NY Public Bathrooms Are Terrible: Unnecessary Survey Finds

NEW YORK CITY — New York's hard-to-find, often-closed, largely squalid public restrooms stink, a new survey unsurprisingly found.

But the Empire State's bathroom horrors surprisingly aren't number one in the U.S., or even number two, the Lavatory Lab survey found.

New York is ranked 12th worst in the country, according to the survey of 3,000 people.

"When broken down nationally, public bathrooms in Wyoming were ranked as the worst in our great nation," a Lavatory Lab release states.

Wyoming's respondents rated their public restrooms at 3.5 out of 10. New Yorkers, by contrast, gave theirs a 4.7 out of 10.

Public restroom access has been a pressing issue for New York City dwellers.

For a city of 8 million people, there are comparatively few public toilets. City dwellers largely have become accustomed to holding it (or not) as they ride the subways, go to parks or otherwise roam the streets.

MTA officials even closed subway restrooms for nearly two years as the coronavirus pandemic struck. They reopened many bathrooms in January, giving New Yorkers a chance to see if the infamous subway toilets — as the New York Times put it in 2019 — still "lived up to the horrific hype."

Many people who work in New York City didn't even have access to restrooms on the job until recently. App-based delivery workers had long complained about restaurants denying them use of bathrooms — a problem that prompted City Council members to pass a bill guaranteeing their access.

“Public restrooms still serve a critical role in our society," Mark Williams, an editor with Lavatory Lab, said in a statement. "Whether we like it or not, they're a necessary part of our lives and we need them to be clean, safe, and accessible."

See the full Lavatory Lab ranking and map here.