"Quite common"? I've spent more than 3 decades here, visited most of the countries on the western side, both north and south (although embarrassingly little eastern parts), and have not seen this once in my life. Thinking about it, I haven't seen this anywhere in the world.
You will usually see these in public places that have no other access controls - think in a park, rather than in a restaurant. It's for places that have a high risk of people sleeping in them.
Yeah, I do visit public bathrooms from time to time, especially in Spain, Germany, France, Denmark and Sweden, and never seen that once anywhere, although I've seen much worse things on single occasions than a timer for the door to open.
I've seen them in some of the shadier parks in the Netherlands, Italy and Austria. Yppenplatz, Vienna, has a particularly nasty (smelling) one which the countdown clock does very little to obviate.
The fact that you haven’t been in central or Eastern Europe might be the key.
I haven’t seen an actual countdown timer, but many of the public toilets in Poland have time limits that are displayed on a sign, and announced by the computer voice loudspeaker. Usually it’s 30 minutes though IIRC.
I'm not going to pile on since there is already a handful of comments stating the same, but I think we can all be guilty of "This thing exists/happens specifically where I and most people I interact with live, so it must be common (in [superset])". It's very good to be mindful of when making assumptions/imprinting generalizations.
incredible work. I can only imagine what it was like standing here getting the images, the smell of the must wafting from the corners that haven't been cleaned in a decade, the microbial colonies thriving off pipe condensation above with entire universes of births and deaths and rebirths
Wow this is amazing! I had a habit of visiting the nicest bathroom I can find (typically 5 star hotel lobbies) while traveling. I took some photos of a couple a long way back, but never even thought to use something like LIDAR. I was thinking of using them as a coffee table book with the title "The Best Places To Go".
So from a fellow public bathroom enthusiast, I wholeheartedly thank you for this project. I travel much less these days, but if I'm ever in a nice bathroom I'll see if I can get a scan to work and upload it!
Thank you for making it! This is an incredible project so I hope to see (and contribute!) more scans. Also just a really well-crafted website in general, functionally and aesthetically. You mentioned looking at "standard design conventions used for other web archives and for designing public signage for ADA compliant restrooms" in another comment — any interesting design decisions from that research?
Yeah! It lead me to design the UI to be very simple with a clear hierarchy, high contrast, and using a sans-serif font. Accessibility and legibility is key. I landed on using Arial as the font because it's arguably the most accessible. Beyond that, my research drove the language I use throughout. "Catalog", for example, used to be "Index". or calling comments "annotations". It's funny, something about the subject matter being so stupid made me want to go really hard on taking the archive itself 100% seriously.
Cool project! I wanted to make something similar, but for archiving bathroom graffiti! Yours is a better implementation than I would've accomplished though, so I'm glad you did it!
There are like a half-dozen Android phones with LIDAR and most are from 2019-2021 when the AR craze was in full swing (Samsung S21, Pixel 6), while all the iPhone Pros since 12 have it.
It's so randomly weird that a bunch of these are in Utah and I have personally visited them, including one in my neighborhood last week! Some days the Internet is so....local.
Public bathrooms are such an interesting public services issue. In some places it’s totally normal to pay a small fee, and in return you (usually) get a clean space. In other places, the idea of paying to use the bathroom is considered an offense against the public.
Years ago when I was in New York often, I had the idea to make a paid bathroom app, with a bit of a luxury twist. You’d pay $30 or whatever a month to have access to 40+ well-designed bathrooms across the city. The idea was that we’d own and operate these, and they’d be extremely well-designed, have beautiful tile interiors, come with a variety of hygiene products, water bottles, and so on.
I still think it could work, but over time I began to dislike the idea, as it would have been yet another example of the public commons essentially being eroded and replaced with a privatized paid system. Not that NYC public bathrooms are even remotely nice to begin with… but I think a better solution would be less deliberately exclusionary. Then again, what could be more NYC than the idea of paying money to get better things?
I thought this sort of thing was what CEPTIA successfully campaigned against?
Also, what is the public commons that's being eroded in this scenario? Public toilets are few and far between but also kind of don't seem like a commons. I'd imagine a commons is something like a fishery or something. Pretty easy to control access to toilets. They have doors and as most European countries have proven, you can charge for the access to those doors.
As of about 15 years ago, Rudford's diner in San Diego (El Cajon Blvd) had pay toilets with the real authentic coin boxes on them. You didn't actually need to pay your own money; any waitress could provide you a coin when you asked. IIRC, they may have run on tokens only, so that it would be a closed ecosystem.
