Latest news with #publicbathrooms
CBS News
14-07-2025
- Health
- CBS News
NYC enacts new law to increase number of public bathrooms
New York City is one step closer to nearly doubling the number of public bathrooms across the five boroughs. Earlier this year, the New York City Council passed Local Law 58 of 2025 to create and maintain a citywide network of public bathrooms. The goal is to provide at least 2,120 public restrooms by 2035, at least half of which are publicly owned. The law called for a strategic plan to identify funding, policy changes, locations, designs, and create an online map of all the city's public bathrooms. Now a new measure, Local Law 92 of 2025, requires additional reporting about the status of potential locations and the strategy for maintaining them. The bill passed the Council in June and was enacted into law on Friday after Mayor Eric Adams neither signed nor vetoed it within 30 days. NYC looking to nearly double number of public bathrooms Last summer, the mayor's office launched a Google Map showing the city's public restrooms and found there were only around 1,100 public toilets for 8.6 million residents. That's roughly one for every 7,820 residents. Advocates for seniors, people experiencing homelessness and people with disabilities say the lack of access impacts everyone. Councilmember Sandy Nurse, who proposed the series of bills, previously told CBS News New York that a city-run public bathroom network is long overdue. "Everybody deserves to be able to use a private space to use the bathroom that's clean and that's functional and maintained, and that is the task of the city," Nurse said in the spring. Organizers say the number of public bathrooms hasn't increased since the 1970s, when many were closed due to budget cuts. The goal of 2,120 puts the ratio closer to one for every 4,050 residents.
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Travel + Leisure
14-07-2025
- Travel + Leisure
These Are the Best (and Worst) U.S. Destinations for Public Bathroom Access
If you are a Type A travel planner, you know there is more to consider than making sure you get through your lists of restaurants to try and sights to see. And one of the most important things to plan for is where you will be able to use the bathroom when out and about. But if you are traveling in the United States, the answer may be difficult. That's because the U.S. faces a public bathroom shortage, according to a new study from Tena, an adult incontinence brand. In fact, for every 100,000 people, there are just eight public bathrooms. (And if you've ever had to wait in a long line for a restroom, you can begin to understand just how dismal that statistic really is.) To help travelers who don't want to factor in midday returns to their hotel for bathroom breaks, Tena ranked the best cities and states for public bathroom access, factoring bathroom cleanliness, wheelchair accessibility, overall density of public restrooms, and discoverability of the public restrooms. And there were some clear winners: Wyoming, Montana, and Hawaii offer the best overall public restroom access in the U.S. Wyoming offers one of the largest caches of public restrooms with an average of 118 public bathrooms appearing on state-level map searches. These are mostly easy to find, spaced out, and well reviewed. Plus, the state ranks No. 1 for having the most wheelchair-accessible bathrooms in the country. Montana similarly scored well, in part because Visit Montana offers a list of public restrooms available across the whole state, making them ultra easy for visitors and locals to find. For its part, Hawaii has an abundance of public restrooms with the island of Oahu alone boasting more than 215 state-maintained public bathrooms. However, only 120 appear on Google Maps for the entire state, meaning finding the restrooms may require a bit more local insight. When it comes to overall cleanliness, North Dakota's public restrooms came in first place. Overall, 94 percent of the bathrooms analyzed in the state had a rating of four stars or higher. Alaska, Indiana, and New Mexico also scored high, each with 88 percent of bathroom reviews at four stars or above. The study's least impressive states were New Hampshire and Kentucky, each of which had a low number of public restrooms available (No. 11 and No. 20, respectively). These are the top five states for public restroom: 1. Wyoming2. Montana3. Hawaii4. Oregon5. Idaho
Yahoo
15-06-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Maybe the television wasn't the greatest invention to come out of our state
