How to make… a UK Public Toilet Map

Our funding application to continue developing public toilet open data and The Great British Public Toilet Map was rejected by the Economic & Social Research Council (ESRC)

Our research into public toilets was funded by the ESRC. When a research project ends, there is sometimes ‘follow-on funding’ available, in order to develop anything unexpected that has come out of the work (rather than letting all that work go to waste!).

Our proposal for follow-on funding had 3 reviewers.

• One reviewer LOVED it.
• The second thought it ‘extremely worthy‘ , but had trouble understanding what we proposed to do, which is our fault.
• The third thought it ‘extremely important‘, but that local government, or their national bodies like the Local Government Association, should be the ones undertaking this work (and not the ESRC) or at least providing the funding, since public toilets are in their remit.

… The Great British Public Toilet Map, v.1

We made a first version of The Great British Public Toilet Map.

Click on the map to go to the website.

It’s not really a toilet map.

It will be, when there’s more data (initially for London – this link tells you why). At the moment, it’s more a way of seeing the data that’s available, and asking for more.

… The Australian Public Toilet Map

Would you believe I’ve barely ever mentioned the Australian Public Toilet Map www.toiletmap.gov.au, despite it being my secret weapon in presentations about the idea of making a UK map of our public toilets.

It began in the early 2000′s, commissioned by the Department of Health & Ageing as part of their National Continence Management Strategy (the fact that these two things exist is a marvel in itself)

It says: “The National Public Toilet Map (the Toilet Map) shows the location of more than 14,000 public and private public toilet facilities across Australia. Details of toilet facilities can also be found along major travel routes and for shorter journeys as well. Useful information is provided about each toilet, such as location, opening hours, availability of baby change rooms, accessibility for people with disabilities and the details of other nearby toilets.”

… more from Ordnance Survey

I’ve just had another reply from Ordnance Survey, which I think, due to its clarity, draws a line under something – namely councils publishing the OS public toilet point data as OpenData, even though the council know where their toilets are, and, indeed, put them there in the first place.

(unless you choose a different interpretation of the licence, which is none of my business.).

I’ve published their response first, as it’s more interesting. My email that they’re responding to is afterwards, and a little grumpier than I care for.

… more Open Data Councils

I’ve been doing some housekeeping

Namely making a spreadsheet of all the councils that I’ve contacted to ask if they would be able to make a dataset of info about their public toilets (location, opening hours etc) so that people who wish to make maps and apps to find toilets can make better ones.

I gave myself a fighting chance by only contacting councils that already publish some other free-to-use datasets (‘open data’) on their web pages, based on this list at openlylocal.com.

Anyway, here’s my spreadsheet for anyone into these things.

It’s interesting (no, really) because I included notes about the councils’ responses.

Link to my public toilet open data spreadsheet in Google Docs. 

I’m trying really hard to focus on all the helpful councils that created data or even explained forlornly why they could not. 

… Ordnance Survey’s Reply

I never said where I got to with Ordnance Survey.

There’s a good reason. I don’t really know.

I never did figure out how to embed the OS OpenData maps into WordPress. To be fair, I didn't try very hard. It just looked too difficult. Sorry Paul...

In March I wrote a blog post about how Ordnance Survey’s licensing rules were inhibiting my plan for local councils to publish data on where their public toilets are. You can read it here.

*Most* councils (i.e. all but one of my acquaintance) said that they weren’t allowed to publish the locations of their public toilets by giving Latitude/Longitude co-ordinates, because this information came from their internal mapping systems (‘GIS’) which Ordnance Survey provided, and own.

The toilet data itself is part of the ‘Points of Interest’ dataset, provided to Ordnance Survey by an external company called Point X.

Most of Point X’s data is provided by Ordnance Survey.

*flounces*

So. Any council that provides toilet data would have to do so by going the extra mile. This would mean replotting data on Google Maps or similar, or going out and finding the location data of public toilets themselves using a GPS. Basically, do something less convenient than they would like to. Which in the under-funded world of local government feels like a bit of a killer.

But like I said, one council did think that OS would allow it. So I concluded that “the only way that I can see to solve this is to get confirmation one way or the other from Ordnance Survey themselves.”

