Rushing to McDonald’s, sneaking into Trump Tower: the desperate struggle to find a public toilet in New York

The city has one bathroom for every 8,000 residents - and they're ancient and disgusting. Can anything be done?

Why is it so hard to find a public bathroom in New York? The city of over 8 million people operates a paltry 1,000 bathrooms - that's one for every 8,000 New Yorkers. Anyone running errands in one of the five boroughs who doesn't want to pay for an overpriced bottle of water in exchange for a cafe's bathroom code must brave a decades-old public toilet that might be poorly lit, out of toilet paper, or covered in ... something.

Now Mayor Eric Adams has a plan ... well, sort of. In a press conference this week, Adams launched Ur In Luck (get it?), an initiative to expand access to public restrooms across all five boroughs.