Updates on Swiss public toilets

Since I emailed Swiss city governments about their public toilet provision in August, I've had phone and email replies from most of them, so here's an update on what they told me. I'll be adding this to the main post about Swiss public toilets, too.

Geneva

The very nice lady in charge of Geneva's public toilets informed me of something I hadn't noticed: that if you click on the icons on their map, you can see a photo and more information about each toilet. I went through all of them and made a list of the ones that were gender-neutral:

• Avenue du Mail
• Chemin de l'Impératrice
• Jardin Anglais - Monument National
• Longemalle
• Parc BERTRAND
• Parc de Bourgogne
• Parc des Acacias
• Parc GOURGAS
• Promenade des Bastions - Saint-Léger
• Quai Gustave-ADOR - Police du Lac
• Sentier du Promeneur Solitaire

Unfortunately, all the information on Geneva's city website is under copyright, so I can't simply post all the details of these toilets here. The next step is to write back and ask whether they've considered opening up their toilet data.

Basel

Basel do have information on which public toilets are gender-neutral, but not in a form that they could send out to me. Their map does at least show the locations of wheelchair-accessible public toilets, which are generally gender-neutral. The man who phoned me up suggested I visit each toilet and check, which would be hard, with over 80 of them!

Lausanne

The people in Lausanne (map) kindly sent me a list of all their public toilets, of which the following are gender-neutral.

• Sous le pont Bessières, Rue St.-Martin, Lausanne 1005
• Rue de la Borde 12, Lausanne 1018 (also wheelchair-accessible)
• Place de l'Europe, Lausanne 1003
• Parc Mon-Repos 3, Lausanne 1005 (also wheelchair-accessible and with a changing table)
• Place de la Navigation, Lausanne 1006 (also with a changing table)
• Port de Vidy, Allée du Bornan, Lausanne 1007
• Saint-Etienne Place de la Cathédrale N° 4, Lausanne 1005

Bern

In Bern (map) there are 20 public WC facilities, 8 urinals, two staffed facilities (at Metro Parking and Parking Casino) and 6 playground WCs, which are shut in winter. Most (but not all) of the WC facilities are gender-neutral and have a wheelchair-accessible toilet. In the playground toilets and the staffed facilities, there are changing tables.

Lucerne

The Lucerne public-toilet masterplan is still being worked on, and the situation there is quite variable. Older toilet facilities are still gender-segregated, and will remain that way, but where newer ones are built, they are generally unisex. Not all facilities have a wheelchair-accessible toilet, but this is improving and all the facilities scheduled to be built will have one. The public toilets in Lucerne do not have changing tables.

Winterthur

Good news! All the public toilets in Winterthur (map) are gender neutral, with the exceptions of those at Härti Endstation (Wülflingen) and Wallrüti (Oberwinterthur).

St. Gallen

In general, public toilets in St. Gallen (map) are unisex facilities with a wheelchair-accessible toilet, which normally requires a Eurokey to open. There are still a few older, gender-segregated toilets in operation, though. None of the public toilets have changing tables, due to a lack of room in the cabins.

Lugano

Some public toilets in Lugano are unisex and some are gender-segregated, but I've not been told which are which. There is no city map for toilets in Lugano, but they are shown on the WC-Guide and the Pro Infirmis website.

Thun

The official flyer for public toilets in Thun is up-to-date. Toilets #2 and #12 are unisex, at the following locations:

• Jäger-Stübli, Militärstrasse 9
• Dampfschiff, Hofstettenstrasse 20 (also wheelchair-accessible)

Köniz

The community of Köniz maintains only two public toilets, one at Oberwangen railway station and one at Neuhausplatz in Könizs. Both are gender-segregated and wheelchair-accessible.

Chur

Public toilets in Chur (map) are all gender-segregated, except for the fully-automated 'Swisstoilet' on Austrasse. There are six wheelchair-accessible public WCs in Chur, but I've not been told which ones. None of the public toilets in Chur have changing tables.

Neuchâtel

The people at Neuchâtel have sent me a detailed list of all their public toilets -- unfortunately, it's in French and a little too detailed for me to quickly make sense of! I will post this information as soon as I can.

Uster

In Uster, as in other cities on this list, they're moving away from gender-segregated toilets and towards unisex facilities. I haven't been told the locations of any of them, though. Their new toilets generally have changing tables built in, unless there's a risk of vandalism.

Sion

I got a very concise response to my email to the Sion city council. There is no list or map of their public toilets; the toilets are all gender-segregated; they are accessible for wheelchair users; and they do not have changing tables.

