> Nick Parlante 8/2025
What if I told you there's a public toilet in Palo Alto where, basically, you need a cell phone to use it?
It sounds like a joke or an attempt at trolling, like the kids today really can't do anything without their phone! Or maybe it's some kind of dark, user-exploitation trick.
But in fact, I think this free, Throne-brand toilet in Palo Alto is using a strategy you will recognize from the online world to make its free toilet work.
Say you want to offer a free public toilet and you've got a small budget to keep it clean. For 99.9% of users, they are happy the toilet is there and they use it normally and the system works fine. But a small percentage of people are, let us say, not in control of themselves enough to use the toilet responsibly. Maybe they leave syringes in there, or they smear feces on the walls or something like that. In some respects these people deserve pity, unable to navigate in the world, but as a simple practical matter, they are also messing up the functionality of our free toilet.
One way to keep the free toilet working is to create a disincentive for the bad behavior, and this is where the cell phone number comes in. To use the toilet, the user sends a text to a number associated with that toilet in order to open the toilet's door, which does not have a regular door handle. The key here is that the Throne system can note down the cell number and the time of entry. Throne does not need the person's name, or for them to create an account of anything like that. Just the cell phone number. You can imagine that if that toilet shows up with feces on the walls or other problems, it does not take much for Throne to figure out which phone number is a problem, and stop opening the door for that number.
This is a simple example of a reputation system, attaching an identifier (possibly anonymous) to each person, so that over multiple interactions, if that identifier is associated with bad behavior, the system can decline to interact with them. This does not make an airtight system. It's not that hard to get another phone number or borrow a phone or whatever with a little effort. If someone misbehaves, that "burns" that phone number, so that will be a small cost for the person misbehaving if they want to use the toilet again. You can imagine someone who is at risk of misbehavior, but the knowledge of the cost of being banned is enough of a nudge that they use the toilet normally. This is good scenario, where the incentive has nudged them to use the toilet but without creating a unsupportable maintenance headache, and we're still providing them with a free toilet, which was the original goal. The bad scenario is people who cannot manage themselves to use the toilet responsibly, so they just get banned.
Now the Throne site, for whatever reason, does not explain the dynamics as I have here, so we'll just say this is my theory of why the Throne toilet requires a phone number. One can imagine they are afraid of being criticized about the 1% or 0.1%, or whatever it is, of people the Throne ends up banning.
For myself, I think it's an idea worth trying, and I'm glad they are giving it a shot. Having free public toilets is a great feature for a public space, and perhaps this cell-number scheme is a way to screen out enough bad behavior that the toilet can work without requiring an unsupportable amount of maintenance. We'll have to see how it works out in practice.
It would be interesting to see statistics about what percentage of users get blocked. I would think it's going to be really low, as my gut is that the implied threat of being blocked in the future will be very effective. The Throne door stays closed for a maximum of 10 minutes, so we also should not be surprised when people think of other uses for the privacy of the Throne, and that's part of the experiment too.
It would also also be interesting to know how clean the Thrones are on average and how often they get cleaned by staff. The internet being what it is, we should look forward to r/Throne with a selection of images!
I visited the Palo Alto Throne, and it's perfectly nice inside — very clean when I was there, and surprisingly, there's music playing. More like the bathroom off a hotel lobby than, say, the toilet at the town soccer fields.
In the Throne FAQ, they mention that users without a cell phone may be able to get a wireless-pass card from their city social service department, so that provides a solution for that case too. This also avoids the Orwellian "Person Without Cell Phone Not Allowed To Use Toilet" headline.
Aside: technology-fix vs. economics-fix. The JC Decaux company makes public toilets, and one feature they use is self-cleaning technology to make the toilet nice for the next user. Palo Alto had such toilets installed for a while and then later took them out, so somehow it did not work out. As I recall, it has a tilting floor and did some sort of automated spraying cleanup after each use. At a super high level, Throne is leaning more on social science for its approach — the word "incentive" playing a central role, and my gut is that this is a smart approach.
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Nick Parlante nick.parlante -at- cs.stanford.edu