People are so weird about bathrooms and genders and who should get to go to the bathroom where, when, and with whom. It's such nonsense. Universal family/single-occupant restrooms forever. They're safer, more equitable, more private, and simply better.
posted by cupcakeninja at 8:47 AM on October 20 [13 favorites]

I seem to recall having heard of research with the same results 20+ years ago. (Not a complaint about the post - rather a complaint about how even when research about women’s experiences in public life, medicine, etc. is actually done, it often goes overlooked and gets forgotten about. Grar/sigh.)
posted by eviemath at 8:55 AM on October 20 [8 favorites]

One of the theaters I perform at was customized so the ladies room is around probably 2.5x the size of the men's. No queue issues and you are in and out.
posted by jenfullmoon at 9:02 AM on October 20 [5 favorites]

Universal family/single-occupant restrooms forever

A wall of urinals does handle more standing urinators per minute per square foot than stalls do, which is a relevant metric most places that there's queues. But I don't see any reason one couldn't have a washroom with common hand-washing zone, a lot of individual ungendered stalls, and a separate and well-labeled urinal area.
posted by aubilenon at 9:06 AM on October 20 [12 favorites]

But I don't see any reason one couldn't have a washroom with common hand-washing zone, a lot of individual ungendered stalls, and a separate and well-labeled urinal area.

The annals of "public restroom layouts where I have been harassed for my gender" features gendered facilities with a common hand washing zone.
posted by hoyland at 9:19 AM on October 20 [6 favorites]

(While washing my hands, if that wasn't obvious.)
posted by hoyland at 9:19 AM on October 20

Yes, this has been a long recognized issue. I've noticed a few fairly modern construction building that seem to address the problem with significantly larger women's restrooms. Single occupant bathrooms get costly on space to capacity ratio, however, even if they are broadly popular as communal facilities.
posted by 2N2222 at 9:29 AM on October 20 [1 favorite]

But I don't see any reason one couldn't have a washroom with common hand-washing zone, a lot of individual ungendered stalls, and a separate and well-labeled urinal area.

This is how virtually every public restroom is designed here in Scandinavia and it's fantastic. I would love for this model to be adopted in the US. As long as the stalls are fully enclosed I don't see the issue.

They also opened a version of this at the new Kansas City airport a year or so ago (which I pass through occasionally), if you happen to pass through you can check it out. Not surprisingly the usual conservative dimwits got upset about it "courting controversy", "being woke", "inviting harrassment", etc. Thankfully most folks either seem to love it or don't care - it's a bathroom, most of us just want a clean, accessible place to do our business.
posted by photo guy at 9:32 AM on October 20 [7 favorites]

A wall of urinals does handle more standing urinators per minute per square foot than stalls do

While we're solving the problem of queues for women who need to use the bathroom it'd be great if we could also get rid of urinals... or at the very least space them out with better partitions so that I'm never shoulder-to-shoulder with a stranger while relieving myself. One of the venues I see shows at from time to time has a trough urinal, which is just an ungodly concept.
posted by jzb at 10:02 AM on October 20 [2 favorites]

One of the venues I see shows at from time to time has a trough urinal, which is just an ungodly concept

Isn't that the norm for urinals? All the urinals I've seen have been trough urinals.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 10:13 AM on October 20

Trough urinals are quite common in Australia, very much less so in the US, where it’s typically inefficient adjacent single fixtures. American plumbing is weird across the board.
posted by zamboni at 10:15 AM on October 20 [1 favorite]

They also opened a version of this at the new Kansas City airport a year or so ago (which I pass through occasionally), if you happen to pass through you can check it out. Not surprisingly the usual conservative dimwits got upset about it "courting controversy", "being woke", "inviting harrassment", etc..

To steal a joke: just wait til they see the bathrooms on the plane!
posted by jedicus at 10:16 AM on October 20 [2 favorites]

Isn't that the norm for urinals? All the urinals I've seen have been trough urinals.

