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Gerardo Valerio had been looking for a bathroom in Los Angeles Little Tokyo neighborhood for 20 minutes when he stumbled across a blue and white trailer with FREE BATHROOM at the top. At first, he was hesitant to enter the bathroom, which had been installed by the Washington, D.C.-based portable toilet startup Throne. To get in, he had to scan a QR code which pre-loaded a text onto his phone. After sending the text, the door would automatically slide open. What do I text, I need to pee? he jokes. All in all, he says, it was a positive experience: It was pretty to look at but it definitely has a smell to it. It needs to be maintained a bit more. But overall, nice. In Little Tokyo, there are almost no public restroomsin most of the restaurants and shops, you have to buy something first. There should be more, Valerio says. After years of complaints from riders, LA Metro is rolling out more free public Throne bathrooms this year at transit stations across L.A. County. The portable, touchless trailers are self-contained, requiring no water or electric hookup. This allows the company to rapidly deploy restrooms wherever neededlike a busy train station. The new location at Little Tokyo station has been particularly popular, with 120 to 150 uses per day during the weekend. Thrones have also been deployed in the D.C. area, Ann Arbor, Michigan; Beverly Hills; and in the Bay area at two Caltrain stations. View this post on Instagram /div>A post shared by Throne Bathrooms (@thronebathrooms) Built on accountability Throne says its smart bathrooms use accountability to solve the age-old problem of unwanted bathroom activity. Accessing a Throne requires a unique user ID, usually a cell phone number. For those without access to a phone, Throne also distributes key cards through local service providers. [Its] just behavioral science, explains Throne cofounder and COO Jessica Heinzelman. If somebody knows that theyve used their phone to get into a bathroom, theyre treating it a little bit nicer, kind of the same mentality of if you have somebody in line behind you in a regular bathroom. Every user is asked to rate the cleanliness of the Throne and can report any issues via text. Throne uses this feedback to optimize the cleaning schedule which relies on gig laborand rapidly respond to any issues. As of March 1, there have been 425,900 uses nationally, with 168,600 in L.A., and a rating of 4.07 out of five stars. The biggest issue facing public bathrooms in Metro stations has been preventing inappropriate behavior, says Stephen Tu, deputy executive officer of station experience at Metro. Throne bathrooms are cheaper to clean and maintain because problem users can be banned from the system. So far, only 375 people out of 37,144 unique users across the national Throne network have been access-restricted, according to Heinzelman. Last year, after a six-month pilot at four locations, Metro approved a $22 million four-year contract with Throne to provide up to 64 bathrooms. Currently, there are 14 Thrones in the Metro system, with four more set to roll out in April. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Throne Bathrooms (@thronebathrooms) Tapping the gig workforce Some Throne features might be high-tech, but the bathrooms are still cleaned the old-fashioned way: by people, specifically gig workers who sign up to clean specific locations at specific times through an app. It allows us to respond really quickly, while also providing people flexible income opportunities, says Heinzelman. If we had a W-2 workforce, we would probably be able to accomplish a quarter of the cleans in twice the time. Correna T., a public transportation advocate with the L.A. chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, believes that the bathrooms should be staffed by unionized Metro employees, not gig workers. We would much rather see those jobs go to union employees who have protections and benefits and are staffed publicly, she says. In July of last year, DSA-LA successfully mobilized to push LA Metro to conduct a feasibility study on bringing cleaning staff in-house. Over seven months later, the report is still not out. Next City reached out to Metro for a status update on the report but did not receive a response. Throne declined to provide details about how much a member of the cleaning network is paid per clean, but according to Thrones website, each clean is priced dynamically. There are all sorts of variables to how we are setting clean tasks including when we have two Thrones co-located next to each other (no transit time or transit cost) [plus] the ability to get bonuses for rapid response, says Heinzelman in an email. Workers can receive an extra $15 for extra tough jobs after submitting before-and-after photos that are then confirmed by the company. Thrones top earners are making up to $1,800 per week, says Heinzelman. Having bathrooms is an enormous social service support and health and safety strategy that we wholeheartedly support, says Alfonso Directo, Jr., advocacy director for the Alliance for Community Transit, a coalition of transportation and housing organizations. But ACT-LA would rather see Metro provide stable employment for local residents. Metro, as a public agency with public dollars, could be using those dollars to develop the infrastructure themselves, he says. A temporary fix? Correna T. was initially excited about the Throne bathroom program, but thinks it doesnt go far enough in providing a permanent solution. The bathrooms are portable, not permanent, she points out. Metro doesnt own themThrone does. The contract only extends to 2028the year that L.A. is hosting the summer Olympic games. To DSA-LA, this shows that the Throne partnership is primarily meant to serve tourists during the Olympics. If they dont expand this program past the Olympics, Throne could literally just come in and take them away, and they would no longer be an amenity for the city, she adds. Tu doesnt see the restrooms as necessarily temporary and says the agency has the option to renew the contract at the end of four years. The beauty of its portability allows us to scale very quickly, because to be able to do this with a more traditional approach would take many years to be able to get this at up to 64 locations, he says. LA Metro riders have been requesting bathrooms for decades with little success. The system has only three stations with permanent bathrooms in a system with 107 rail stations and about 12,000 bus stops (the city of Los Angeles has four bathrooms at Metro stations that it maintains separately). Tu says that the challenge with building and maintaining public bathrooms has been not just the capital costs of adding new bathrooms, but also the amount of money needed to staff them and keep them clean. During the pilot, Metro saw a 50% reduction in public urination and defecation incidents at locations where Thrones were deployed. When Next City asked if Metro could use the money saved on maintenance to build permanent bathrooms, Tu repeated that the partnership with Throne allows the agency to roll out multiple bathrooms in a short period of time. He stresses the high rating that Throne has received from users as evidence of the programs success, though he states that Metro is not opposed to exploring other options in the future. The only solution we see in the market right now is the Throne solution, he says. This story was originally published by Next City, a nonprofit news outlet covering solutions for equitable cities. 