|
 If you’ve ever spent time lurking around the bathrooms of your local bars and restaurants, you might be struck by two things: A.) Women stand in line to use the bathroom much too long and B.) Women often leave the bathroom chatting away with a new friend.
Now, thanks to scientists from Ghent University, no longer will those life-long friendships be forged while waiting in line to use the bathroom.
The Problem
According to the Ghent scientists, there are a variety of reasons contributing to the increased wait times outside of women’s bathrooms versus men’s rooms.
One reason: Because urinals occupy less space than a standard bathroom stall, there are fewer stalls to accommodate women.
Another cause is due to women typically outfitting themselves in complicated attire. If you’ve ever tried to remove a pair of uncooperative Spanx®, you know what I am talking about. It takes women longer to disrobe and then to subsequently…re-robe (?).
A third possible cause for the bottleneck at the bathroom, according to researchers, is a combination of the first two reasons with the added ingredient of everyone trying to occupy that space at once.
The Solution
Ghent researchers created six different bathroom design scenarios to address the issue, ultimately settling on a unisex design that offered two bathroom stalls for every one urinal.
According to their findings, researchers determined that the female wait time in the bathroom would be reduced from the average six minutes to less than a minute and a half (a 63-percent reduction) using the proposed design. Not only would the unisex bathroom design solve the waiting problem, it would also address, according to researchers, the headline-making issues affecting the transgender community.
Do you think a perfectly engineered bathroom will solve the issue of bathroom wait times?
Image credit: Lobster1 / CC BY-SA 3.0
| 
2
Re: Engineering the Perfect Bathroom
Good Answers:
"Almost" Good Answers: