The state of the world'sBathrooms
Every public bathroom mapped within five kilometres of the centre of the world's major cities. Where they are, who can use them, and what they cost.
Density
Public bathrooms per square kilometre in the city centre. This is the number that decides whether you find one when you need one.
Who can actually use them
Share of mapped bathrooms tagged as wheelchair accessible. A low number here means the count above is not the real count for a lot of people.
What they cost
Share that charge money, among bathrooms where cost is recorded. Free is not the default everywhere.
Open at three in the morning
Share tagged as open twenty four hours. The rest close, and closing time is when this becomes a problem.
Live usage
Every time someone asks the shortcut for a bathroom, we record the hour, a rough area, and whether we found anything. No exact locations, no accounts, nothing that identifies anyone.
Method
City figures come from OpenStreetMap, counted inside a five kilometre radius of each city centre, an area of about 78 square kilometres. A bathroom only appears here if someone mapped it, so these numbers measure mapped bathrooms rather than every bathroom that exists. Cities with active mapping communities will look better than cities without one, and that gap is itself worth knowing about. Accessibility, cost and opening hours are counted from tags, and untagged entries are excluded from those percentages rather than assumed. What counts as a public bathroom also varies: some cities are dominated by street level public toilets, others by shared or community sanitation facilities mapped by local projects, and OpenStreetMap records both under the same tag. Nairobi's high count is the clearest example, so read the density chart as bathrooms someone mapped and made public, not as identical facilities across cities.