Might be different where you are, but it's not really typical in the US. I think it used to be more common at places like stadiums or performance venues where a lot of capacity was needed (or very occasionally at bars) but I don't know that I've seen them in newer buildings.
posted by LionIndex at 10:20 AM on October 20 [1 favorite]

if we could also get rid of urinals

The primary goal of the ABCB study discussed in the article is to make queues shorter, not longer. Unless you have an unlimited building size and budget, eliminating urinals would make things worse for everyone.
posted by zamboni at 10:26 AM on October 20 [7 favorites]

Also, Military
posted by aleph at 10:33 AM on October 20

Toilet lines are longer for women than men

... and in other news, water is wet.
posted by panglos at 10:34 AM on October 20 [5 favorites]

No, it's more like "Women have toilets?" /ignorance
posted by aleph at 10:38 AM on October 20 [1 favorite]

... and in other news, water is wet

Yes, but how wet is it, and how much water are we dealing with?

Quantifying something that everybody knows is useful, particularly when you’re attempting to codify a solution to the problem in a building code. For anyone else who can’t be bothered to read the article:

The issue of queuing for women's bathrooms has been raised in a new proposal by the Australian Building Codes Board.

The agency — which writes the national construction code — is seeking to increase the minimum number of cubicles in women's bathrooms required in new single-auditorium theatres and cinemas.

Chief executive Gary Rake said the agency undertook an analysis to quantify the issue.

"At entertainment venues, like a theatre, there are very particular peak usage times, such as immediately before the show, at the intermission, and immediately after the show," Mr Rake said.

If endorsed, the board's proposal would amend the national construction code and increase the number of cubicles built in women's bathrooms.

"A small facility with a target capacity of 300 people would have, at the moment, four closet pans for women. Under our revised proposal that would increase by 50 per cent to six," Mr Rake said.

"If we move to a larger theatre, one that had a capacity of around 5,000 people, currently we have 34 closet pans, and under the new proposal we'd increase that to 46."

posted by zamboni at 10:45 AM on October 20 [6 favorites]

On bike trips we just normalize women going into the men's room. We usually are traveling in a large pack, in case someone cared. No one has ever cared
posted by eustatic at 10:46 AM on October 20 [1 favorite]

The urinal that was the most efficient and also worst possible design (that I have used) was:


A metal trough in a circle at a stadium and half time was just a yellow haze.

So optimizing has limits!
posted by Acari at 11:00 AM on October 20 [1 favorite]

This is how virtually every public restroom is designed here in Scandinavia and it's fantastic.

Was going to make same comment. We took a trip to Sweden last summer and the bathrooms made so much goddamn sense, I can’t understand why the US doesn’t do likewise. One of our neighborhood bars build a Scandanavian bathroom (3 individual closets with full doors and toilets+ a common sink area) and it works so much better for their small, limited space than two gendered bathrooms would.
posted by caution live frogs at 11:05 AM on October 20 [3 favorites]

We had a big thing in Houston about this after a woman used the men's room at either the Summit (now Lakewood Church) or wherever the football team was playing because she had to go right then and the line for women was overlong. There was a "potty parity" law in the Texas legislature in 1991 afterwards to require twice as many toilets for women than men in future stadium/event building construction. I can find reports of the trial and of the (Texas) Senate passing the law but nobody includes bill numbers so I can't refresh my memory on what happened. (Pretty sure it was not signed and I think there would have been articles about it if it had.)

While searching I found this article from Texas Architect magazine back in 2018 which talks about the gender-neutral restrooms at the Alamo Drafthouse (I know) Mueller in Austin. I've used those restrooms and similar ones at Heim BBQ here in Dallas. They were a little disconcerting at first, especially doing what passes for a makeup check in front of dudes who are also washing hands, but after the first time or two I got over my ingrained habits and it was fine.
posted by gentlyepigrams at 11:05 AM on October 20

Anyone with women in their lives know that it's a fact that women always have a toilet que even when men don't. I'm surprised and impressed with Texas since the norm there seems to be "What can we do to make women's lives more difficult?". Now if we can get everyone else on board.
posted by evilDoug at 11:12 AM on October 20

"...after the first time or two I got over my ingrained habits and it was fine."

A lot of people won't "g(e)t over". And an even bigger amount won't even try. Most of them from my generation, and those a little younger.

People are weird. I would expect some people will adapt (at different speeds) but it's going to take "next generation" for a lot of people. The best I hope for is everybody getting along as best we can while it happens.
posted by aleph at 11:15 AM on October 20

> One of the venues I see shows at from time to time has a trough urinal, which is just an ungodly concept.

Ha, a luxury! *stares directly at you*
posted by lucidium at 11:18 AM on October 20 [2 favorites]

On bike trips we just normalize women going into the men's room.

