Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine is pushing to make public bathrooms throughout the subway system easier to find.
In a letter to New York City Transit President Richard Davey on Tuesday, Levine made a series of recommendations — including simply erecting more signs to direct riders to available porcelain thrones. The letter comes after the MTA reopened bathrooms that were previously closed during the pandemic at nine subway stations last year.
The agency said it has since opened 121 bathrooms at 63 stations out of more than 100 citywide. But the restrooms have remained difficult to find and lack signs showing customers where they are, the borough president argued. Levine said he wants the transit agency to change that.
“Even knowing that they’re in a given station might not be enough because these stations are sometimes very large and they’re labyrinths, and the bathrooms tend to be in those kinds of stations,” Levine told Gothamist on Tuesday. “If you didn’t walk by them, you probably wouldn’t know they exist.”
A spokesperson for the MTA said the agency was reviewing the letter.
In addition to signage on subway platforms and station entrances, Levine suggested that the MTA show which stations have bathroom display screens in the newest trains, and add automated announcements when a train arrives in a station with a bathroom. These measures already exist for station accessibility and public safety features.
Levine also proposed that the MTA create a digital subway station bathroom map and add bathrooms to the station attributes in the new MTA map the same way ADA-accessible stations are currently shown.
Lastly, Levine asked that the bathrooms, which are currently open from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. daily with a one-hour break at noon, stay open longer. He urged the MTA to extend those hours wherever feasible, “so that the hundreds of thousands of subway riders who are taking the train earlier in the morning or later in the evening are not struggling to find a place to go when they need a bathroom.”
“I think the public might be pleasantly surprised at how well-maintained they are. They all got some renovation work done before they reopened, so they’re in better shape than people might remember, and they’re a great resource,” Levine said. “Now we just need the public to know about them.”
This story has been updated with a response from the MTA.