That may have been the only place I ever saw the real pay-toilet coin boxes. Anywhere else was simply gatekept by being a patron of the restaurant or store. Of course, in 1980s San Diego, there were zero public toilets of any kind, anywhere in town. All of the toilets were inside businesses, maintained by those businesses, and 100% closed to non-customers.
Yeah I’m sure there would be a regulation against it, and you’d need to brand them as rest centers or something.
And I think public access to toilets, at least in NYC, should probably be something more like the subway system than a service just for those that can pay a lot. Even then, the subway isn’t really a life need in the way a toilet is. (Yes I’m aware that it costs money to ride the subway, but it’s not very expensive.) I can imagine the service I described being branded by the press/public as bathrooms only for the rich.
As I said, norms around this aren’t the same around the world. It’s normal to pay for a toilet in Europe but many Americans have a negative reaction to the idea.
Just in case you're not familiar with it, the reason there's a regulation against it is that a group of kids with the belief you're espousing lobbied for that regulation. They formed the Committee to End Pay Toilets in America. I suspect if there is a norm against this here in the US it was created around the time of that law.
In 1974 (about) I was at a Greyhound terminal in NY City. The large, attended restroom was almost all pay stalls, except for one free stall, and I really did not want to use that one.
My friend, handling the waste of all the people that live in a city is one of the most basic examples of the public commons I can imagine lol. What are you talking about?? It is a bit fundamental to the concept of a city!
And by corollary, a town with no public bathrooms is ignoring realities, ie the needs and comfort of the public. It's a signal: the question in those places is, what else are they willfully ignoring, what other responsibilities are they dodging?
I wish this was a for-profit corporation, because for some odd reason I want a job of traveling across Canada, and documenting every public restroom that exists.
It'd almost be like an episode of the Littlest Hobo. Each week I'd roll into town, bent on performing my job and documenting restrooms.
But in the end I'd save some woman, or orphan, or somebody that's having a horrible problem in their lives, and then I'd roll on to the next town.
Except... in my series, I'd always get a piece of homemade pie as thanks, before I left.
Make it into a Youtube channel, create Patreon, fund the first few months yourself and you've created your own travel show :) Be the change you wanna see in the world, it's never too late!
I love this! Years ago I had an idea to catalogue "bathrooms around the world" which would include some very strange urinal positions. We need to expand to Europe and get Crown and Treaty imaged.
Wow! I have always wanted to archive the graffiti in pu pic toilets, but this 3D capture is a million times better!
Now I’m wishing more public spaces inside and out were archived forever like this - imagine we had this 1000/2000/3000 years ago and seeing how it was like back then!
High quality photo archive of public bathroom walls with curated text describing the grafitti like fine art would be something I could spend hours consuming.
My kid has a major fear of restrooms. I wonder if we can use this site as exposure therapy or if it will only be more fear inducing given how tiny and messy most of them are, plus the messiness of 3D capture artifacts.
I can't recall any time I have seen a public restroom with a knob to exit instead of a push or pull handle. Even office buildings don't have a knob on the door.
The closest I've ever seen is train and airplane bathrooms where the knob is required - but it is also close enough to the sink that you just use your towel and throw that.
There are knobs on the stalls, but you wash your hands after exiting the stalls so I don't think you are counting that.
It's actually everywhere. Europe is full of door knobs. We're trying to make sure that everyone touches as many surfaces as possible. Next step would be tongue operated doors and switches.
Gemini: You've spotted a real historical and geographical divide. Door knobs are predominantly an Anglo-American standard, while lever handles dominate continental Europe, Scandinavia, and much of the rest of the world.
Jag vill ha runda "Door Knobs" till mina innerdörrar! Finns det att hitta i Sverige och fungerar det till våra kantiga dörrpryttlar (ja, du vet de där som ser till att dörren hålles stängd. Vad sjutton heter det??)?
> Of the many victims of Bernard L. Madoff, the Ponzi scheme mastermind who died in prison April 14, was a visionary entrepreneur: George Costanza, whose app, iToilet, directed its user via global positioning technology to the nearest acceptable public toilet anywhere in the world. Or so runs the plot of the fictional “Seinfeld” reunion.
On the clean hand, are the trustworthy tools there for me to plunge out a big poop or wipe a bit of overspray ? I sometimes see a plunger, but don't ever bring rubber gloves and a roll of paper towel that would make me feel comfortable cleaning up a nasty toilet.
On the dirty hand, I used to see (evidence that) someone clog(ged) a one of the toilets in an office building that I shared with lawyers, once a month or so. I developed a head canon that this person acted out their dissatisfaction with the lawyer or counterparty on the rest of the building.
https://restroomarchive.com/r/2026-08-29-grand-army-plaza-au...