August updates

I had some time to work on the project this weekend, and here's what I got done:

• The @CrowdPee bot is up and running again, after a bit of downtime.
• It's also going to be easier to update the CrowdPee database from now on. (The open data it's based on is released once a year.) Go to the questionnaire website to tell us about Zürich toilets or get the results!
• Finally, the page on public toilets for the 20 biggest cities in Switzerland is now up-to-date. Zürich is still the only city for which I know that the public toilets are gender-neutral, and Biel no longer has public toilets at all, but I've emailed all the other city councils to request this information. I hope they get back to me quickly!

Gender-neutral public toilets in Berlin (again)

I'm in Berlin for Open Knowledge Festival, and keeping an eye out for gender-neutral toilets as I go. So far I haven't found any in restaurants, clubs, bars etc. (not that I'm really here for clubbing!) and REFUGE Restrooms only have three entries for the city. If you know where the gender-neutral toilets are here, please let me know or add them directly to the REFUGE Restrooms directory!

I am impressed with the Berlin public toilets, though. Here are some pictures I took of a City Toilette: it's wheelchair accessible, non-gendered, and has instructions for use in four languages. Note that unless you have a EuroKey, it costs 50 cents to use the toilet.

I also discovered that in the Kino in der Kulturbrauerei, the women's toilets have a urinal:

This is something I haven't seen before, and I'd welcome opinions on whether this is useful or not!

None of the toilets at the venue are gender-neutral, but OKFest put a sign up to convert one, and also marked it on the map. They responded quickly when I told them I couldn't find it!

.@RachelKnowler The sign on the door called down! Thanks for telling us, we'll put it up again now! #genderneutral #OKFest14
— OKFestival (@OKFestival) July 17, 2014

Woo, gender-neutral restrooms! I like this design for the label, too. :) #okest14 pic.twitter.com/GK5kY8TfEJ

— Rae Knowler (@RachelKnowler) July 17, 2014

Unisex toilets in Berlin!

Good news from Berlin: the borough of Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg decided to bring unisex toilets to all its public buildings a year ago, and now the borough of Mitte might follow suit.

The Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg measure was proposed by the Pirate Party and supported by the Left, Social Democrat and Green parties on the borough council. (The Christian Democrats were against it.) The Pirates have now also asked the borough council in Mitte to find out which public buildings there are suitable for unisex toilets. They want to keep the men's and women's options, but add a third room as an extra choice, with the aim of making life easier for trans* and intersex people. Public finances in Berlin are tight, but the Pirates point out that changing signs on toilet doors would be practically cost-neutral.

Many public buildings there don't yet have wheelchair-accessible toilets. The Pirate Party representative Lena Rohrbach acknowledged that this was also very important, and emphasised that the groups should not be played off against one another. I heartily agree.

Sources:

• 'Eine für alle', Berliner Zeitung (German | Google Translate)
• 'Mittes Piraten fordern Unisex-Toiletten in öffentlichen Gebäuden', Berliner Woche (German | Google Translate)
• 'Bezirksamt prüft Unisex-Klos in öffentlichen Gebäuden', Berliner Woche (German | Google Translate)

Tweaks to CrowdPee: a better tweet and nicer results

I've just made a couple of tweaks to CrowdPee:

• The tweet sent to request information from Twitter users has changed. It now says: Hi! Could you answer three quick questions about the toilets at (location)? (url) Thanks! Hopefully this will be less confusing.
• Results are now available to download in CSV and JSON format, as well as a slightly prettier HTML table.

Updates on CrowdPee

As I mentioned in the previous post, the Zürich Open Data Hacknights were a good opportunity to get started on gathering data on the available toilets in Zürich. Together, David Stark and I built a website that hosts a questionnaire for each of our locations, and a Twitter bot to ask people to fill it out.

NearbySources, the website we made, is a system for crowdsourcing information about places from people who are there. Get in touch if you're interested in using it for a project of your own.

We presented our progress so far at the final Hacknight, using the slides below. Amazingly, when the projects were voted for at the end of the night, we came in second place! It felt great to see that so many people were interested in getting this useful information out there.

CrowdPee from Zarkonnen

From conversations at the event and later, we've come up with the following to-do items:

• Make nearbysources.com questionnaire searchable to add data - done!
• Add a 'more info' text to the questionnaire, and link to it from the location-questionnaire pages - done!
• Enable tweeting at the bot to receive a questionnaire
• Improve the results display and export function
• Include the coordinates of each location in the results

@CrowdPee has seen several retweets and favourites on Twitter (and, most importantly, some data on toilets!). Unfortunately, it's also been suspended once on suspicion of spamming. This can happen to even helpful bots, as this article on the @FeelBetterBot shows. (Thanks to Suzy Hamilton for that link.)