I still look back fondly on that one time I was at a beer festival being held inside an aerospace museum and made my way to an out of the way second set of bathrooms on a different floor than the one where beer was being served. The women's line was ~30 people out the door. The men's line was nonexistent. I'm not sure there's another time in my life where I can be said to have led a charge, but I did indeed martial a dozen people from the line into the men's room, to the brief surprise of the one guy washing his hands.

More recently, my work converted some gendered bathrooms to nongendered ones with full height stall doors, with signs for whether there are urinals inside or just toilets. They're great! Zero confusion except for that one time I walked into the non-urinal one and found a construction worker pissing into a toilet with the stall door open. Still scratching my head over that one.
posted by deludingmyself at 11:33 AM on October 20 [1 favorite]

People are so weird about bathrooms and genders and who should get to go to the bathroom where, when, and with whom. It's such nonsense. Universal family/single-occupant restrooms forever. They're safer, more equitable, more private, and simply better.

They recently remodeled one of the high-schools here as non-gendered, all private stall. kids just use them as shag spots and private graffiti temples. At any given time like half of them are down for maintenance and there aren't enough left so all the kids who want to go to the bathroom between classes can.

They also remodeled the bathrooms at Pioneer Square in the same way, but it works fine there. The difference being that there a guard present in the bathroom at all times.

Does this work other places in America without having to have adult supervision?
posted by Dr. Twist at 12:11 PM on October 20

The Carnegie library I started going to when I learned to read had urinals that went all the way to the floor, and were so tall and broad I could have stepped into one without ducking my head as an 8 year old.

Never really understood that, but they were impressive.
posted by jamjam at 12:26 PM on October 20 [1 favorite]

kids just use them as shag spots and private graffiti temples. At any given time like half of them are down for maintenance

Are these related? Neither sex nor graffiti renders a toilet inoperable - arguably, the bathroom is more useful for providing a space for teenagers to be teenagers more safely than so many other places.
posted by Dysk at 12:28 PM on October 20 [5 favorites]

The dive bar I frequented at university was a long trough that wasn't even hooked up to a water supply. Every now and then an employee would take big buckets and fill the trough with ice cubes.
posted by zardoz at 1:36 PM on October 20 [1 favorite]

Since we're talking about bathrooms, I would like to advocate for every bathroom door, everywhere in existence, to have a "VACANT/OCCUPIED" indicator, because nothing makes me more anxious than a wall of closed stall doors in a gender-neutral bathroom where I can't tell if any or all of the stalls are occupied. As in, I will just leave the bathroom if nobody comes out of one within a certain threshold of time.
posted by grumpybear69 at 1:47 PM on October 20 [8 favorites]

It can even be a gendered bathroom! I just have no interest in knocking on a door or jiggling a handle, because I've been on the other side of that situation and it is nofunsnick.
posted by grumpybear69 at 1:48 PM on October 20 [3 favorites]

Last weekend I went to a high school football game here in Cincinnati. The secondary i.e. furthest away from the entrance men's bathroom had trough urinals. From how pristine they looked, these were recently installed.

I can remember as a child in the 1980s and going to a game at Wrigley Field where I believe I first encountered a trough urinal. That was an image seared into my memory.
posted by mmascolino at 1:57 PM on October 20

At a theatre once I saw an attendant doing traffic control in the ladies' - noting which stall had just come free and waving people over to the right one. Just cutting through that few seconds of hesitation really made the queue flow.
posted by I claim sanctuary at 2:02 PM on October 20 [3 favorites]

I once used a non-gendered rest room with a trough urinal in France. It was fine -- you face the urinal to pee, so nobody walking past is going to see your dick (not that I care). Folks just need to lighten up.
posted by novalis_dt at 2:08 PM on October 20

Ms Webber said the agency's proposal was a step forward in solving an "equity issue".
The whole issue could be solved by getting rid of gendered toilets, in my view. There's no reasonable way for any facility catering for large numbers to have enough toilets that nobody ever has to queue, but it's fairly easy to make sure everyone has to queue equally. I've seen this becoming more common at big events, where rows of portable toilets are deployed so, even though there are queues, it's everyone in the same queue. My most recent observation of this included blocks of urinals labelled 'standing room only'.

