That’s relieving news.
City lawmakers are aiming to solve an all-too-common problem of not knowing where to go when you’ve got to go — which plagues tourists and locals alike — with a bill to add thousands of new thrones to the Big Apple within the next 12 years.
If passed, the plan introduced by Brooklyn Councilmember Sandy Nurse on Thursday would amend the city’s charter and require the government to build a four-year plan of “establishing and maintaining a public bathroom network,” Hell Gate NYC reported.
“This is really an issue of equity and justice. It’s been a long time coming, and the City knows that we need to be doing this,” Nurse, 39, told the outlet.
The bill would force the city to provide one bathroom for every 2,000 residents — creating significantly more restrooms than the one per every 7,700 New Yorkers available now.
There are around 1,100 public restrooms for the city’s 8.4 million residents, and Nurse’s plan would require 3,100 toilets to become available.
These toilets can be newly built or existing bathrooms on privately owned public space could become readily available.
Nurse said the restrooms don’t need to be elaborate, just functional.
“[The bill’s] not asking for one of those big comfort stations,” she told Hell Gate NYC. “We’re saying in this bill, we need a simple structure that can be put all over the city and in a lot of settings that will streamline and make efficient the process for siting and constructing toilets.”
New York City’s new toilets could look like the “Portland Loo,” a standalone, single-stall toilet with a door located on sidewalks. Nurse’s district — which serves Cypress Hills, Bushwick, City Line, Ocean Hill, Brownsville and East New York — already have a few standalone facilities.
Nurse would also like to see restrooms retrofitted with all the amenities needed in a public toilet, especially for women.
“Recently, I went to use a restroom, and I use a menstrual cup, and there’s no sink in most of New York City’s public parks bathrooms. There’s no sink inside of the stall. So if you’re emptying a menstrual cup, what do you do?” she told the oulet.
“It’s embarrassing. It makes you feel shameful. And it’s just not acceptable.”
Nurse pooh-poohed critics who might fear the proposed public restrooms will become overrun with drug addicts.
“We have easily, every night, thousands of people living on the street. They need a place to go, whether we like it or not. And if they don’t go in a bathroom, they’re going on the street,” Nurse argued. “So we really need to be focused on some common sense solutions.
“The pros are, we have a cleaner, more livable city. A more just city.”
The only con Nurse pointed out was that it would cost “more money” to maintain these restrooms, but “that’s something we should already be doing in the first place.”
Advocating for more public restrooms in NYC isn’t new, but has been an uphill battle over their cost, which could be in the millions, as well as resident opposition.
This has left dozens of sidewalk bathrooms stuck in a warehouse in Queens since the days of former Mayor Mike Bloomberg. Bloomberg, who was in office from 2002 to 2013, introduced the 20 automatic public toilets in 2006, but only five were ever installed, according to The City.
Nurse’s plan also includes creating an “extensive, detailed map of all the public bathrooms in NYC.”
Several resident-made bathroom maps have popped up over the years, including an Instagram account called Got2Go that was created by local Teddy Siegel, who created the account after nearly peeing herself in Times Square.
She asked one store to use their bathroom and was denied; eventually, she had to shell out $3 for a bottle of water to use a McDonald’s restroom. The purchase stung of injustice, especially when she realized the door was unlocked.
“I need my $3 a lot more than McDonald’s does,” she said at the time.
Earlier this year, fellow Brooklyn Councilmember Rita Joseph also introduced a bathroom bill that would force the city to report on the state of all public restrooms by the end of year.