How the map works
Restrooms come from public open data (for New York City, the NYC Open Data “Public Restrooms” list) and from OpenStreetMap. Visitors fill in what those sources miss.
Anyone can rate a restroom from 1 to 5 stars and tag what they found, such as clean or out of supplies. Each browser gets one rating per restroom; rating again replaces your earlier one. Averages are pulled toward the middle until a restroom has several ratings, so one vote cannot top the list.
New restrooms and corrections are held for a moderator before they appear on the map. Free-text notes are never shown publicly.
If a restroom is gone, closed, or not really open to the public, use “Report a problem.” When several different visitors report the same restroom, it shows a warning and goes to the top of the moderator queue. Only a moderator removes a restroom.
To prevent spam, every change passes a quick human check, and the site keeps a salted hash of your IP address rather than the address itself.