a domain thronehunter.com, for 10 years now, after a stint at a startup in a downtown metro, where the office was a very small "loft" with 10+ people squeezed in.
Myself and a few others fairly quickly had an aversion to using the lone bathroom in the loft for respectful reasons and instead began seeking out bathrooms at nearby hotels and elsewhere. We would often joke "hey I'm going to run to the Hilton, I'll be right back" or "has anyone checked if the Mariott is open?".
I bought the domain thinking it'd be fun to build a bathroom finder/rating app but never got around to it!
Yeah, well, people squandered it and abused the old system. There are still strong social norms in places like Japan. People in SF are fine with dropping needles in the streets.
I live in Tokyo and previously lived in New York. I was back visiting last week and found it even harder to find bathrooms now that many tourist centric places closed. I ended up buying a lot of hot tea at various starbucks locations throughout the day just for the bathrooms.
頑張って OPさん. Your contact button doesn’t work, by the way.
Thanks. I visited NY in May and faced the issue. The purchased drink made me want to pee again too. The contact page works by a phone. I can change it to my LinkedIn too haha. I’ll use the app when I visit NY again. You can add your favorite bathroom place on the app too.
This idea came up from a Japanese guy(me)who are used to the public bathroom environment in Japan. I was surprised that there was no bathroom in the train station in NY.
When I was van dwelling around the US I was blown away at how inviting NYC was for van living. I was expecting it to be the hardest place in the US due to density, but it was one of the easiest.
First spot I checked was a dead end street next to a warehouse in Williamsburg. Backing onto the Hudson. Beautiful Manhattan views. A park on one side, and another a block down with a bathroom. And immediately fell into a community of about 10 others do the same thing.
Amazing.
This is the kind of app that serves well for van living, tho I rarely couldn’t find something.
- offline first (tho the background map didn’t work, but the items on the map were there which was more critical)
- wiki style info, so it was usually accurate
Built off OSM maps, and I think data entered into it was fed back to OSM. Tho that portion was vague.
Didn't George Costanza make millions with this app idea, only to lose it to Madoff?
Also, NY bathroom pro-tip: look for the local police precinct. They will always have public bathrooms, they exist all over NY, even in the more residential areas with no shops, and the type of people who go and destroy public bathrooms or shoot up drugs in them for hours usually aren't going to voluntarily walk into a police station.
Interesting. I mean I have been using Where is Public Toilet app for years. That app is crowd sourced, so you can suggest bathroom location. Not sure how this app is different.
But seriously, this is an underrated problem. As a runner and someone who drinks a lot of water I wish there were more public restrooms. Even johns are ok
As a foodie, one of the most frustrating things is answering nature's unexpected calls, this App is a foodie's 911. My to-go app is https://goweewee.com or just type 'wc' on Google Map
The HN crowd loves to promote urbanization, density, blah blah blah. The fact that such an app exists at all is de facto proof of a failed city. Just a comic level of dysfunction. "NYC, we're so progressive we can't even address the basic requirements to support human life"
In my experience suburbs and rural areas are even worse for public bathroom access (and even delivery of most other public goods except education). Are there US suburbs with plentiful public bathrooms?
What's a suburb? Depending on the level of density and sentiment about public parks (poor people's lawns v. a public good), some relatively low density places are better about public bathrooms. Boise is something like 5K people per sq. mile downtown, but there's public bathrooms at regular intervals on the Greenbelt in places at lower 3K densities.
As homelessness has gotten worse though, there's been noticeable encampments/vehicle caravans building up at these bathrooms.
I don't think "the HN crowd" has anything close to such a consensus. But I do think you could find broad agreement that cities should have more sanitary facilities in general.
Part of the problem in NYC is any time you offer any kind of community utility/service it invariably gets taken over by the homeless population. Benches become beds, libraries become bedrooms, cell phone charging stations become encampments.
Yeah, it's an unfortunate, "This is why we can't have nice things," situation. I would really love the idea of having public restrooms both for convenience for anyone who is out and about, and to allow homeless people to have some amount of dignity about being able to relieve themselves.
But you're right, it invariably gets taken over and becomes disgusting. And all the solutions I can think of are quite dystopian, like having a video camera that watches you in the bathroom so it can detect any kind of foul play.
Yeah. I always make sure to hit a restroom before driving through a city. Few things suck as much as feeling the call of nature while you're stuck on surface streets in the middle of a big city. Where are you going to be able to temporarily park your car and where is the restroom.
In the less dense zones, it's just stop at the next gas station/mcdonalds/starbucks/whatever. Less dense than that, just run into the woods...
