On Monday, a JSTOR Daily essay asking where all of America’s public bathrooms went hit the front page of Hacker News, drawing 270 upvotes and 590 comments before the day was out. The thread is a familiar ritual: urbanists lamenting the decline of public goods, libertarians blaming government incompetence, and a rotating cast of commenters pointing out that Tokyo has clean public toilets on every corner while San Francisco has none.

All of them are arguing about the wrong question. The bathrooms didn’t disappear through neglect, austerity, or bureaucratic failure. They disappeared through a successful activist campaign.

The Victory That Flushed the Toilets

In 1970, a group called the Committee to End Pay Toilets in America — CEPTIA, an acronym its founders surely regretted — began agitating against the coin-operated toilets then common in American cities. The argument was straightforward: charging a dime to use a toilet was an indignity, a tax on a biological necessity, and a burden that fell hardest on women, who needed facilities more often and faced longer lines.

The campaign worked. City after city banned pay toilets. By August 15, 1976, CEPTIA had achieved its goal so completely that it disbanded, declaring victory. The pay toilet was dead in America.

What CEPTIA did not anticipate — and what the JSTOR essay and the HN thread both glide past — is that the pay toilet was not just an indignity. It was a funding mechanism. The dimes in the slot paid for cleaning, maintenance, and the construction of new facilities. When the dimes disappeared, so did the economic case for building public bathrooms at all.

The result was not a flourishing of free public toilets. It was fewer public toilets of any kind. America didn’t get free bathrooms. It got no bathrooms.

The Quiet Reversal

Which brings us to Los Angeles, where the city has spent millions on public bathrooms that are now mostly closed, and where the Metropolitan Transportation Authority is rolling out a fleet of “smart” standalone bathroom trailers built by a company called Thrones. The goal is 64 units by 2028, timed for the Summer Olympics.

Read the press materials and you’ll hear about sensors that monitor cleanliness, app-based access, and real-time occupancy data. What you won’t hear is the word “pay.” But the Thrones model is, in every meaningful sense, a pay toilet with a software layer. The tech isn’t there to make bathrooms free; it’s there to make them monetizable — through advertising, sponsorship, or user fees dressed up as “premium access.”

New York is running the same play in slow motion. The City Council voted in April 2025 to establish a citywide strategy for public bathrooms with a goal of 2,100 by 2035. That’s a decade-long timeline for a basic sanitation need. Meanwhile, as of March, 50 park bathrooms sat closed for repairs while a council member pitched new construction. The math doesn’t work because the funding model was deliberately destroyed fifty years ago, and no one has been willing to say so.

A parks department supervisor from a Bay Area suburb, standing in a hotel bar during a regional facilities conference, put it plainly: “We don’t have a bathroom problem. We have a revenue problem. And nobody wants to say the word ‘revenue’ out loud.”

The Lesson Nobody Wants to Learn

The CEPTIA story is a case study in a specific kind of policy failure: banning a mechanism without replacing it. The activists were right that charging a dime to pee is an indignity. They were wrong to assume that removing the charge would produce free bathrooms. It produced nothing.

The current fix — smart toilets, app-based access, Olympic-timed rollouts — is an attempt to rebuild the funding mechanism without admitting that’s what’s happening. The tech veneer exists to make the reversal palatable to people who would never vote to bring back the pay toilet but will happily approve a “smart sanitation pilot.”

The HN thread will move on. The JSTOR essay will be forgotten by next week. But the underlying problem will persist, because the people who care most about public bathrooms are still arguing about whether government or the market should provide them, when the actual history shows something more uncomfortable: the market was providing them, a well-intentioned movement destroyed the market, and now the market is being quietly rebuilt under a different name.

If you want to know where the public bathrooms went, don’t ask the urbanists or the libertarians. Ask the people who won in 1976. They’re still celebrating.

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