………………

With help from the very helpful Paul Beauchamp on Twitter (who’s Twitter bio lists him as a member of the Award-Winning PR and Comms team at Ordnance Survey, and I can see why!), I got a couple of answers.

… London’s Toilet Info

more London-centric blogging, sorry…

However!

The Greater London Authority have been reinvestigating the state of London’s loos.

Before they write their report they would like to hear your thoughts on Toilet Data.

The GLA will be asking the London borough councils, nicely, to provide clear, complete, consistent information on their public toilet facilities, and in a common format, so that it can be re-used by absolutely anyone to make London-wide maps and toilet-finding applications and websites.

This would be a big improvement compared to now where the info is fractured across 33 council websites.

When it exists.

Which it frequently doesn’t.

Consequently they have been working on what this common format should be. They need to know what data the councils should include (e.g. location, opening times, type of facilities, access restrictions…) and how the data should be formatted.

… Ordnance Survey

I don’t know how actors do it.

Having to play emotional scenes where you cry-on-demand must be incredibly challenging. I don’t know anything that is soooo upsetting that it would squeeze real tears from my eyes just by thinking about it.

That is, until I started looking at Ordnance Survey Licensing Agreements.

(This is a screenshot of Ordnance Survey’s ‘open’ maps for public use. It’s a screenshot because there aren’t simple instructions to embed it in a free WordPress blog. What’s more, the ‘public use’ maps aren’t relevant to this post, and (still) don’t show the public toilets. But it Looks Pretty.)

This trauma began a month ago when, in my innocence, I tried emailing some more ‘open councils’ from the OpenlyLocal.com Scoreboard. These new councils had just published a few bits of spending-related data, but no school locations, no library locations, no ‘dataset of the location of the 120 000 lampposts in Lesser Hampton’, and certainly no toilets.

[Context: In order to make The Great British Public Toilet Map I'd like councils to publish information on where their toilets are as 'Open Data', meaning the type of file that anyone can download ('open') and that's compatible with computer-programming ('data').

To you and me it would look like this...

OpenData .csv file for (doomed) Manchester Public Toilets

...which might not look that exciting, but magical computer programs could join together all 300-odd local council datasets and display it on one map!

This would make it easier for people to find out where public toilets are (and if they're open and what facilities are provided) without having to check 300-odd council websites]

So, I asked these new ‘open’ councils if they’d considered publishing open data for public toilets and sent my email to the attention of their web/data enthusiast (who doesn’t have one of those?!)

In return I got lots of replies from very nice GIS managers explaining that this was not possible. Or, more to the point, not legal.

Eek.

But why?

… Wandsworth – Part II

What is a public toilet?

I keep talking about local authorities as the providers of public toilets. In reality I’m not quite that naive.

For there are many ‘publicly-accessible toilets’ that do not (or may not) fall under council control, e.g.

• Parks
• Shopping Centres
• Transport Hubs (Train / Underground / Bus / Port)

Here’s a sliding scale of publicly-accessible toilets that I made.

Green is public sector, blue is private sector.

By ‘accessible’ I mean mentally, or legally, more than physically (accessible is often used to describe wheelchair-accessible facilities – that’s a whole other issue). Accessible is clearly not a great word to use – suggestions are welcome… Some of the ordering is a little dubious too…

Further down the scale most of the toilets are not ‘intended’ for the general public. Including these in maps and apps rather disadvantages those people who don’t wish to ask favours or blag it. Not really inclusive design…

My earlier map of the London Borough of Wandsworth toilets showed the council’s Superloos (marked in yellow) and Community Toilet Scheme (blue), but now it has all of the other publicly-accessible toilets too. This has added nearly 20 extra loos, more than some councils have in the first place!

View Larger Map

Where did these extra toilets come from?

… Open Data Councils

In December and January I contacted the most open data friendly councils to ask them of the possibility of adding open data on public toilets.

An ‘Open Data Friendly Council’ was determined by OpenlyLocal.com’s UK Councils Open Data Scoreboard, which at the time stood at about 40 ‘truly open’ councils (although I skipped the County Councils (not responsible for toilets) and a couple others (data newbies))