Why it's so hard to find a public toilet

Planet Money

NPR

Business, News

4.6 • 29.8K Ratings

🗓️ 2 May 2025

⏱️ 24 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Why is it so hard to find a bathroom when you need one?

In the U.S., we used to have lots of publicly accessible toilets. But many had locks on the doors and you had to put in a coin to use them. Pay toilets created a system of haves and have nots when it came to bathroom access. So in the 60s, movements sprung up to ban pay toilets.

Problem is: when the pay toilets went away, so too did many free public toilets.

Today on the show, how toilets exist in a legal and economic netherworld; they're not quite a public good, not quite a problem the free market can solve.

Why we're stuck, needing to go, with nowhere to go.

This episode was produced by Willa Rubin with help from James Sneed. It was edited by Marianne McCune and engineered by Cena Loffredo. It was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Planet Money from NPR.
0:07.3	We have all been there.
0:10.0	Do you have a restroom I could use?
0:11.4	No.
0:13.3	No.
0:14.0	You're walking around in a town, in a city, and you have got to go.
0:19.9	So you pop into a nail salon.
0:22.6	Hello.
0:23.6	Do you have a restroom we could use?
0:25.6	All right.
0:26.6	No on the nail salon.
0:28.6	You try a smoke shop.
0:30.6	I'll try anywhere. I don't care.
0:32.6	This is Teddy Siegel and if you're out in New York City,
0:35.6	Teddy's got your back. Are you a public toilet
0:39.4	influencer? Sure. Yeah, I guess so. She's being humble. Teddy's created this crowdsourced,
0:47.0	publicly accessible Google map. It is like a maze. Of all the places you can just walk into
0:53.2	and use the bathroom.
0:54.5	It really just depends, like, when you're catching the toilet.
0:57.9	Churches, bookstores, hotels.
0:59.9	Barnes & Noble is like close-ish that way.
1:02.5	It started in New York and now includes the U.S. and a bunch of other countries.
	...

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