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After making his mark in Silicon Valley, Icelandic designer and tech mogul Haraldur Halli Thorleifsson is now solving a far more analog problem: the inaccessibility of local storefronts. As a wheelchair user, Thorleifsson knows firsthand how exclusion can be built into a city. If you dont see anyone using a wheelchair, he says, its not because they dont existits because they have nowhere to go. Thorleifsson has experienced such access barriers to public spaces throughout his life, but the turning point came on a late-night walk with his family in downtown Reykjavík, when he couldnt join his son in a corner store because of a single step at the entrance. As I was sitting outside, I kept looking at that one step, he recalls. Over the years, steps like that had stopped me from being able to go cafés to meet friends, from going to the barber, or going Christmas shopping with my family. That one step was the main obstacle between me and fully participating in society. And, not just me; anyone who uses a mobility device to get around. I decided that this had to change and since nobody else seemed to be doing anything, I figured it was up to me. So in 2021, Thorleifsson launched Ramp Up Reykjavík to fund the installation of 100 ramps in places with the most foot traffic across Icelands capitalcafés, restaurants, and shops. Four years later, the project has delivered far more ramps than initially promised and well beyond Reykjavík to additional Icelandic cities, garnering a fitting name change to Ramp Up Iceland. On March 14, Thorleifsson celebrated the completion of Ramp Up Iceland with a ribbon-cutting ceremony and the support of the mayor, prime minister, president, and other leaders of the municipal governments across Iceland. Now, the team plans to expand the initiative to Paris and Lviv, Ukraine. [Photo: Ramp Up Reykjavík] An age-old accessibility problem Creating accessibility in any urban environment is often met with logistical and bureaucratic challenges. But in cities with historic buildings that predate modern accessibility standards by decades or even centuries, those challenges are even further amplified. In downtown Reykjavík, most buildings date back to the 18th century with storefronts that sit slightly elevated above street level, making one or two steps a recurring access barrier across most of the citys core business district. And this isnt just an Icelandic issue. In a recent study, 70% of disabled people surveyed said theyve shown up to a building only to realize they couldnt get inside. More than half of them (60%) reported that they had to leave without completing their task because the building wasnt accessible. This study was conducted in the United States, where we have the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), a law intended to protect the rights of disabled people and ensure accessible infrastructure. Yet, even with the ADA, there are still massive access inequities in our urban environments. Buildings, sidewalks, and transportation systems often remain out of compliance or are poorly maintained, and legal protections such as the ADA arent universal. In many older cities around the world, accessibility standards are inconsistent, and the push to retrofit historic areas is often delayed or deprioritized in favor of architectural preservation. Thorleifssons work is beginning to change this. The goal of Ramp Up Reykjavík was to install 100 ramps within a year; the project finished it in half the time and under budget. Following the success of the trial project, Thorleifsson expanded the initiative to cities across Iceland, with a new target goal of building 1,000 ramps in five years. They ended up building more than 1,700 ramps and again came in under budget. [Photo: Ramp Up Reykjavík] Building a better ramp Each ramp is built for the location, and is integrated into the environment with designers working with the city and municipalities to try and match existing materials when possible. In many cases, passersby wouldnt even notice modifications to the historic buildings because the ramps are intentional design choices built into the urban environment. The role of a designer is to make something simple and beautiful to use, for as many people as possible,” says Thorleifsson. “So when I look at how some things are made, I can’t help but wonder how easy it would have been, with small tweaks, to make it usable by more people without losing any of the beauty. The biggest challenge in the beginning was making people believe that this was possible, Thorleifsson says. “These problems have been discussed for decades, often with very little progress. So the approach was really to give people no excuses. We fund, design, build, and get all the permits; it’s all free for the shop owner or the person who owns the building. Once people start seeing success, where before there was none, all the arguments go away and doors open. Thorleifsson initially funded the project with dividends made through the sale of his digital design agency Ueno to Twitter in 2021. He joined the company as a senior director of product design but was abruptly terminated in 2022 along with some 200 others when Elon Musk took over Twitterwhich led to a Twitter exchange with Musk that made international headlines. The sale of Thorleifssons company helped get the Ramp Up Reykjavík initiative off the ground, but the project has been a collaborative venture between Thorleifsson and local businesses, government agencies, and city officials. I had some money, and I was able to quickly raise more. Once the snowball was rolling, everyone jumped on board very quickly, he says. Now he is looking to make quick improvements at the international level. Ukraine has a lot of peope coming back from the war that need access. So the urgency is there, Thorleifsson explains of where the initiative will head next. I’m not a very patient person. I don’t think there is any excuse to move slowly on fixing a human rights issue. So I sometimes have to push hard for change to happen. When asked what lessons hes learned that other cities should consider when trying to improve accessibility, Thorleifsson says, It’s easy. It’s cheap. There’s no excuse. Just do it. We can help. Call me.
