Loos in the news
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- June
- 10
I now know a lot about “potty parity” after talking with Robert Brubaker of the American Restroom Association about Rockland’s Board of Health decision to deliniate a toilet ratio for restaurants with over 51 seats. And, for the record, Brubaker, who knows more about bathroom use, length of time spent, types of facilities, traffic flow for toilets, that just about anyone, said that the 51-patron number seems to be the tipping point everywhere. Once you hit that capacity, he says, you start seeing lines at the loo.
Onto potty language: It seems that those agencies that deal with restrooms use terms very specifically. In plumbing regulation-speak, the room is the “toilet” and the commode is the “water closet” and the sink is the “lavatory.” So, even in the big department store, the actual room is the toilet, though there are 20 toilets in there.
ADA adds space: Also, the Americans with Disabilities Act regulates the amount of accessible stalls. But if there’s only one stall, it has to be accessible (makes sense.) That means many smaller restaurants just take down the stall and leave an open room. Problem is, that means only one person can be in there at a time. That shuts out “multi-use” moments of one person washing up as another uses the facilities. Everything’s a tradeoff.
More potty info: Public restrooms with timers record length of stay information. Muncipalities have found that the timers (which trigger doors unlocking and/or lights switching off when the time’s up) have to be set to 15 or even 20 minutes. That’s hardly the average stay, but such a visit happens enough to make the length of time have to change.
This entry was posted
on Tuesday, June 10th, 2008 at 12:25 pm by Nancy Cutler.
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Pleased to see this issue getting discussed and apparently something getting done about it. Sure is a drag when you need to go and the doors locked or worse there’s a line.
What’s raising the cost for restaurateurs is the cost of the employees restroom. Not all states require separate facilities for workers.
Presumably that employee toilet is unisex. Why not make the additional required toilets unisex as well?
Stalls with full sized walls and doors would be grouped around an attractive hand washing area. That would automatically bring potty parity plus significant savings in floor space and overall cost. And you’d probably need only one ADA stall!
And don’t you think having hand washing observed by a mixed group of diners might significantly increase hand washing – both among those using the stalls and those who just want to wash up before eating.
I am all for unisex restrooms because then when there are free ones in one sex and the other can’t use them. This way, the facilities are utilized more effeciently and both sexes (or all sexes)can wait in one line.
More restrooms are needed. When you ‘gotta go’, you ‘gotta go’. Children have to go ‘right now’, people on medications or who have medical issues need ‘to go right away’. They can’t walk blocks or take the time to try and find one, locked or blocked or unavailable. It is inhumane.
Humans need “to go”, and apparently laws are in place to meet the need, but things have yet ‘to go”.
But if the restrooms are unisex then men will have lines too. No sir I don’t like it!