Building a public bathroom in New York City costs taxpayers about $4 million today, according to the Mayor’s office. For about the same amount, the city will build 17 new restrooms across the five boroughs through a new pilot program that Mayor Zohran Mamdani launched Wednesday.
Teaming up with the appropriately named Throne Labs, the city is bringing the 17 restrooms to parks and prominent public plazas across the five boroughs. The bathrooms will be open daily from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m., giving New Yorkers on the go a chance to find relief when nature calls.
City Hall says each of the bathrooms will have touchless technology to run the water and flush the toilets. They will also be climate-controlled (warm in winter, cool in summer) and feature baby-changing stations for parents on the go.
Each bathroom will also be secured, with people given 10 minutes to do their business; they are accessible with an app, a text message, a QR code or a physical card to be distributed by local groups to those in need.
On paper, the plan sounds reasonable. It seems like a cost-efficient way to solve one of the city’s most underrated yet necessary problems: the lack of public restrooms available to New Yorkers on the go.
By price tag alone, it is already an improvement on a similar pilot program the Adams administration launched in 2025 in which modular toilets, at $1 million a piece, were installed at five locations across the city.
As of June 2025, there were just 975 operational public bathrooms, mostly in public parks, across the five boroughs. In a city of 8 million people, that number is unacceptably low.
The most obvious challenge will be keeping the potties clean and open for everyone. There is also concern that homeless individuals will ultimately use the bathroom as shelters for themselves overnight.
Throne Labs will be responsible for regularly cleaning the bathrooms every 10 or 15 visits, tracking usage through real-time data collected from each station. But the ability to clean the bathrooms could be hampered by people who refuse to leave.
The Throne bathrooms will have audible and visual warnings for users when their 10-minute time limit is up, but what happens if someone refuses to leave? Will the police be called to remove the individual? Will any charges be filed? That remained unclear Wednesday.
New Yorkers need clean, secure public bathrooms that are conveniently located in public locations that are open to anyone. Private businesses and mom-and-pop shops should not have to bear the brunt of helping New Yorkers find relief.
But in order to provide public bathrooms, the city needs to make sure this pilot program fulfills its basic agenda in offering clean, secure places for people on the go to find relief when they need it. Whether this program is right for the city will ultimately come down to how resources in time, money and labor are spent in maintaining the Throne bathrooms.
If all efforts are made for this program to succeed, there is no reason why the city should hold back thoughts of further expanding it.