3. Advance identification of available restrooms was a consideration
As anyone who has ever traveled by car with small children can attest, coordinated restroom stops are a virtual impossibility. Not all of the children need to use the facilities at the same time, and seldom do. During the Jim Crow era, not all facilities were available at every potential stopping point, at least not for the Black motorist. Clearly identifying them as part of the planning of one’s route was paramount. So was using them when available, as changes to facilities subsequent to the publishing of the Green Book was always a possibility. It seems to modern sensibilities the denial of the use of a gas station’s restroom to children is unthinkable, but it was a fact of life during the Jim Crow era.
One reason Black motorists accepted such conditions by choosing to travel by automobile was because the conditions in the nation’s mass transit systems were often worse. Railcars offered to Black customers frequently did not have restrooms, Black passengers were expected to use the facilities offered at stations, which often did not have running water and were little more than outhouses. In many smaller stations of the South and Midwest they were outhouses. The Green Book offered an opportunity for a Black motorist to meticulously plan a trip for business or pleasure during which he would encounter as little inconvenience as possible under the racist laws of the place and time.