Show HN: PeeYork, Bathroom finder app for NY

This is my go-to app to find bathrooms: https://www.starbucks.com/store-locator

This is a top-notch comment.

My local one doesn't allow customers in the bathroom unless they buy something. Are there ones that don't?

How recently did you check? There was a debacle in the past year or two and I think the policy changed.

At a corporate level there was an open bathroom policy instituted a few years back [0]. I’m not aware of that changing but I’m also not surprised that a local outlet might not comply with that policy.

0: https://people.com/food/starbucks-bathroom-policy-change-arr...

TIL they changed this policy.

Used to be the bathroom had a PIN lock, and the PIN was printed on your receipt. (I assumed it rotated regularly)

I’ve only seen this in areas with a bit of a homeless issue. Even then just ask the barista for the code.

You can always say you’re waiting for a phone order. But I can’t say I’ve ever been asked.

I went to a bar to use the bathroom and ordered an orange juice. The orange juice made me want to pee again in the NY train and had a nightmare on the way home. You can guess what happened lol

My go to in Manhattan is just to walk into the nearest big hotel like you’re a guest and find the restroom off the lobby.

That also works well in San Francisco.

Really? Should I call it as Pee Francisco?

Nice restaurants were also a good place to go because they had good customer service habits. Any bar or places that serves alcohol has to have a bathroom.

In NYC iirc, 20 seats or more and built before 1970 or so also required it. I looked this up once after getting sick of being told there was no bathroom at places that seemed likely to be lying.

I tried to sneak in a restaurant to use the bathroom but couldn’t. I used a bathroom in a bar once.

Your mistake was acting sneaky.

Also some restaurants say “customers only”.

As a tourist, I didn’t know this. Will try this next time. I was wondering if I should pay tips or not in that case.

Unless there’s a bathroom attendant you’re just ignored. Tips wouldn’t be necessary.

This works in pretty much any American city.

If anything, you have to be careful with this in New York specifically, because some of the little boutique hotels have tiny lobbies that don't have a bathroom. Make sure to go for a big brand-name hotel.

The outer boroughs are trickier, but I've found that McDonald's and KFC generally have open bathrooms. And gas stations with attached convenience stores, which do exist in Queens.

Most Starbucks around here closed their bathrooms for the pandemic.

Yes they did. Even Macdonald also closed them. I was asked to pee around the counter by a staff at a street shop.

Some Starbucks does not have a bathroom especially in NY. Also we don’t want to drink when we want to pee.

Neat. I've been holding onto a domain thronehunter.com, for 10 years now, after a stint at a startup in a downtown metro, where the office was a very small "loft" with 10+ people squeezed in.

Myself and a few others fairly quickly had an aversion to using the lone bathroom in the loft for respectful reasons and instead began seeking out bathrooms at nearby hotels and elsewhere. We would often joke "hey I'm going to run to the Hilton, I'll be right back" or "has anyone checked if the Mariott is open?".

I bought the domain thinking it'd be fun to build a bathroom finder/rating app but never got around to it!

It’s better to collaborate with hotels to scale this idea. I want to do Airbnb for bathroom to be honest.

haha, it's not a bad idea, although not sure how to monetize it? lmk if you want to brainstorm and/or use thronehunter.com

I had this same exact idea years ago when I worked in NYC.

Except the name was "New York Shitty"

I think I wanted to make it primarily for the name.

Back in 2008 there were MizPee and Diaroogle which did the same.

https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/diaroogle-he...

The issue still remains for 13 years lol

Same, but “Poober”.

This must be a nerd Manhattanite rite of passage, perhaps because the bathroom situation sucks there.

My personal NYC bathroom database name idea was "WikiPeedia" or just "the 'Peedia"

I was going to say "NYPee" was a missed opportunity for this name.

My go to map of bathrooms in NYC is this Google Map I found on Reddit a few months back:

https://goo.gl/maps/oiKqZ5PTEQ3RAWeJA

Wow this is cool. Also it’s fun to take bathroom pictures lol

I like the name haha. My best bathroom place is Domino Park cuz they have okay bathroom, wifi and good view!!

There might be a competitor called “PooYork”.

This seems very useful but shouldn't it be called "N Y Pee"?

Surely you mean Manshattan?

The big Crapple

PooYork

I like PeeYork. The sound is cool.

It’s not too often this comes up ... but here is an iOS app for finding drinking water fountains and public restrooms using Overpass’s OSM API.

https://github.com/hashFactory/ImThirsty

Or alternatively, one can also use https://mapcomplete.osm.be/drinking_water and https://mapcomplete.osm.be/toilets to find and easily update them in OpenStreetMap

Ah I've wanted something like this for ages. Do you know of anything similar for Android?

https://findtap.com/

The app is a available for android too.

Wow. Uber for bathroom sounds good too. I could find water refill easier in NY tho.

There's an underserved market in SF, too. I'd pay cash money for a regularly updated restroom finder.

Best of luck!

EDIT: どうもありがとう!

Just saw the Hirigana on the landing page. My Japanese partner and I have been lamenting the failure of public restroom availability compared to JP.

Heck, even compared to the US 2 decades ago when gas stations allowed public access to their restrooms.

Yeah, well, people squandered it and abused the old system. There are still strong social norms in places like Japan. People in SF are fine with dropping needles in the streets.

I live in Tokyo and previously lived in New York. I was back visiting last week and found it even harder to find bathrooms now that many tourist centric places closed. I ended up buying a lot of hot tea at various starbucks locations throughout the day just for the bathrooms.

頑張って OPさん. Your contact button doesn’t work, by the way.

