Public toilets in Mechelen

Open the free Fontavio app with toilets selected and tap Closest: it points a needle at the nearest one with a distance and a walking estimate. A home-screen widget opens straight into that from a locked phone.

Some are and some are not, and each listing says which, with the amount where somebody recorded it. You can filter the map to free places only, which hides the ones nobody has priced yet as well as the paid ones.

Filter for open now and the list answers it for the time you are looking. A place recorded as 24/7 shows as open around the clock; one with no hours on record shows hours unknown, which is not the same as closed.

They come from contributors and site operators, and the app checks them against your phone’s clock. Treat them as a strong guide rather than a guarantee, since hours can still slip on a holiday.

Places that expect you to be a customer are listed and labelled customers-only, which is a different thing from a paid public toilet. You can see which is which before you walk in.

Some listings carry wheelchair access, a changing table or Euro key access, where a contributor added those details, and you can filter for them. Filtering hides every place that has not been described yet, which today includes accessible toilets nobody has got round to recording.

Where somebody recorded one, the listing says so and you can filter for it. It is among the details most often missing from open map data, so an empty result means nobody has described it rather than that there is none.

The whole city, wherever contributors have added places. Coverage is naturally denser near the centre, and outer districts fill in as the people who live there add what they pass.

A contributor confirmed recently that the place still matches what is listed. It says nothing about how clean it was on the day.

With Fontavio Pro you can pick stops along a route and open them in Google Maps as one trip. Without Pro, search the destination and the map jumps there, so you can work tomorrow out tonight.

Report it from the app so a moderator can update or remove it. If it has been replaced by something, adding the new one helps more than removing the old one.