City Council Bill Aims to Build Facilities Before Tournament; Engineers Estimate This Requires Moving Faster Than Any Prior NYC Construction Project
MIDTOWN MANHATTAN, N.Y. – New York City confirmed this week what its residents have known for decades and its tourists discover within approximately 45 minutes of arrival: the most visited city in the United States has fewer public restrooms per capita than almost any comparable major city in the developed world, a fact that has been documented in multiple policy reports, complained about in approximately 11 billion Yelp reviews, and managed by a collective municipal strategy of directing everyone to the nearest Starbucks and hoping for the best. The urgency of addressing this situation has been amplified by the impending arrival of the 2026 FIFA World Cup, which will bring an estimated 1.5 million visitors to the region for matches at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey and fan events across the five boroughs.
The City Council bill to expand public toilet access, which has been in various stages of advocacy and legislation for several years, has gained new momentum from the World Cup’s proximity, which is the kind of external deadline that New York City institutional decision-making frequently requires before producing action that advocates have been requesting since before the deadline became visible on the calendar. The bill proposes a combination of new standalone facilities, expanded access to existing public buildings, and partnerships with private businesses that would receive compensation for providing accessible restroom access to non-patrons, which is a polite way of ending the coded Starbucks purchase requirement without admitting that the policy was always about the purchase requirement.
The Scale of the Deficit
New York City currently has approximately 1,100 public restrooms across all five boroughs, a number that includes facilities in parks, libraries, transit stations, and public buildings. This works out to roughly one facility per 7,600 residents, before the addition of 1.5 million World Cup visitors, 60 million annual tourists in non-World Cup years, and the 700,000 daily office workers who have discovered through the return-to-office mandate that the building bathroom situation in midtown Manhattan does not scale to current occupancy levels. The city’s parks department maintains the largest share of public restrooms and has chronically underinvested in their maintenance, a fact documented by users who have visited them and who would prefer not to describe the experience in detail but whose Yelp reviews suggest it was not adequate.
Paris, which hosted the 2024 Summer Olympics and spent several years preparing its public infrastructure for mass visitor volumes, deployed approximately 3,000 temporary and permanent toilet facilities around competition zones and fan areas – a ratio that New York would need to significantly expand its permanent stock to approach even temporarily. London, which hosted the 2012 Olympics, had a similar mobilization. New York’s current proposal involves a smaller number of new permanent facilities and a larger reliance on the private-public partnership model, which works well in cities where private businesses have been adequately incentivized and works less well when the incentive is ‘you will be mentioned in a press release’ and the cost is ‘you must maintain a public toilet in midtown Manhattan at your own expense.’
The Uber Women Drivers Subplot
In a development tangentially related to the visitor experience theme, Uber announced this week that New York City women can now request female drivers through a new feature in the app, responding to safety concerns that female riders and drivers have raised through multiple advocacy channels over several years. The feature, which requires a female driver and a female rider to mutually opt into the matching preference, has been welcomed by women’s safety advocates and noted with interest by the substantial number of female riders who have been requesting such an option since approximately the moment the ride-sharing app launched in New York. Gothamist reported that implementation is being monitored by the city’s Taxi and Limousine Commission, which oversees ride-sharing operations in the five boroughs and which has expressed support for the feature while noting that implementation details are still being worked through the regulatory framework.
The connection between the women’s driver feature and the public bathroom bill is not immediately obvious, but both reflect the same underlying theme: that New York City’s public infrastructure and service ecosystem has historically been designed around assumptions about who uses it and how, and that updating those assumptions to reflect the actual diversity of the city’s population requires policy action that advocates have been requesting for longer than the city has been responding. The City notes that Mayor Mamdani’s administration has signaled interest in both issues and that actual action on the bathroom front, specifically, will be measured by the number of operational facilities available by the time the World Cup begins, which is a straightforward and empirically verifiable test that the city has approximately three months to pass.
What Visitors Can Expect
World Cup visitors arriving in New York will find one of the world’s great cities at what its current administration describes as a moment of progressive urban renewal and what its permanent residents describe as ‘complicated.’ The subway is being improved, the congestion pricing is working, the housing shortage is being addressed through zoning reform, and the public toilet situation is being vigorously discussed. The fan experience in Manhattan will be extraordinary by any reasonable measure, the city’s restaurants and cultural institutions are unparalleled, and the energy of a World Cup summer in New York will be unlike anything in recent memory. The bathroom situation will be handled. It may involve some creative solutions and some longer queues than ideal. But New York has hosted every kind of global event at every stage of its infrastructure’s development, and it has consistently managed to be remarkable in spite of what it has not finished yet. The World Cup will be no different. Bring comfortable shoes and a backup plan for the bathroom.
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