How Mamdani Can Deliver on His Public Bathrooms Promise
My recent piece in Vital City
I’m a huge fan of the team over at Vital City-- in my Practical Guide to NYC Local News Outlets, I rated them the best local news source for forming opinions that make you look smart at dinner parties.
So when they reached out and proposed a collab, I was excited.😆 I batted around a couple different ideas for what to write, and then it became obvious: Mamdani just announced his initiative for more public toilets in NYC, and I love writing about public toilets.
Here’s the link to my piece in Vital City about what the administration can learn from previous failures and what to look out for to prevent costs from overrunning or ballooning.
I wonder if the me of 10 years ago knew how excited current me would be reading about public toilets?
$90k operating cost for Throne sounds insane.
While they sound really nice, this article flagged how in a pilot in Ann Arbor 10 sites had a total of 100,000 uses. For $900,000, that is $9 for each use! At this rate, the city should just pay businesses to provide free access to bathrooms - I don't see how this can actually scale.
However, it must be possible to bring costs down here. Throne shares that they service a porta-potty after every 300 uses. Servicing for a luxury unit costs about $150 on average for construction sites. So that is a base 50 cents per unit. Assuming in NYC we have 10,000 uses per unit, that put us at $5k. Adding cleaning on top of this could be another $10k per unit, putting this at $15k, or $1.50 per use rather than $9.
My vision for this would be to recruit to nonprofits like Doe Fund to provide re-entry roles focused on cleaning and maintenance. The city takes this in-house, and runs in collaboration with a non-profit partner, rather than outsourcing it to an expensive contractor. Otherwise, the high operating costs will make this impossible to scale outside of a few pinch points, such as Times Square.
A key factor here is that every bathroom has some unique QR code to provide a touch free rating, and there is a sign that implores people to rate their experiences to serve as an additional maintenance mechanism. You publicly post these scores online, and create transparency to ensure consistency. One of the 20 very fancy Bloomberg toilets at Madison Square Park is totally busted, for example, and without any transparency here, it wastes the millions of dollars in capital expenses spent to build this in the first place. The right accountability system makes this idea operational.