The greater the number of Sterni beers consumed on a long, sunny evening in Berlin, the more the city’s absence of public toilets makes itself known to your bladder. Now, just in time for the season of outside hangs, the new public toilet locator app, EasyPZ, is launching in the German capital.
Berlin may be good for a Sudanese sandwich or a walk in the park, but it ain’t good for an impromptu pee. To remedy problems faced by hoards of stranded Berliners hopping impatiently from one foot to the other, EasyPZ is set to launch in the German city, an app which lets users know where to find their closest toilet, free of charge.
The start-up’s idea isn’t actually novel, a similar service had already been started up by GratisPinkeln all the way back in 2008. But while the GratisPinkeln website still looks much like what you would imagine a website from 2008 looks like, the EasyPZ app has all the squeaky-clean features which inspire hopes of a similarly unstained pissoir.
“When nature calls, our app answers”, the website claims, adding that the journey to finding your next favourite place to relieve yourself will include everything to make the experience “personalised for you. Filter the results by gender, accessibility, and other preferences”.
One would think that in a city where burger restaurants, nightclubs and fine dining establishments now inhabit the quaint public toilets of the previous century, we would have all just started spending money on fineries and stopped needing the toilet.
According to a new study, that isn’t actually the case, people in Berlin do still need the toilet. The sense of sweet relief offered by EasyPZ begs the question, “How did it come to this?”
Back in the 1990s, the city of Berlin entered a deal with the advertising company Wall, which provides cities with free outdoor furniture plastered with the advertising which the company makes its revenue from. Wall runs these 260 or so toilets across Berlin which cost 50 cents a pee.
But between 2021 and 2022, Wall’s toilets started being hit by a spate of thefts, which led the city to decide to make 50 of the toilets free and trial the rest of them as “cashless”. Not “cashless” as in free, but “cashless” as in, nobody without a bank card can access the facilities.
Now, the verdict is in and the city has decided to double the number of actually free public toilets to 100, evenly spread across the districts. The authorities have also said that the foreseeable future goal is to make all of the toilets free. As Berlin's free toilet population grows rapidly, EasyPZ might have picked the wrong moment…
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