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  • Hacker News
  • Finally, something i can contribute to!
    by khernandezrt
  • I love this! Years ago I had an idea to catalogue "bathrooms around the world" which would include some very strange urinal positions. We need to expand to Europe and get Crown and Treaty imaged.
    by skinfaxi
  • You can see one of the authors here in the mirror :) - https://restroomarchive.com/r/2024-12-02-the-mart-collective
    by malkia
  • I wish this was a for-profit corporation, because for some odd reason I want a job of traveling across Canada, and documenting every public restroom that exists.

    It'd almost be like an episode of the Littlest Hobo. Each week I'd roll into town, bent on performing my job and documenting restrooms.

    But in the end I'd save some woman, or orphan, or somebody that's having a horrible problem in their lives, and then I'd roll on to the next town.

    Except... in my series, I'd always get a piece of homemade pie as thanks, before I left.

    Which sort of brings us full circle:

    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ayo9PoZgrMU

    by b112
  • This is awesome. It reminds me a lot of the excellent work done by the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) [1].

    One of my personal favorites is Pavement Paradise [2] documenting American parking spaces.

    I'll also shamelessly plug some pictures of gas stations I took last summer :) [3].

    [1] https://clui.org/photo-archive

    [2] https://clui.org/projects/pavement-paradise

    [3] https://henryrobbins.com/artwork/gas-stations/

    by henryrobbins00
  • Public bathrooms are such an interesting public services issue. In some places it’s totally normal to pay a small fee, and in return you (usually) get a clean space. In other places, the idea of paying to use the bathroom is considered an offense against the public.

    Years ago when I was in New York often, I had the idea to make a paid bathroom app, with a bit of a luxury twist. You’d pay $30 or whatever a month to have access to 40+ well-designed bathrooms across the city. The idea was that we’d own and operate these, and they’d be extremely well-designed, have beautiful tile interiors, come with a variety of hygiene products, water bottles, and so on.

    I still think it could work, but over time I began to dislike the idea, as it would have been yet another example of the public commons essentially being eroded and replaced with a privatized paid system. Not that NYC public bathrooms are even remotely nice to begin with… but I think a better solution would be less deliberately exclusionary. Then again, what could be more NYC than the idea of paying money to get better things?

    by keiferski
  • https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49422800

    There was a huge discussion here last week ICYMI

    by gosub100
  • And by corollary, a town with no public bathrooms is ignoring realities, ie the needs and comfort of the public. It's a signal: the question in those places is, what else are they willfully ignoring, what other responsibilities are they dodging?
    by imglorp
  • I thought this sort of thing was what CEPTIA successfully campaigned against?

    Also, what is the public commons that's being eroded in this scenario? Public toilets are few and far between but also kind of don't seem like a commons. I'd imagine a commons is something like a fishery or something. Pretty easy to control access to toilets. They have doors and as most European countries have proven, you can charge for the access to those doors.

    by arjie
  • It's so randomly weird that a bunch of these are in Utah and I have personally visited them, including one in my neighborhood last week! Some days the Internet is so....local.
    by graupel
  • Me too. I felt like I know half these bathrooms.

    Did you click on the map view to see the route he is driving?

    by ghostbrainalpha
  • 3d splatting takes on a different meaning in this context.
    by shireboy
  • George Costanza would be proud
    by ziofill
  • Does anyone have a recommendation for an open source photogrammetry application for Android?
    by computerfriend
  • Especially one that can produce rooms like this!
    by stavros
  • There are like a half-dozen Android phones with LIDAR and most are from 2019-2021 when the AR craze was in full swing (Samsung S21, Pixel 6), while all the iPhone Pros since 12 have it.
    by jubilanti
  • Hey this is my project. Thanks for sharing
    by jakewelch
  • I love this so much.
    by virgil_disgr4ce
  • Cool project! I wanted to make something similar, but for archiving bathroom graffiti! Yours is a better implementation than I would've accomplished though, so I'm glad you did it!

    What was your original goal(s) for the effort?

    by gaudystead
  • It would be fun to have this connected to other world mapping projects such as Panoramax which is a federated alternative to Google Street View.

    https://panoramax.fr/

    by dolmen
  • Thank you for making it! This is an incredible project so I hope to see (and contribute!) more scans. Also just a really well-crafted website in general, functionally and aesthetically. You mentioned looking at "standard design conventions used for other web archives and for designing public signage for ADA compliant restrooms" in another comment — any interesting design decisions from that research?
    by jcalx
  • Wow this is amazing! I had a habit of visiting the nicest bathroom I can find (typically 5 star hotel lobbies) while traveling. I took some photos of a couple a long way back, but never even thought to use something like LIDAR. I was thinking of using them as a coffee table book with the title "The Best Places To Go".

    So from a fellow public bathroom enthusiast, I wholeheartedly thank you for this project. I travel much less these days, but if I'm ever in a nice bathroom I'll see if I can get a scan to work and upload it!

    by binarymax
  • > https://restroomarchive.com/r/2026-08-31-tri-cities-airport-...

    incredible work. I can only imagine what it was like standing here getting the images, the smell of the must wafting from the corners that haven't been cleaned in a decade, the microbial colonies thriving off pipe condensation above with entire universes of births and deaths and rebirths

    1000/10, every bathroom is an entire story

    by paimapi
  • you're getting me sentimental about the last time i scrubbed the tiles :(
    by jareklupinski
  • https://restroomarchive.com/r/2026-08-29-grand-army-plaza-au...

    > has a countdown timer above warning visitors that the door will auto-open in x amount of time.

    A toilet that has a door with a countdown seems like the most stress-inducing thing ever.

    by v9v
  • It's quite common in Europe. Usually you get 15 minutes which seems fairly generous.
    by Doohickey-d
  • Shit or get off the pot.
    by xyzelement
  • > A toilet that has a door with a countdown seems like the most stress-inducing thing ever.

    It would be more stressful to the people who are standing there watching me finish my shit than it would be to me, I guarantee.

    by stronglikedan
  • The bathroom also has braille text on the signs below the mirror.

    I assume one would wash their hands after reading.

    by waltbosz