A metal trough in a circle at a stadium and half time was just a yellow haze.
I once visited a swanky whiskey bar in Melbourne and there were separate normal-except-for-being-black urinals like you'd see in any modern public urinal, except they were arranged in a circle, facing inward. The entire interior of the room was black (in keeping with the aesthetic of the bar itself) and there was no light whatsoever except for pin-point downlights aimed at the centre of each urinal. Awkward doesn't even begin to describe the experience.

Trough urinals are pretty common in Australia, almost always in older pubs and similar places. But at least with a trough you don't feel obliged to make eye contact.
posted by dg at 3:10 PM on October 20

no interest in knocking on a door or jiggling a handle,

I may have, once or twice, when the stall door was jiggled called out

This station is occupied. Will be for some time. Which is apparently a misquote, but still funny. So I'll probably do it again.
posted by howbigisthistextfield at 3:11 PM on October 20

Not just Scandinavia; I’ve seen a fair few non-gendered restrooms in Amsterdam too, although maybe slightly fewer. I was at the Anne Frank house last week and they had them too. (Yes, various tourists were confused. Mostly Brits, if I was listening properly while queuing).

I have to say gender neutral bathrooms are less confusing when purpose-built (because there’s just one room instead of two).

And, less likely for various heavily gendered events to run out of spaces— physics conferences, in my experience, usually don’t have too much of a wait for the women’s. (And when they do we all celebrate together a little because it’s still rare).

So, building code ought to encourage gender neutral setups.
posted by nat at 3:24 PM on October 20 [1 favorite]

I would like to advocate for every bathroom door, everywhere in existence, to have a "VACANT/OCCUPIED" indicator

Agreed. Do This, this is easy. And get rid of those circular hand washing sinks, because they do become urinals in GameDay situations, and that can be unpleasant

These are much better courses of action than figuring out how to segregate bathrooms better. Put me in the column that thinks that the segregation is the problem.

Maybe we should have women only bathrooms, due to the logistical issues described above, but not the other way around for sure. Maybe formalizing this would trigger some kind of culture war response I guess.

I feel like we can informally come to agreement that it s fine for women to use the men's bathroom. And women can do this themselves in a pack, I am sure. There are just basic norms against cruelty that we can fall back on. All of these bathroom segregatIon conversations are just so annoying.

I am a father of small daughters. So of course my daughters come into the men s bathroom to use the toilet. I think I have gotten a look exactly one time, and I responded with "what?" And the response was, "oh. Yeah."

Also, women only bathrooms don't necessarily prevent the thing that we collectively fear, men assaulting women in the bathrooms, or, generally, assault of all kinds in any permutation happening in a bathroom. From my experience with local high schools, boys hurting girls happens anyway, unfortunately. In my all boys high school, one sided 'fights' eould often happen on the bathroom just because it was a place relatively free of adult surveillance.

There are other kinds of solutions for that kind of problem. Segregation of the bathrooms is not one.
posted by eustatic at 3:47 PM on October 20

I would like to advocate for every bathroom door, everywhere in existence, to have a "VACANT/OCCUPIED" indicator, because nothing makes me more anxious than a wall of closed stall doors in a gender-neutral bathroom where I can't tell if any or all of the stalls are occupied.

I agree with this! I don't think I've ever seen it in the wild, but the closest is bathrooms where the stall doors will swing open if not locked, so that works as an indicator If you're familiar with the bathroom in question. As a bonus, it makes it all but impossible to forget to lock the door!
posted by Dysk at 3:54 PM on October 20

We had a town pool, back in the 60s. And the male locker room had a trough.
Grade school had the tall ones like Jamjam mentioned.
In Antwerp, by the cathedral in the center, is a "piss wall". Water flows down it continuously.

Seriously though, I suspect a city wants to provide such places, as it avoids urine in places that aren't getting washed.
posted by Goofyy at 3:59 PM on October 20 [1 favorite]

Are these related? Neither sex nor graffiti renders a toilet inoperable

I omitted "constant vandalism"
posted by Dr. Twist at 4:09 PM on October 20 [3 favorites]

Are these related? Neither sex nor graffiti renders a toilet inoperable - arguably, the bathroom is more useful for providing a space for teenagers to be teenagers more safely than so many other places.

This cannot be a serious comment. Come on. No, people having sex in bathrooms is not generally a great use of them especially when people actually want to use them for their intended purpose, and it is not the job of schools to provide safe spaces for graffiti and sex. I hope this isn't the common outcome of unisex bathrooms though because that would be a real bummer.
posted by ch1x0r at 4:25 PM on October 20

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