> has a countdown timer above warning visitors that the door will auto-open in x amount of time.
A toilet that has a door with a countdown seems like the most stress-inducing thing ever.
The bathroom also has braille text on the signs below the mirror.
I assume one would wash their hands after reading.
> A toilet that has a door with a countdown seems like the most stress-inducing thing ever.
It would be more stressful to the people who are standing there watching me finish my shit than it would be to me, I guarantee.
Shit or get off the pot.
It's quite common in Europe. Usually you get 15 minutes which seems fairly generous.
"Quite common"? I've spent more than 3 decades here, visited most of the countries on the western side, both north and south (although embarrassingly little eastern parts), and have not seen this once in my life. Thinking about it, I haven't seen this anywhere in the world.
You will usually see these in public places that have no other access controls - think in a park, rather than in a restaurant. It's for places that have a high risk of people sleeping in them.
Yeah, I do visit public bathrooms from time to time, especially in Spain, Germany, France, Denmark and Sweden, and never seen that once anywhere, although I've seen much worse things on single occasions than a timer for the door to open.
I've seen them in some of the shadier parks in the Netherlands, Italy and Austria. Yppenplatz, Vienna, has a particularly nasty (smelling) one which the countdown clock does very little to obviate.
A really nasty smell would get me out fast. Can't imagine any use for the timer, unless you're trying to estimate the remaining oxygen.
The timer is to let the junkie know how much privacy they have left before they can be discovered in the act of shooting up.
> people sleeping
Junkies' heroin-induced stupor.
The fact that you haven’t been in central or Eastern Europe might be the key.
I haven’t seen an actual countdown timer, but many of the public toilets in Poland have time limits that are displayed on a sign, and announced by the computer voice loudspeaker. Usually it’s 30 minutes though IIRC.
I'm not going to pile on since there is already a handful of comments stating the same, but I think we can all be guilty of "This thing exists/happens specifically where I and most people I interact with live, so it must be common (in [superset])". It's very good to be mindful of when making assumptions/imprinting generalizations.
I've been all over Europe and I have never seen this....
What, where? Never saw this.
I have seen a couple of them in Cologne.
... et voilà, we now know where the GP is from :)
"quite common in Europe" oh please. I live there, traveled quite a bit, and have never seen one or heard of one.
> https://restroomarchive.com/r/2026-08-31-tri-cities-airport-...
incredible work. I can only imagine what it was like standing here getting the images, the smell of the must wafting from the corners that haven't been cleaned in a decade, the microbial colonies thriving off pipe condensation above with entire universes of births and deaths and rebirths
1000/10, every bathroom is an entire story
you're getting me sentimental about the last time i scrubbed the tiles :(
Hey this is my project. Thanks for sharing
Wow this is amazing! I had a habit of visiting the nicest bathroom I can find (typically 5 star hotel lobbies) while traveling. I took some photos of a couple a long way back, but never even thought to use something like LIDAR. I was thinking of using them as a coffee table book with the title "The Best Places To Go".
So from a fellow public bathroom enthusiast, I wholeheartedly thank you for this project. I travel much less these days, but if I'm ever in a nice bathroom I'll see if I can get a scan to work and upload it!
Thank you for making it! This is an incredible project so I hope to see (and contribute!) more scans. Also just a really well-crafted website in general, functionally and aesthetically. You mentioned looking at "standard design conventions used for other web archives and for designing public signage for ADA compliant restrooms" in another comment — any interesting design decisions from that research?
Yeah! It lead me to design the UI to be very simple with a clear hierarchy, high contrast, and using a sans-serif font. Accessibility and legibility is key. I landed on using Arial as the font because it's arguably the most accessible. Beyond that, my research drove the language I use throughout. "Catalog", for example, used to be "Index". or calling comments "annotations". It's funny, something about the subject matter being so stupid made me want to go really hard on taking the archive itself 100% seriously.
It would be fun to have this connected to other world mapping projects such as Panoramax which is a federated alternative to Google Street View.
https://panoramax.fr/
Cool project! I wanted to make something similar, but for archiving bathroom graffiti! Yours is a better implementation than I would've accomplished though, so I'm glad you did it!
What was your original goal(s) for the effort?
I love this so much.
Does anyone have a recommendation for an open source photogrammetry application for Android?
There are like a half-dozen Android phones with LIDAR and most are from 2019-2021 when the AR craze was in full swing (Samsung S21, Pixel 6), while all the iPhone Pros since 12 have it.
Especially one that can produce rooms like this!