Here are the changes we've made, which will hopefully make the bot more helpful for everyone:

• When it detects a geotagged tweet from within 10km of a location of interest, it will ask to follow the user who posted it. They are near enough to Zürich that they might visit one day.
• When it detects a geotagged tweet from within 100m of a location of interest, it checks whether it already follows that user. If so, it will send it the link to the questionnaire about that location.
• If a user follows the bot, it will send them a questionnaire for any other location they tweet from. If not, it only ever sends one tweet.

I hope that by only tweeting at people it follows, after they've had a chance to block it, the bot will look less spammy.

Some improvements to identifying nearby locations:

• We originally filtered the public Twitter stream by location, to get only tweets from the area around Zürich:
• stream.filter(locations=[8.41, 47.31, 8.62, 47.48])
• Unfortunately, this filtering didn't always work, for reasons only Twitter knows. The bot followed a lot of people in the Czech Republic and France before we realised this! This is why it now double-checks that a tweet is within 10km of a location of interest.
• The bot also seemed to be fixated on only a few locations. This was because we were asking for the origin of the bounding box of the 'place' of the tweet:
• lng, lat = status.place.bounding_box.origin()
• It now asks for the actual coordinates of the tweet, and the problem is solved.
• lng, lat = status.coordinates['coordinates']

The next improvements will be to the results. They should be exportable in at least CSV and JSON format, and displayable on a map. I will also upload them to the safe2pee.org database.

• GitHub repo for CrowdPee Twitter bot
• GitHub repo for NearbySources

Any comments or suggestions for CrowdPee are very welcome!

CrowdPee

David Stark, Vincent van der Lubbe and I are taking part in the Zürich Open Data Hacknights 2013, a four-week-long challenge using the open geographic data provided by the city of Zürich. The goal is to help people make location-based decisions intuitively.

Naturally, we are working on the problem of gender-neutral toilets! Our project wiki page is here: CrowdPee.

As mentioned before, the official public toilets in Zürich are non-gendered (apart from urinals), but we want to get lots more information. One dataset that caught our eye was the list of licensed premises. We're going to use that list as a starter set and collect data on their toilets in two ways:

1. Using crawlers to find contact details for these establishments, and emailing them to ask.
2. Using Twitter / Flickr / etc. bots to find geotagged updates from their locations, and asking people to fill out a quick questionnaire about their toilets.

CrowdPee data collection diagram

Since the locations we're targeting are places that sell alcohol, we will probably mostly be approaching people who are out enjoying themselves. Vincent proposed that the questionnaire should be as short and as fun to fill out as possible, with pictures rather than radio buttons (he hates radio buttons!) and easy to complete on a phone. It could also be useful to give something back to the user when they complete a questionnaire ... a picture / video / joke / voucher / something else? What's more, since we are anticipating that people will be answering our questions on smartphones, why not have them upload a photo of the toilets at the same time? David pointed out that the photo and questionnaire would have to be sent separately, since a webpage cannot communicate with a smartphone camera. Something to think about.

We will also need to make a database to store the returned information, and of course, the more questionnaires that are filled out for a venue, the more reliable the data will be. To keep things simple for the responders, we agreed to limit ourselves to the following questions:

1. Are the toilets unisex, or gendered?
• Safe2pee.org distinguishes between 'genderfree' and 'single stall or locking'. Maybe we should too?
2. Are they accessible for people using wheelchairs?
• Accessibility can be much more nuanced than this, of course. Is this too simplified?
3. Are there baby-changing tables, and are they in the men's toilets too?
• David suggested this question, an important consideration.

We have started work on the Twitter bot, using Tweepy and with Will Thompson's fewerror bot as a handy base. Our code is here. So far, we can identify tweets within about 500 metres of a known restaurant in Zürich. The next step will be making a questionnaire for them to visit. We might need help with the design, as none of us are artists!

Public toilets in Swiss cities

Public toilets in Zürich. Photo by Mike Knell.

Since my first post, I've found out that the public toilets provided by the city of Zürich are all non-gendered. (The cubicles, that is, not the urinals.) I don't know if this is the case for other cities, so to find out I will email the relevant council departments.

The list below shows the publicly-available information on pubic toilets for the major cities in Switzerland by population, according to Wikipedia. I will update it as I get more information.

