Long Beach extends ‘smart’ public restrooms at parks and pier

Long Beach’s free “smart” public restrooms, with touchless features and sensors scattered throughout, are sticking around as the city extends its partnership with the company that makes them.

The ADA-accessible restrooms at DeForest Park near the pickleball courts, Harvey Milk Promenade Park in downtown and Belmont Pier will be available until at least next September. The Shoreline Marina location will be discontinued Thursday.

Long Beach launched a four-month pilot program with Throne Labs in mid-April.

Ryan Kurtzman, from the city’s Technology and Innovation Department, told LAist the program was “highly successful” and made people feel safer when compared to using traditional public restrooms.

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Kurtzman, the city’s technology partnerships officer, said officials are looking for ways to bring some of the “smart” Throne features to older brick-and-mortar restrooms.

About the Long Beach program

Each unit includes touchless toilets, faucets and soap dispensers, as well as more than 20 sensors to detect motion, water and waste levels. They’re wrapped in anti-graffiti wallpaper inside and out.

The restrooms are wheelchair-accessible with ramps. They also feature baby-changing tables and "NaviLens" codes to guide users who are blind or visually impaired.

The units impose a 10-minute time limit on users to prevent people from hanging out or sleeping in them. There are warning signs about the time limits posted around the restrooms in English and Spanish.

People are given additional audio warnings at the halfway, eight- and 10-minute marks. The doors will open automatically shortly after the time runs out, and they'll stay open — with the lights flashing — until the user moves along. Throne Labs says most people are in and out of the restrooms within four minutes.

The restrooms are solar powered. Each blue-and-white unit costs Long Beach about $6,000 to $9,000 each month, depending on the amount of cleaning and maintenance provided.

There were more than 31,500 visits to the four Long Beach locations across the pilot program, which ran from April to August. For comparison, the unit at L.A. Metro’s Willow Station in Long Beach saw nearly 13,000 visits in about a year.

Throne Labs worked with the city to come up with a four-question survey that was posted outside the restrooms to gather community feedback, according to Jessica Heinzelman, the company’s co-founder and COO.

More than 90% of respondents rated the public restrooms as “good” or “great,” and a little less than a third of users returned multiple times. More than 80% of users said the Throne units felt safer compared to traditional restrooms, which Heinzelman told LAist was particularly important to city officials.

“ That’s one that [Long Beach] really cared about as they were kind of assessing it versus kind of the standard public restrooms that they have around the city,” she said. “ We were able to make people feel, you know, good about their use of it and feel confident in relieving themselves.”

There was also a 70% drop in public defecation within a half-mile of the Throne restrooms, Heinzelman said, according to city data leading up to and during the pilot period.

You can see more data from the pilot program here.

Long Beach’s funding for the units comes from parking revenue, the Tidelands Operating Fund, as well as the Parks, Recreation and Marine Department General Fund.

Other SoCal locations

There are 37 Throne restrooms across Los Angeles and Orange counties, including a public-facing unit in Fullerton and a pair open only to O.C. Transportation Authority bus drivers.

The company is on track to expand to 41 units by the end of October, Heinzelman said, with four more locations coming to the L.A. Metro system this month.

“ Hopefully we'll look back and this will be a starting point to meaningfully expanding public access in the future,” she said. “Especially with the World Cup and Olympics just around the corner.”