Its the most annoying thing when I go into NYC.
But the best public bathrooms in the city (and probably most cities), that are always open, are the ones in the civil courthouses. If you are there after 9:30 AM (typical time for jury duty check in and courtroom calendar calls) there is virtually no wait to get past security.
Unless you get out of a major city. In some of the suburban or rural areas then things go downhill pretty quickly
Well, I should hope so! 
i am reminded of an important lesson a plumber working in my apartment once shared with me:
“water flows downhill. it ain’t all water.”
When I was a USPS letter carrier I learned how to find accessible restrooms in many places; this became a big issue in winter when you needed to download the coffee you’d filled up with to keep warm. Most office buildings have locked restrooms on the first/lobby floor (if they have any at all) but upstairs the bathrooms are usually unlocked. Residential neighborhoods were more problematic.
The normal list that comes up is: easier for people in wheelchairs to pull up to and open the door, easier to mop under, easier to spot if (drug users?) people are inside. I’m skeptical of those reasons, but I’m sure they’re cheaper to build.
The European, full size doors do make it easier to make the bathroom gender neutral—at least from what I’ve seen. I was a bit surprised to see a few American friends find a gender natural, series of individual stalls weird to use and made comments after.
I’m living in Europe right now and my beef with the bathrooms are that the smell sticks around. I also find them more claustrophobic. Granted, it’s not just the doors. The whole bathroom is designed slightly different. Each bathroom usually has a trash can and a sink. I also feel like fewer businesses offer public bathrooms. The grocery store and train station both require payment and I’ve avoided them.
They were right to cover the water fountains at the start of the pandemic. Even if the virus turned out to be purely an airborne risk, they had no way of knowing at that time.
Since then, it’s been determined that COVID transmissions are well over 99% airborne. They won’t definitively say that you can’t get the virus through contacting an infected surface with a mucosal membrane, it’s just that it’s so easy to get via respiration that your lungs will get inoculated before your hand even touches the infected surface.
Clearly we should turn that over to the private sector, too… /s
But that’s SOCIALISM!!! /s
I saw the musical “Ragtime” there a long time ago and it still to this day one of the most ornate buildings can think of. It’s kind of sad to see the name was changed. Seems kind of par for the course in Chicago where lots of old things get renamed. I 'm waiting for it to happen to Wrigley Field next.
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