How to Use This

Why aren't benches here yet

A single city can have over ten thousand benches. Listing them without a map wouldn't help anyone find one, and it would only inflate the download. When we tried loading one city's benches as-is, a single page passed 800KB. So we've held off until a map is in place. We're noting this here rather than quietly pretending the feature doesn't matter.

How to read the fee labels

We currently have 1557 toilets. Of those, 200 are listed as charging a fee and 576 as free. The remaining 781 have no record, so we don't know.

One thing we want to be clear about: we never count an unlisted fee as free. Map data often simply has no entry for that field, and counting those as free would inflate the numbers in our favor. So we count unknown separately.

Places with the actual amount listed are rare. Even when we know a place charges, we usually don't know how much, and in that case the screen says the amount is unknown. Carrying a little change ahead of time makes things easier.

"All of Europe charges for toilets"

It's a widely repeated claim, but counting our data tells a different story: free is far more common, and paid is the exception. Paid ones do cluster around busy spots like tourist centers and train stations, though, so travelers run into them more often than the overall ratio suggests.

That's exactly where this tool earns its keep. Instead of bracing for every toilet to cost money, knowing one free option nearby actually helps.

Wheelchair labels

We record accessibility as one of four states: accessible, limited, not accessible, or unknown. "Limited" is often used to mean a step or narrow space, but the data doesn't say how much of an obstacle it is.

We're upfront that unknown is common. No listing doesn't mean it's inaccessible, but we also can't confirm it is accessible, so we mark it unknown rather than guess.

The limits of this data

The data comes from OpenStreetMap, built by volunteer contributors. Because people enter it by hand, some places are missing and some closed places may still be listed. When a spot has a last-confirmed date, we show it on screen, and right now 270 spots have one.

We also show the date we fetched the data for each city. Nothing that changed after that date is reflected. Baking the data in ahead of time makes the site fast and needs no server, but it isn't real-time.

When you're in a hurry, asking a nearby shop or station is faster. Use this tool to plan ahead, and follow what you see in front of you once you're there.

What reaches our server

Which city you looked at and where you opened a map are never sent to a server. All the server receives is a single signal marking how far you got. There's no account either.