Mayor Zohran Mamdani's new high-tech public restroom pilot costs $4 million for 17 automated units across New York City, and if you're not finished in 10 minutes, the door swings open anyway.
Mamdani held a news conference in Queens to unveil the program, which deploys modular restroom units built by a company called Throne Labs at high-traffic locations in all five boroughs. The units are free to use, ADA-accessible, and operate daily from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. Users get in by scanning a QR code, sending a text message, using the Throne app, or tapping a physical card distributed through unnamed community partners.
The catch is the clock. Once the door shuts, a countdown begins. Reminders hit at five minutes and again at eight. At ten minutes, flashing lights and an audio message, in English and Spanish, warn that time is up. Thirty seconds later, the door opens whether you're ready or not.
Throne Labs co-founder and COO Jessica Heinzelman laid it out plainly at the news conference, Fox News Digital reported:
"It says, 'The door, your time is up, the door is opening.' The door's opening. That extends for about 30 seconds. So, if you are still pants down, we're not going to open the door on you. But then the door does open."
Heinzelman told Fox News Digital that the 10-minute cap is standard for timed public restrooms and that the company validated it against real usage data. She said the vast majority of users across Throne Labs' markets leave within three and a half minutes. Company data shows 81 percent of users across its network finish within five minutes. At one downtown Los Angeles location, more than 95 percent finish within 10 minutes.
Mamdani framed the pilot as a workaround for a city that has spent itself into paralysis on basic infrastructure. New York has roughly one public toilet for every 8,500 residents, by his own count. The traditional approach, permanent, plumbed restrooms, has priced itself out of reach.
At the news conference, Mamdani put a number on it:
"Seventeen costs about what one public restroom has historically cost in New York City. 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 Throne Labs units sidestep the worst of that cost spiral. They are modular and do not require direct connections to water, sewer, or power systems, a detail the mayor highlighted, though the city has not publicly explained what alternative systems the units use. The one-year pilot will place units in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island. Only two were described as active on the streets at the time the program launched.
That a city of more than eight million people treats 17 portable bathrooms as a policy milestone says less about the technology than about decades of bureaucratic bloat that made a single permanent restroom a multi-million-dollar project. Mamdani is a mayor who has drawn repeated controversy since taking office, and even a straightforward quality-of-life initiative invites scrutiny over whether the execution matches the press conference.
New York is not the first city to try Throne Labs units. Long Beach, California, launched four of them in 2025 and later extended its partnership with the company. Each unit contains 21 sensors that monitor cleanliness, usage, and potential misuse while maintaining user privacy, according to the city's pilot announcement.
But Long Beach's own published community survey turned up at least one pointed objection to the time limit. One respondent wrote: "Please make it more than ten minutes. I was almost embarrassed in front of strangers still using the restroom."
Caltrain, the commuter rail system serving the San Francisco Bay Area, also runs a Throne Labs restroom pilot at stations in Redwood City, Sunnyvale, and Palo Alto. Its rider information page notes that "a visual and auditory warning will sound before the doors are opened", the same 10-minute framework.
Heinzelman defended the timer as a necessary trade-off. She told Fox News Digital that users are notified of the time limit before they enter and receive multiple audio and visual warnings throughout their visit.
"At the tail-end of the use there is 30 seconds of audio and visual queues to leave. This has proven successful in other cities, balancing human needs and mitigating loitering."
Mamdani, for his part, was blunter when asked about the restriction. "This is not a place to scroll on your phone," he said. "I know that many people do that. This isn't one of them."
Dave Aronberg, a former state attorney in Palm Beach County, Florida, offered a measured endorsement. He acknowledged the problem is real and visible to anyone who has walked New York's streets.
"Anyone who's walked the streets of New York knows the lack of basic public facilities is a real quality-of-life problem. 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."
Aronberg then added a line that landed harder than any restroom statistic. He told Fox News Digital he'd "much rather see the mayor doing the gritty, unglamorous work of solving an actual New York City problem than spending his time grandstanding about Middle East policy." It was a pointed reference to a mayor whose tenure has been defined less by infrastructure than by confrontations with 9/11 families and ideological side battles that have little to do with trash pickup, subway safety, or public restrooms.
Fox News Digital reached out to Mamdani for comment on the program and did not immediately receive a response.
For all the detail about sensors and timers, the announcement left basic operational questions unanswered. The city did not specify what infrastructure the modular units rely on if they bypass water, sewer, and power connections. It did not name the community partners distributing tap cards. It did not say how many of the 17 units were actually installed and functional beyond the two described as active. And it did not explain what happens if someone remains inside after the door opens, whether staff respond, whether the unit locks out, or whether the next user simply walks up to whatever they find.
Mamdani described the 17 units as a first step toward a larger network, but the full scope of that expansion remains undefined. The pilot runs for one year. Whether it survives contact with New York City's streets, and New York City's politics, is another matter. This is a mayor who has faced accusations of fueling antisemitism and whose administration was caught coordinating talking points through a secret influencer network. Trust in City Hall is not a given.
A city that can't build a single public bathroom without spending millions probably shouldn't be lecturing residents about how long they're allowed to sit in one.