Kiri Engine with AI and Splats might be even better on this.
It's so randomly weird that a bunch of these are in Utah and I have personally visited them, including one in my neighborhood last week! Some days the Internet is so....local.
Me too. I felt like I know half these bathrooms.
Did you click on the map view to see the route he is driving?
[dead]
3d splatting takes on a different meaning in this context.
George Costanza would be proud
Public bathrooms are such an interesting public services issue. In some places it’s totally normal to pay a small fee, and in return you (usually) get a clean space. In other places, the idea of paying to use the bathroom is considered an offense against the public.
Years ago when I was in New York often, I had the idea to make a paid bathroom app, with a bit of a luxury twist. You’d pay $30 or whatever a month to have access to 40+ well-designed bathrooms across the city. The idea was that we’d own and operate these, and they’d be extremely well-designed, have beautiful tile interiors, come with a variety of hygiene products, water bottles, and so on.
I still think it could work, but over time I began to dislike the idea, as it would have been yet another example of the public commons essentially being eroded and replaced with a privatized paid system. Not that NYC public bathrooms are even remotely nice to begin with… but I think a better solution would be less deliberately exclusionary. Then again, what could be more NYC than the idea of paying money to get better things?
I thought this sort of thing was what CEPTIA successfully campaigned against?
Also, what is the public commons that's being eroded in this scenario? Public toilets are few and far between but also kind of don't seem like a commons. I'd imagine a commons is something like a fishery or something. Pretty easy to control access to toilets. They have doors and as most European countries have proven, you can charge for the access to those doors.
As of about 15 years ago, Rudford's diner in San Diego (El Cajon Blvd) had pay toilets with the real authentic coin boxes on them. You didn't actually need to pay your own money; any waitress could provide you a coin when you asked. IIRC, they may have run on tokens only, so that it would be a closed ecosystem.
That may have been the only place I ever saw the real pay-toilet coin boxes. Anywhere else was simply gatekept by being a patron of the restaurant or store. Of course, in 1980s San Diego, there were zero public toilets of any kind, anywhere in town. All of the toilets were inside businesses, maintained by those businesses, and 100% closed to non-customers.
Yeah I’m sure there would be a regulation against it, and you’d need to brand them as rest centers or something.
And I think public access to toilets, at least in NYC, should probably be something more like the subway system than a service just for those that can pay a lot. Even then, the subway isn’t really a life need in the way a toilet is. (Yes I’m aware that it costs money to ride the subway, but it’s not very expensive.) I can imagine the service I described being branded by the press/public as bathrooms only for the rich.
As I said, norms around this aren’t the same around the world. It’s normal to pay for a toilet in Europe but many Americans have a negative reaction to the idea.
Just in case you're not familiar with it, the reason there's a regulation against it is that a group of kids with the belief you're espousing lobbied for that regulation. They formed the Committee to End Pay Toilets in America. I suspect if there is a norm against this here in the US it was created around the time of that law.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_to_End_Pay_Toilets_i...
In 1974 (about) I was at a Greyhound terminal in NY City. The large, attended restroom was almost all pay stalls, except for one free stall, and I really did not want to use that one.
My friend, handling the waste of all the people that live in a city is one of the most basic examples of the public commons I can imagine lol. What are you talking about?? It is a bit fundamental to the concept of a city!
And by corollary, a town with no public bathrooms is ignoring realities, ie the needs and comfort of the public. It's a signal: the question in those places is, what else are they willfully ignoring, what other responsibilities are they dodging?
It’s more like addressing reality has no viable political solution.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49422800
There was a huge discussion here last week ICYMI
This is awesome. It reminds me a lot of the excellent work done by the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) [1].
One of my personal favorites is Pavement Paradise [2] documenting American parking spaces.
I'll also shamelessly plug some pictures of gas stations I took last summer :) [3].
[1] https://clui.org/photo-archive
[2] https://clui.org/projects/pavement-paradise
[3] https://henryrobbins.com/artwork/gas-stations/
You can see one of the authors here in the mirror :) - https://restroomarchive.com/r/2024-12-02-the-mart-collective
I wish this was a for-profit corporation, because for some odd reason I want a job of traveling across Canada, and documenting every public restroom that exists.
It'd almost be like an episode of the Littlest Hobo. Each week I'd roll into town, bent on performing my job and documenting restrooms.
But in the end I'd save some woman, or orphan, or somebody that's having a horrible problem in their lives, and then I'd roll on to the next town.
Except... in my series, I'd always get a piece of homemade pie as thanks, before I left.