Thanks. I visited NY in May and faced the issue. The purchased drink made me want to pee again too. The contact page works by a phone. I can change it to my LinkedIn too haha. I’ll use the app when I visit NY again. You can add your favorite bathroom place on the app too.

This idea came up from a Japanese guy(me)who are used to the public bathroom environment in Japan. I was surprised that there was no bathroom in the train station in NY.

When I was van dwelling around the US I was blown away at how inviting NYC was for van living. I was expecting it to be the hardest place in the US due to density, but it was one of the easiest.

First spot I checked was a dead end street next to a warehouse in Williamsburg. Backing onto the Hudson. Beautiful Manhattan views. A park on one side, and another a block down with a bathroom. And immediately fell into a community of about 10 others do the same thing.

Amazing.

This is the kind of app that serves well for van living, tho I rarely couldn’t find something.

I want to make an app for van life in the future.

This was the most useful app I found: https://apps.apple.com/au/app/ioverlander/id894352689

- offline first (tho the background map didn’t work, but the items on the map were there which was more critical) - wiki style info, so it was usually accurate

Built off OSM maps, and I think data entered into it was fed back to OSM. Tho that portion was vague.

Let me know if you make something.

Didn't George Costanza make millions with this app idea, only to lose it to Madoff?

Also, NY bathroom pro-tip: look for the local police precinct. They will always have public bathrooms, they exist all over NY, even in the more residential areas with no shops, and the type of people who go and destroy public bathrooms or shoot up drugs in them for hours usually aren't going to voluntarily walk into a police station.

That’s an excellent idea!

That's right, and not only in New York or in the USA, you'd be able to find public bathrooms in many police stations across the globe.

I was gonna say, call the app “Costanza”.

Wealthy industrialist H.E. Pennypacker would have loved such an application.

The itoilet

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Pci_7o6cCbM

7 years ago we had Airpnp... same as Airbnb, just for toilets.

https://thenextweb.com/news/airpnp-its-like-airbnb-but-for-t...

This is so funny. I had the same idea. I hope this scales in the end.

I can’t remember where I found it, but there’s an ad-supported iOS app called Flush that does this: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/flush-toilet-finder-map/id9552...

Interesting. I mean I have been using Where is Public Toilet app for years. That app is crowd sourced, so you can suggest bathroom location. Not sure how this app is different.

You can enjoy adding bathroom locations and review it. Actually I wanted to make it to Airbnb for bathroom by partnering with many merchants.

But seriously, this is an underrated problem. As a runner and someone who drinks a lot of water I wish there were more public restrooms. Even johns are ok

I saw many bathrooms along the Hudson River where runners can see New Jersey side. I saw a homeless in the bathroom too haha.

There’s a great similar app called runPee geared more towards movie goers and what happens during the film while you step out.

Neat concept.

As a foodie, one of the most frustrating things is answering nature's unexpected calls, this App is a foodie's 911. My to-go app is https://goweewee.com or just type 'wc' on Google Map

This app sounds cool too. I like taking bathroom pictures lol

I understand, my favorite place for selfies, ha.

I almost thought I read YC 21 PeeYork.

I wish I could get in lol

You need an app to find an alley?

Actually an alley is a spot to pee in NY lol

The HN crowd loves to promote urbanization, density, blah blah blah. The fact that such an app exists at all is de facto proof of a failed city. Just a comic level of dysfunction. "NYC, we're so progressive we can't even address the basic requirements to support human life"

I don't think "the HN crowd" has anything close to such a consensus. But I do think you could find broad agreement that cities should have more sanitary facilities in general.

Yeah. I always make sure to hit a restroom before driving through a city. Few things suck as much as feeling the call of nature while you're stuck on surface streets in the middle of a big city. Where are you going to be able to temporarily park your car and where is the restroom.

In the less dense zones, it's just stop at the next gas station/mcdonalds/starbucks/whatever. Less dense than that, just run into the woods...

I learned to pee before going out in NY. This is a mandatory action. Also decided to not hold until the last minute.

In my experience suburbs and rural areas are even worse for public bathroom access (and even delivery of most other public goods except education). Are there US suburbs with plentiful public bathrooms?

What's a suburb? Depending on the level of density and sentiment about public parks (poor people's lawns v. a public good), some relatively low density places are better about public bathrooms. Boise is something like 5K people per sq. mile downtown, but there's public bathrooms at regular intervals on the Greenbelt in places at lower 3K densities.

As homelessness has gotten worse though, there's been noticeable encampments/vehicle caravans building up at these bathrooms.

NYC has plenty of reasonably well maintained public restrooms, they can just be hard to find if you don't know where they are.

True. Especially it’s hard to find at night time as they close around 8 or 10pm. Where should drunk people pee at night time?

Part of the problem in NYC is any time you offer any kind of community utility/service it invariably gets taken over by the homeless population. Benches become beds, libraries become bedrooms, cell phone charging stations become encampments.

Yeah, it's an unfortunate, "This is why we can't have nice things," situation. I would really love the idea of having public restrooms both for convenience for anyone who is out and about, and to allow homeless people to have some amount of dignity about being able to relieve themselves.

But you're right, it invariably gets taken over and becomes disgusting. And all the solutions I can think of are quite dystopian, like having a video camera that watches you in the bathroom so it can detect any kind of foul play.

Almost sounds like the bigger and more complex issue is homelessness rather than people with homes not being able to find a convenient bathroom.

True. I was surprised by the number of homeless people in NY. Especially in the train.

I would pay 5-10$ to use a bathroom when emergency.

The fact that the HN crowd has to politicize a pretty carefree and lighthearted human interest story is amazing too.

I agree. I was frustrated about bathroom and internet connection between train stations. In Tokyo we can use internet in the subway. NY cannot.