It is Mark Twain to whom the quote 'Write what you know' is most often attributed. It's advice I try to live by — writing about my personal experiences, passions and areas of expertise. But there are times when journalism requires that I step beyond my own realm of comfort and knowledge to better understand the most pressing issues of our modern day. This week that step beyond was into a men's restroom. Metaphorically. I didn't actually walk into a men's restroom. Though I have before — a couple of times on accident and once when the line for the women's room was really long and I needed to change a baby's diaper immediately. On the latter occasion, a man walked in, saw me, shrugged, and proceeded to use the urinal. How nice it must be for men, I thought at the time, to have the ability to relieve themselves without having to wait in a lengthy line for a stall. How nice to not have to worry about the cleanliness of toilet seats or the bacteria that may be lurking on the stall handles and locks. Men have it so much easier, I concluded. What I didn't realize, though, is how much grosser men have it. Imagine my horror upon learning that an estimated 1 million liters of urine splashes onto public bathroom floors every day in the United States thanks to urinal splashback. And worse, that the urine sometimes splashes back onto the … um … urinator. I'll be honest, my initial reaction upon learning this frankly horrifying fun fact was to judge. To ask the entire male species, 'How can you live like that?' But then I remembered my hero, Jane Goodall, and the way in which she studies chimpanzees without judgment and advocates for conditions that would better their existence. Does she judge chimpanzees for baring their teeth when afraid? No. Instead, she works to create an environment where chimps need not feel threatened. So, too, am I refraining from judging men for walking out of the restroom with droplets on their pants or shoes, and am instead advocating for a better way. A better urinal, more specifically, and I have great news. There's a new urinal design in town. Move over, inventor of the television Philo T. Farnsworth, there's a new greatest invention to come out of Utah. Two, actually. Weber State associate professor Dr. Randy Hurd and his collaborator Zhao Pan at the University of Waterloo in Canada have created two new urinal designs — the Cornucopia and the Nautilus — that reduce splash back to 1.4% of the typical urinal model. 'I think anyone who's used a urinal has noticed that this is an issue,' Hurd said during our phone interview. 'Or just look around the floor in any men's bathroom,' he implored. 'There's pee all over the ground. It's clearly secondary droplets being splattered everywhere.' I'm going to refrain from looking around the floor in any men's bathroom and instead take Hurd's word for it. Because if anyone's qualified to understand this issue it's him. Hurd has a Ph.D. from Utah State University in mechanical engineering and his dissertation was on fluid dynamics, specifically impact events related to fluid dynamics. Together he and Pan discovered that the solution to the issue that has plagued male pee-ers for centuries came down to what Hurd describes as a 'simple' math problem. 'If we assume that the droplets are coming from an origin, we can basically figure out where the line will intersect at a defined plan at the given angle,' he said. Then, mercifully, explained, 'If you can't hit the porcelain at a bad angle, then you can't create splatter.' 'If a train of droplets is impacting a flat surface, as the angle between that train and the surface varies, so do the splash conditions,' he said, then explained that as that angle becomes more oblique then the splatter reduces and eventually goes away. The Cornucopia, which Hurd said looks like a urinal from Star Trek, is a three-dimensional solution to the splashback problem that reduces the angle of the stream. And the Nautilus is a more simple, two-dimensional solution that is both easier to clean and not height-dependent. The designs are pending a patent, which, for the sake of the men in my life, is a process I hope goes quickly. But in the immediate, Hurd can take satisfaction in knowing that he identified a solution to a problem that men have dealt with for, in my opinion, far too long. 'It's like the glass ketchup bottle,' Hurd said. 'Sure, you can get ketchup out of it, but it doesn't make it easy. Why not make an inverted plastic ketchup bottle? That solves the problem. So I guess my argument would be, why not make it easier?' And my argument would be, 'Why did none of you do this a long time ago?' But then I remember that Jane Goodall never asked such questions of the chimpanzees. She simply lived among them with respect and celebrated those things which would make their natural lives better. So, too, do I celebrate the Cornucopia and the Nautilus and the ways in which they will better men's restrooms and the lives of the men who use them.
