Where's the worst loo? JC student spends hours reviewing 159 public toilets for project

SINGAPORE — Student Kelvin Yap had spent more than 30 hours reviewing 159 public toilets islandwide.

And after posting his findings on online forum Reddit on March 31, his singular obsession snowballed into thousands of views and incredulous comments on social media platforms including TikTok and X, formerly known as Twitter.

The 16-year-old, who is in his first year of junior college, says he embarked on the project with a group of four other classmates as part of an ungraded school assignment to do a "self-directed learning journey" addressing a potential problem in Singapore.

Kelvin's toilet tour across Singapore took place over four days during the recent March school holidays, and focused mainly on MRT station loos.

Armed with a monthly concession pass to minimise costs, he evaluated each restroom on a 50-point scale, considering cleanliness, aesthetics as well as availability of amenities such as bidets, auto-flushing, accessibility features and signage.

The privy at The Shoppes at Marina Bay Sands took the top spot, while Stevens MRT station on the Thomson-East Coast Line emerged as his highest-ranking MRT station toilet.

According to his list, the worst-performing MRT station washrooms were on the North East Line, while the lowest-ranking toilet overall was at a Bukit Panjang coffee shop.

"I don't think it's the worst in Singapore, it's just the worst toilet we went to," he says.

What started out as a joke among friends transformed into a serious undertaking.

He found the idea intriguing enough to make a full-scale effort at completing the project by tabulating the group's data on many spreadsheets.

"About halfway through, I considered stopping," he admits, adding that traipsing around Singapore in the heat was hard work.

"But at that point, I already had 80 data points, and I figured I should have something to show for my work."

It helped that this project meant that the transport infrastructure enthusiast could explore far-flung corners of the island he had never visited before, such as Tuas, and admire the design of each MRT station.

Overall, he says the reception to his project from his peers has been mostly positive.

"When I went to school on April 1, the first thing my form teacher asked me was: Kelvin, you're famous now, you know that right?" he recounts with a chuckle.

The platform he posted his data on, the Reddit forum known as SGExams, is a frequent haunt of teachers and students alike.

"There's a certain scepticism as to why I would do this. That's natural, because I don't think what I did was particularly rational," he says.

"The subject was really unserious, but the way that we went about it was really serious."

He adds: "I think it's encouraged people to explore the silly things they're interested in. Because, with the right amount of effort and curiosity, these projects can turn out to be so much more."

The project also drew the attention of Jack Sim, founder of Restroom Association (Singapore), or RAS.

The RAS rating system was a source of inspiration for Kelvin and his peers, and they took things a step further by presenting a detailed breakdown of how each lavatory received its score in their spreadsheet.

"We need more people like him as users. Real-time generated data is so much better than RAS ratings captured at a moment in time," says Sim, who adds that RAS lacks the manpower to review all of Singapore's latrines.

The 159 toilets reviewed do not mark the end of the restroom road for Kelvin and his friends, however.

Seeing the reception to their project, they plan on continuing with it as part of their graded project work.

In the works: A more detailed breakdown of Singapore's toilet hall of fame.

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This article was first published in The Straits Times. Permission required for reproduction.