Let my people go: New York needs more public toilets

You just went through the subway turnstiles and realized you’ve reeeealllly got to go — and we’re not talking about getting to your destination. You probably have no choice but to steel your gut for a half hour of profound discomfort until you finish your trip and rush to the nearest toilet, which is probably in a restaurant you’ve got to beg to enter.

For a small fraction of straphangers, that all-too-common scenario could soon change, as public toilets at eight subway stations will be reopened beginning next year. The system’s 100-plus bathrooms across 69 stations were shuttered during COVID; the hiring of 800 new cleaners enables them to start come back online, albeit painfully slowly.

Rather than accept this as progress, we take it as a reminder that New York City has long been pitiful in the public potty department. A 2019 report by then-City Comptroller Scott Stringer pegged the number of city toilets open to all at 1,428, the vast majority of them in parks and playgrounds. Very few of those include changing tables for babies or are accessible to people in wheelchairs. The city as a whole offers just 16 public bathrooms per 100,000 residents — which means we’re circling the drain, 93rd in the nation. And last we checked, flush-with-bathrooms Buffalo (84 per capita), Pittsburgh (86 per capita), Cincinnati (125 per capita) and Milwaukee (113 per capita) weren’t also attracting millions of tourists every year.

Sure, if too rarely tended to, public lavatories can quickly become disgusting cesspools. But a functioning city doesn’t surrender to that possibility; it deals with it, by cleaning and maintaining them.

Technology can help. World-class metropolises have installed hundreds of advanced public toilets that disinfect themselves after every use. Mike Bloomberg’s 2006 dream of installing 20 such toilets produced a trickle of five.

A bill by Brooklyn’s Rita Joseph, set to pass the City Council Thursday, would require the mayor to identify locations for new restrooms in all zip codes, a modest but necessary start. How long are we supposed to hold it?