Update, 24. 08.2014: Where official maps are not available (and often when they are!), the WC-Guide is the best bet for locating public toilets in Switzerland. The Guide has iPhone and Android apps and notes whether toilets are wheelchair-accessible, but not whether they are gender-neutral.

I will be sending information on gender-neutral public toilets to REFUGE Restrooms to expand their database.

1. Zürich
• General information
• Mobile website (German)
• Raw data (German)
• Gender-neutral? Yes
• Disabled access? Where noted (rollstuhlgängig = accessible by wheelchair)
2. Geneva
• Map (French) NB: yellow symbols show facilities only open in summer
• Gender-neutral? Not yet known
• Disabled access? Where noted on map
• Email sent 23.08.2014
•  
3. Basel
• General information (German)
• Map (German)
• Gender-neutral? Not yet known
• Disabled access? Where noted on map
• Email sent 23.08.2014
4. Lausanne
• General information (French)
• Map (French) - select the tab Show > Mobilite reduite - Donnees Pro Infirmis > Toilettes
• Gender-neutral? Not yet known
• Disabled access? Where noted on map
• Email sent 23.08.2014
5. Bern
• Map: German, French, English - select Add themes > Services, family > Public restrooms
• Gender-neutral? Not yet known
• Disabled access? Wheelchair-accessible status is shown by clicking on the toilet icon. A fuller list of wheelchair-accessible toilets (German) is given by the Behindertenkonferenz Stadt und Region Bern BRB, including ones in restaurants, theatres etc.
• Email sent 23.08.2014
6. Lucerne
• Public toilets masterplan for the city of Lucerne (German, PDF, 2009)
• It is very hard to turn up any usable information on the Lucerne public toilets. The masterplan linked has a list of sites, but some of these have been closed since it was published
• Gender-neutral? Lucerne is moving towards the modern, unisex cabins as used in Zürich. Unknown how many of the older, gender-segregated style are still in use
• Disabled access? Yes, some
• Update 23.04.2014: A Nette Toilette scheme (toilets in restaurants and hotels that are open to the public) started in Lucerne this spring (press release in German)
• Email sent 23.08.2014
7. Winterthur
• List, map (German)
• Mobile website (German)
• Gender-neutral? Not yet known
• Disabled access? Where noted; only noted on list, not map or mobile website
• Email sent 23.08.2014
8. St. Gallen
• Map (German) - select Points of Interest under Suche nach... and then choose öffentliche WCs from the dropdown menu
• Gender neutral? Not yet known
• Disabled access? Not yet known
• Email sent 23.08.2014
9. Lugano
• No list or map available (or perhaps my Italian is not up to the task?)
• Email sent 23.08.2014
10. Biel/Bienne
• The city map (German, French) should display public toilets, but none appear
• Gender-neutral? Not yet known
• Disabled access? Not yet known
• Update 24.08.2014: The public toilets in Biel have been closed since the start of 2014 in a cost-saving measure. A Nette Toilette pilot programme will start this autumn (PDF article in French)
11. Thun
• Map (PDF; German, but with pictograms)
• The city map also includes 13 "nette Toiletten": toilets in restaurants and hotels that are open to the public (press release in German)
• Gender-neutral? Not yet known
• Disabled access? Where marked
• Email sent 23.08.2014
12. Köniz
• No list or map available
• Email sent 23.08.2014
13. La Chaux-de-Fonds
• No list or map available
• Email sent 23.08.2014
14. Schaffhausen
• Mobile website (German)
• Gender-neutral? Not yet known
• Disabled access? Not yet known
• Email sent 23.08.14
15. Fribourg
•  No list or map available
• Email sent 23.08.2014
16. Vernier
• No list or map available
• Email sent 23.08.2014
17. Chur
• Map (German) - select Points of Interest under Suche nach... and then choose öffentliche WCs from the dropdown menu
• Gender neutral? Not yet known
• Disabled access? Not yet known
• Email sent 23.08.2014
18. Neuchâtel
• No list or map available
• Email sent 23.08.2014
19. Uster
• Map (German)
• List and map of wheelchair-accessible toilets (German)
• Gender-neutral? Not yet known
• Disabled access? Where shown on list
• Email sent 23.08.2014
20. Sion
• No list or map available
• Email sent 23.08.2014

Guest post: Gender-neutral toilets are for men too!

Die deutsche Version dieses Eintrags ist hier.

I'm really happy to introduce the first guest post on this blog, by an anonymous contributor.

I'm a six foot tall bearded man who wears black a lot. The issue of gendered toilets affects me because I can't really pee standing up.