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While Teslas stock has seen a sharp decline in recent weeks, Elon Musk has quietly been working to expand his influence in a different area of tech: AI supercomputing. Recent reports have revealed that Musks AI startup, xAI, has been quietly building a new data center in Atlanta. The facility will house around 12,000 Nvidia graphics processing units (GPUs), crucial chips that power AI computation. While the Atlanta data center is modest compared to Musk’s supercomputer project in Memphis, nicknamed Colossus, which boasts 100,000 GPUs, its construction is part of a broader trend in the tech world that has been advancing largely under the radar. Last December, Meta announced its plans to build a $10 billion data center in Richland Parish, Louisiana. In February, OpenAI began constructing a facility in Abilene, Texas, while scoping out potential sites in 16 other states, as they seek to invest $500 billion in AI infrastructure over the next four years under the Trump Administrations Stargate project. While megaprojects like Colossus and Stargate have captured national attentionespecially as Musk trumpeted his goal of creating the most powerful AI supercomputer in the worldthis broader wave of data center construction has largely proceeded under the radar, with minimal public oversight, particularly from the communities that will host these centers. This silent expansion underscores an important issue: We cannot allow Big Tech to have unchecked control over the development of AI infrastructure, especially when there is a lack of transparency and limited public scrutiny. The problem with unchecked AI expansion is multifaceted. While tech companies promise their data centers will rejuvenate local economies with jobs and tax revenue, it is not entirely clear that the risks outweigh the rewards. First, the AI industry is an environmental crisis waiting to happen. Data centers typically consume an immense amount of resources, particularly water. Liquid-based cooling systems are essential to prevent overheating in the massive networks of servers that power these centers, and this process requires vast quantities of water. The Colossus project in Memphis alone is estimated to consume one million gallons of water a day, according to public utilities companies in the city. And its not just Memphiswith an estimated 50% of the worlds population projected to live in water-stressed areas by 2025, the growing demand for water in AI data centers presents a real threat to local communities. In Memphis, activists are already sounding the alarm about the impact on local water supplies, especially in a region with a history of arsenic contamination in drinking water. xAI has reached an agreement with the City of Memphis to build a recycled wastewater facility for the data centers cooling needs, aimed at alleviating some pressure on local water sources. However, the company has not been transparent with the local community regarding its plans for the facility, which is expected to reduce the strain on the Memphis Sand aquifer by only 9%even as xAI announced plans to expand its supercomputing operation to one million GPUs more than 10 times its current capacity. The environmental impact extends beyond water usage. The supercomputing industry is highly carbon-intensive. According to a report by Morgan Stanley, data centers worldwide are projected to emit 2.5 billion tons of CO2 by 2030. Many of these data centers are being built in the U.S. South, a region already vulnerable to rising temperatures. The carbon emissions from these projects will only worsen the heat risks in areas that are already hot. The effects of extreme heat are not felt equally. In Atlanta, for instance, where some neighborhoods were redlined in the 20th century, residents in predominantly Black communitieswho ofte lack access to air-conditioning and shaded green spacesare already disproportionately at risk for heat-related illness and death. The continued expansion of data centers and the heat generated by their carbon emissions will only make these inequities worse. While Musks xAI may tout its role in advancing AI innovation, these environmental tolls cannot be ignored. Moreover, its not even clear that we need this kind of computing power. Earlier this year, the launch of DeepSeek, a more resource-efficient AI model developed in China, shocked the tech industry. DeepSeeks breakthrough suggested that the future of AI could be far less resource-hungry than what Musk and others are pushing. Since DeepSeeks success, tech giants like Microsoft have canceled data center leases in the U.S., signaling that perhaps the need for supercomputing power is not as pressing as Musks ambitions would have us believe. This raises the question: Are these massive data centers even necessary, or are they just part of a generative AI hype bubble? And will the communities hosting these data centers be left to foot the bill once the bubble bursts? Of course, many will argue that the global AI race is too important to let these concerns get in the way. But we cannot allow Silicon Valleys “move fast and break things” mentality to dictate how our cities evolve and how resources are allocated. Urban leaders must step up to demand oversight and accountability in the development of these data centers. AI is undeniably vital to the future of human progress, but its too important to be left in the hands of unaccountable tech oligarchs. Atlanta, Memphis, and other cities across the country need to assert control over the expansion of data centers and insist on transparent, responsible development.
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