Which sort of brings us full circle:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ayo9PoZgrMU
Make it into a Youtube channel, create Patreon, fund the first few months yourself and you've created your own travel show :) Be the change you wanna see in the world, it's never too late!
I love this! Years ago I had an idea to catalogue "bathrooms around the world" which would include some very strange urinal positions. We need to expand to Europe and get Crown and Treaty imaged.
Finally, something i can contribute to!
You can also click and drag to rotate the images, in some cases even a view from the floor up.
Wow! I have always wanted to archive the graffiti in pu pic toilets, but this 3D capture is a million times better!
Now I’m wishing more public spaces inside and out were archived forever like this - imagine we had this 1000/2000/3000 years ago and seeing how it was like back then!
High quality photo archive of public bathroom walls with curated text describing the grafitti like fine art would be something I could spend hours consuming.
My kid has a major fear of restrooms. I wonder if we can use this site as exposure therapy or if it will only be more fear inducing given how tiny and messy most of them are, plus the messiness of 3D capture artifacts.
That's a great idea. It would be nice to have an archive of restrooms in Korea too.
[dead]
I appreciate the Word 97 Brutalism Design of the website.
I did a lot of research on the standard design conventions used for other web archives and for designing public signage for ADA compliant restrooms!
Could generate some truly unique datasets. Anyone else immediately think of 'graffiti as a service' or toilet paper consumption stats?
Public bathroom sinks are always way too small. Google Maps should integrate with this service to incentivize larger sinks.
Incentives to not have said small sinks perfectly curved to splash straight into your pants would be appreciated too.
And the flush mechanism that also doesn't flush your legs.
More importantly: bowls that discourage Neptune's kiss.
Splashback on my ballsack from a public toilet has got to be my least favorite thing ever.
Only in America: Door knob so you cannot use your sleeve to exit sanitarily.
Also obligatory fluffy and sticky floor mat is missing.
I can't recall any time I have seen a public restroom with a knob to exit instead of a push or pull handle. Even office buildings don't have a knob on the door.
The closest I've ever seen is train and airplane bathrooms where the knob is required - but it is also close enough to the sink that you just use your towel and throw that.
There are knobs on the stalls, but you wash your hands after exiting the stalls so I don't think you are counting that.
* giggles in British.
"Only in America"
I feel like the US has been pretty good at installing foot-knobs (if you will) in new bathrooms. That seems to be the most hygienic strategy, no?
It's actually everywhere. Europe is full of door knobs. We're trying to make sure that everyone touches as many surfaces as possible. Next step would be tongue operated doors and switches.
Door knob seems to be british-american thing?
Gemini: You've spotted a real historical and geographical divide. Door knobs are predominantly an Anglo-American standard, while lever handles dominate continental Europe, Scandinavia, and much of the rest of the world.
Congrats. You've used artificial intelligence to guess wrongly about something you don't know about.
Situation Critical in Sweden:
Jag vill ha runda "Door Knobs" till mina innerdörrar! Finns det att hitta i Sverige och fungerar det till våra kantiga dörrpryttlar (ja, du vet de där som ser till att dörren hålles stängd. Vad sjutton heter det??)?
You take a paper towel / piece of toilet paper and you that to exit.
Why are the toilets (and other things) melted? Is this some artifact of the photography?
Love this, you need some more east coast johns outside of NYC though :(
> Of the many victims of Bernard L. Madoff, the Ponzi scheme mastermind who died in prison April 14, was a visionary entrepreneur: George Costanza, whose app, iToilet, directed its user via global positioning technology to the nearest acceptable public toilet anywhere in the world. Or so runs the plot of the fictional “Seinfeld” reunion.
https://forward.com/culture/467735/george-costanza-lost-it-a...
Shit like this makes me feel like I am back browsing Fark 25 years ago (pun intended :P)
- not a single bidet in sight, sigh
- would be nice if there was a flag hasBidet = true or false for each of them
This is very cool!
cool project and great work !
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this is why we cant have nice things
I'd probably reword that and ask: Why do people feel like trashing restrooms or not feel like they shouldn't clean up after themselves?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somebody_else%27s_problem
On the clean hand, are the trustworthy tools there for me to plunge out a big poop or wipe a bit of overspray ? I sometimes see a plunger, but don't ever bring rubber gloves and a roll of paper towel that would make me feel comfortable cleaning up a nasty toilet.
On the dirty hand, I used to see (evidence that) someone clog(ged) a one of the toilets in an office building that I shared with lawyers, once a month or so. I developed a head canon that this person acted out their dissatisfaction with the lawyer or counterparty on the rest of the building.
What are you talking about, this IS a nice thing!