I'm lucky in that the gender I was assigned at birth, and the gender I look like, is one that I'm comfortable with. When I say that I can't pee standing up, this isn't anything anatomical - the embarrassing truth is that I simply never learned to do it, not in a neat, aimed stream.

This means that when I go to the bathroom, I need to be able to sit down. Unfortunately, men's toilets often only have only one or a few stalls. Especially if there's only one stall, and it's been - shall we say - made unusable by a previous occupant, this puts me into a real bind. There may be multiple perfectly usable stalls nearby, but they're all marked as for women.

If the area leading up to the stalls is unisex, I sometimes end up using a for-women stall instead, but usually the toilets are completely separated, with different rooms for men and women. At that point, my only options are to bear the mounting pain of a full bladder or to just leave and go home, cutting short whatever I came here to do.

Being at a concert for three hours with a painfully full bladder is not the most pleasant experience, which means that I often feel quite anxious about the bathroom situation, which in turn tends to mean that I need to go more urgently.

In conclusion, don't assume that all men can pee standing up. Some, like me, can't manage due to a combination of anxiety and lack of skill, others may have medical or anatomical complications, and yet others are simply too shy to whip it out in front of others. Unisex toilets reduce this problem a great deal.

Welcome!

Die deutsche Version dieses Eintrags ist hier.

Hello, and welcome to the start of something beautiful. This project aims to document the availability of gender-neutral toilets throughout Switzerland, raise awareness of the need for gender-neutral (and otherwise accessible) toilets, and create/contribute to apps so that this information is as useful as possible.

My name is Rachel and I will be blogging further on all of this, as well as - I hope! - getting input from lots of other people. (Maybe you?) For now, here are some quick questions and answers.

Why gender-neutral toilets?

Lots of reasons! For example, suppose you have a gender presentation that other people find hard to classify as 'male' or 'female'. You could be transitioning from the gender you were assigned to at birth to the one that fits who you are. You could be a butch woman, a feminine man, or a genderqueer person, to name a few possibilities. In public situations, going to the loo can be a frightening ordeal, where picking the 'wrong' choice out of the little girls' room and the little boys' room might get you beaten up, thrown out by security, or verbally abused.

To take another example, perhaps you are a woman accompanying a young boy, or a man accompanying a young girl. If your child isn't ready to go to the toilet by themself yet, which room do you take them into?

One further reason to have gender-neutral toilets is that they can even out supply and demand. Have you ever stood in a long queue for the loo, watching people step in and out of the other room as they please? Wouldn't it be great if that wasn't necessary?

What information is out there already?

The best resource I've found so far is safe2pee.org. Their community-sourced database is searchable by location and specifies if toilets are free, accessible and/or gender neutral. Unfortunately, it's mostly limited to the USA. There's only one toilet listed for all of Switzerland!

The city of Zürich, where I happen to live, has a great website about their public toilet provision. It includes a mobile page where you can search for the one closest to your position, both for wheelchair-accessible and other toilets. This information is only available in German, however. Besides this, while most of these public toilets are nongendered, I don't know if all of them are and it's not specified in the app or the raw data.

I don't yet know how other Swiss cities and cantons publicise this information. Based on experience, I'd guess a lot of it has been made public but in a very nonstandardised way.

What can we do to improve things?

Since safe2pee.org already has a few thousand entries in its database, as well as an API and a userbase, I don't see a point in reinventing the wheel to make a Swiss-specific catalogue. Here are my first thoughts on useful steps:

• We need to add lots and lots more Swiss gender-neutral and accessible toilets to safe2pee.org.
• We need to raise awareness of the need for gender-neutral toilets here, so that they are considered as an option when opening public services, renovating businesses, etc.
• There should be apps or mobile web pages to enable quick access to this information, available in as many languages as possible - at least German, French and English.

Everyone can contribute in some way! Talk about gender-neutral toilets with your friends. Tell the owner of your favourite café that you appreciate the accessible loos they provide. If you spot a great toilet, add it to safe2pee.org. If there are resources out there that I haven't mentioned, or things I haven't thought of, please let me know and I'll add them here.

Translators, programmers and guest bloggers are also very much appreciated. I plan to translate all my posts here into German, for example, but I don't speak any other language and I'd love help there. I'm planning on learning how to write apps so I can make the ones I think would be useful - but if you have a better idea, go ahead and make it!

Oh, and ...

Gender-neutral and accessible toilets are a cause I really care about, because I've seen the trouble people can have when they're not available. However, I have never personally had trouble accessing a loo because of mobility issues or my gender presentation. If I get things wrong out of ignorance, please let me know and I will correct them. Similarly, if I make any translation mistakes, corrections are welcome.