Coalition of Community Boards Seeks New Plan for Public Toilets
A coalition of three Manhattan Community Boards, including Community Board 1 (CB1), which represents Lower Manhattan, has submitted testimony to the City’s Department of Transportation (DOT) urging that agency to reform its contract with a firm that was hired in 2006 to build 20 automated public toilets (APTs).
Vendor JCDecaux (better known for building and operating hundreds of newsstands and bus shelters in Manhattan, each emblazoned with advertising that the company sells) has managed to open only five of these facilities, largely because of the City’s labyrinthine land-use process. Now, the DOT wants to extend the company’s contract, which would otherwise expire in 2026, by five years.
Other metrics are similarly discouraging. A 2019 report from the City Comptroller notes that New York ranks 93rd among the 100 largest American cities in terms of public toilet facilities, with just 16 public bathrooms for every 100,000 residents.
But CB1, along with CB4 (which represents Midtown between 14th and 59th Streets, west of Eighth Avenue) and CB5 (Midtown from 14th to 59th Streets, between Eighth and Lexington Avenues), is calling for modified siting requirements, which would allow placing APTs “in the roadbed on streets that are permanently closed Open Streets, and in the neighborhood plazas created through the NYC Plaza Program.”
A second mandate calls for updating the appearance of APTs, in response to the City’s Public Design Commission, which has “rejected these units in certain locations because the commission thought that the APTs’ appearance was inconsistent with the surrounding built environment.”
The coalition also notes that “the current approval process for APTs… requires six levels of approval for each unit: DOT, the Department of Buildings, Public Design Commission, the local Community Board, local Council Member and the Mayor,” and urges DOT to streamline this system, while also being transparent about the timeline for opening new APTs.
In other recommendations, the three Community Boards push for longer hours of operation, urge that APTs should be located near other amenities (such as bike racks), and request that the facilities cost nothing, rather than the 25 cent fee that JCDecaux proposes.
In related news, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority announced the reopening of 36 public bathrooms at 18 subways stations that were closed during the COVID pandemic. For Lower Manhattan residents, these include the Chambers Street station on the 1, 2, and 3 lines, and the Whitehall Street station of the R and W trains.