Cities Can Now Set Up a Public Bathroom Overnight, Not in Years

Try finding a public bathroom in an American city and you'll understand the problem fast. The US has about 8 public toilets for every 100,000 people — a rate that puts it in the same range as Botswana. New York City, despite having nearly 1,000 public restrooms, still only manages one for every 8,500 residents.

Throne Labs is trying to fix that without waiting years for it to happen. The company builds self-contained, solar-powered restroom units that don't need to be hooked up to city sewer or water lines — which means they can be set up on an empty sidewalk and ready to use within a single day, not the years it normally takes a city to dig up streets and run new pipes.

Why Building a Public Bathroom Has Always Been So Slow

A typical municipal restroom isn't really about the toilet itself. It's about everything underground that has to connect to it — sewer lines, water mains, electrical hookups. That kind of construction routinely costs cities upward of a million dollars per location, and that's before accounting for permitting delays, utility approvals, and the years those projects can drag on.

Then there's the upkeep problem, which is arguably worse than the construction one. Public restrooms have a reputation — often deserved — for vandalism, drug use, and general neglect, mostly because once they're built, nobody's watching them closely enough to know when something's gone wrong. Cities end up spending money to build a bathroom, then more money trying to keep it from becoming a problem, and eventually many just shut them down rather than deal with the headache.

Fletcher Wilson, who founded Throne Labs in 2020, had a personal reason for caring about this. He's dealt with irritable bowel syndrome for most of his life, which means he's spent more time than most people thinking about where the nearest working bathroom actually is. He started the company with co-founders Jessica Heinzelman and Ben Clark to build something that could scale past the two problems that had been stalling public restrooms for decades: the cost of construction, and the cost of staying clean.

How a Throne Actually Works

Each unit is fully self-contained. There's a tank that holds fresh water for the sink and toilet, and a separate tank that collects waste — so there's no need to tap into a sewer line at all. Power comes from solar panels mounted on the unit, and in places without enough sunlight, or during winter, they plug into a standard outlet instead. Wilson's team has tested the units down to -10°F, so cold weather isn't really a dealbreaker.

The part that separates these from a regular port-a-potty is the sensor system built into each one. Sensors monitor how often a unit gets used, flag when it needs cleaning or restocking, and alert a maintenance team in real time rather than waiting for someone to notice it's a mess. That's a meaningful shift from the usual model, where a public bathroom gets cleaned on a fixed schedule whether it needs it or not, or — more often — doesn't get cleaned at all until it's a genuine problem.

Entry typically works through a phone tap, though the company also distributes physical entry cards through libraries and homeless outreach groups for people without a smartphone — which, fairly enough, is something easy to overlook if you're not thinking about who actually needs a bathroom most.

Where This Is Actually Set Up

Throne set up its first permanent unit around Washington, D.C. in 2023. Since then, the company has expanded into more than 20 cities — and the deployments getting the most attention are the ones that needed to work, not the ones in quiet suburban parks.

Los Angeles Metro set up its first unit near MacArthur Park station, an area hit hard by the opioid crisis. LA Metro's Stephen Tu described something unexpected: people experiencing homelessness who relied on the bathroom started protecting it themselves, since it was one of the only clean, dignified places they had. Metro now runs 20 units, with 44 more planned ahead of the 2026 World Cup and 2028 Olympics.

Seattle is setting up units in Pioneer Square ahead of its own World Cup surge. Detroit's experience has been simpler, according to Eric Larson of the Downtown Detroit Partnership: give people somewhere to go, and the rest takes care of itself.

New York City made the biggest commitment yet — a $4 million pilot setting up 17 free, fully accessible units across all five boroughs after Mayor Zohran Mamdani called finding a public bathroom one of the hardest things to do in the city.

Ann Arbor ran the longest real-world test: ten units set up over a year, racking up 100,000 uses. City official Derek Delacourt called the feedback almost entirely positive — rare for any public service — and signed a five-year contract once the pilot ended.

The Part That's Still an Open Question

Not everyone is fully sold on the model. Because Throne charges cities a recurring service fee rather than a one-time construction cost, some have asked whether that's actually cheaper over time than just building a permanent restroom and maintaining it the traditional way. It's a fair question, and one that probably won't get a clean answer until cities have run these programs for several more years and can compare the real numbers.

What's harder to argue with is the speed. A city that wants a bathroom in a specific location doesn't have to wait through a multi-year capital project to get one — it can have something set up and working within days. For places hosting a sudden surge of people, like a marathon or a World Cup, that kind of speed matters in a way a five-year infrastructure timeline never could.