Public toilet

Terminology

Public toilets are known by many names in different varieties of English. One of the more formal circumlocutions is "public convenience", as in the Guilford Place public conveniences, an architecturally valuable example.

In American English, "restroom" usually denotes a toilet facility designed for use by the public. However, "bathroom" is also commonly used. "Comfort station" sometimes refers to a visitor welcome center such as those found in national parks.

In Canadian English, public facilities are always called "washrooms". The word "toilet" generally denotes the fixture itself rather than the room. The word "washroom" is never used to mean "utility room" or "mud room" as it is in some parts the United States. "Bathroom" is generally used to refer to the room in the home that contains a bath or shower.

In Britain, Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore, and New Zealand, the terms in use are "public toilet", "public lavatory" (abbreviated "lav") and more informally, "public loo". A "bathroom" is a room containing a bath, a "washroom" is a room for washing hands, and a "restroom" is a room to rest in when tired; none of which would necessarily contain a toilet. As public toilets were traditionally signed as "Gentlemen" or "Ladies", the colloquial terms "the Gents" and "the Ladies" indicates the facility itself. The British Toilet Association, sponsor of the Loo of the Year Award, refers to public toilets collectively as "away from home" toilets.

In Philippine English, "comfort room", or "C.R.", is the most common term in use.

In continental Europe, both "toilet", a translation of the French les toilettes, and "WC" (abbreviation for "water closet", an older term for the flush toilet) are common.

Mosques, madrassas (schools) and other places Muslims gather, have public sex-segregated "wash rooms" since Islam requires specific procedures for cleansing parts of the body before prayer. These rooms normally adjoin the toilets, which are also subject to Muslim hygienical jurisprudence and Islamic toilet etiquette.

Types

Many public toilets are permanent small buildings visible to passersby on the street. Others are underground, including older facilities in Britain and Canada. Contemporary street toilets include automatic, self-cleaning toilets in self-contained pods; an example is the Sanisette, which first became popular in France.

Another traditional type that has been modernized is the screened French street urinal known as a pissoir (vespasienne). An updated cylindrical urinal that lowers beneath street level out of the way and pops up during hours when it's needed is the Urilift Pop Up Urinal. It is typically installed in entertainment districts and made operational only during weekend evenings and nights. This urinal brand invented in the Netherlands, also offers a pop up toilet for women.

Permanent public toilets may be maintained by private firms. The companies are then permitted to use the external surfaces of the enclosures for advertising. The installations are part of a street furniture contract between the out-of-home advertising company and the city government, and allow these public conveniences to be installed and maintained without requiring funds from the municipal budget.

Various portable toilet technologies are used as public toilets. Portables can be moved into place where and when needed and are popular at outdoor festivals and events. A portable toilet can either be connected to the local sewage system or store the waste in a holding tank until it is emptied by a vacuum truck. Portable composting toilets require removal of the container to a composting facility.[6]

The standard wheelchair-accessible public toilet features wider doors, ample space for turning, lowered sinks, and grab bars for safety. Features above and beyond this standard are advocated by the Changing Places campaign. Features include a hoist for an adult, a full-sized changing bench, and space for up to two caregivers.

Purposes

As an "away from home" toilet room, a public toilet can provide far more than access to the toilet for urination and defecation. People also wash their hands, use the mirrors for grooming, get drinking water (e.g. refilling water bottles), attend to menstrual hygiene needs, and use the waste bins. Public toilet may also become places where harassment of others or illegal activities occur, particularly if principles of Crime prevention through environmental design (CPTED) are not applied in the design of the facility.

Health aspects

Public toilets play a role in community health and individual well-being. When toilets are available, people are able to enjoy outings and physical activities in their communities. By making it possible for people get out of their cars and onto their feet, bicycles and mass transit, public toilets can contribute to improved environmental health. Mental well-being is enhanced when people are out with families and friends and know there's a place "to go."

Public toilets serve people who are “restroom challenged.”[9] First, there are those who need to go very frequently. These people may have normal conditions – young age, old age, females who are pregnant or menstruating – or medical conditions. Second, there are those whose need for a toilet comes urgently, suddenly and without warning. These include most people with chronic conditions such as Crohn’s disease and colitis as well as those temporarily afflicted with food borne illnesses.[9]

The inability to meet essential physiological needs because there is no available toilet contributes to health issues such as urinary tract infections, kidney infections, and digestive problems which can later develop into severe health problems. Inadequate access to a restroom when required can lead to substantial problems for men with prostate problems, women who are menstruating or going through menopause and anyone with urinary and fecal incontinence.

The difficulty that bus and truck drivers on timed schedules have in accessing toilets puts them risk of bladder and stool health problems. Furthermore, if the concentration of a driver in urgent need is compromised, this becomes a broader public safety concern.

Workers therefore have legal rights to access a toilet during their work day. In the United States, the Department of Labor's Occupational Health and Safety protects workers' rights to toilet breaks because of the documented health risks. This protected right to a toilet is a function of the workplace and is lost when workers leave the workplace and join the members of the general public.

According to the Government of Australia, more than 3.8 million Australians of all ages are estimated to suffer continence issues. This represents 18% of the Australian population. Therefore, the Department of Health and Ageing maintains the National Public Toilet Map to enable the public to find the closest facility.

The public toilet is not an amenity but rather an essential element in a community's physical and social infrastructure, without which people cannot participate in their communities with dignity and confidence.

Doorless entry

Modern public toilets may be designed with a labyrinth entrance (doorless entry), which prevents the spread of disease that might otherwise occur when coming in contact with a door. Doorless entry provides visual privacy while simultaneously offering a measure of security by allowing the passage of sound. Doorless entry also helps deter vandalism; fewer audible clues to another person entering discourages some vandals. Doorless entry may also be achieved simply by keeping an existing door propped open, closed only when necessary.

Coin operated entry

Pay toilets usually have some form of turnstile that is coin operated, or they have an attendant who collects the fee.

Service access

Modern public toilets often have a service entrance, utilities passage, and the like, that run behind all the fixtures. Sensors are installed in a separate room, behind the fixtures. Usually the separate room is just a narrow corridor or passageway.

Sensors

Sensor-operated fixtures (faucets, soap dispensers, hand dryers, paper towel dispensers) prevent the spread of disease by allowing patrons to circumvent the need to touch common surfaces. Sensor-operated toilets also help conserve water by limiting the amount used per flush, and require less routine maintenance. Each sensor views through a small window into each fixture. Sometimes the metal plates that house the sensor windows are bolted on from behind, to prevent tampering. Additionally, all of the electrical equipment is safely behind the walls, so that there is no danger of electric shock. However, a RCCB must be used for all such electrical equipment.

Lighting

Service lighting consisting of windows that run all the way around the outside of the toilet using electric lights behind the windows, to create the illusion of extensive natural light, even when the toilets are underground or otherwise do not have access to natural light. The windows are sometimes made of glass brick, permanently cemented in place. Lighting installed in service tunnels that run around the outside of the toilets provides optimum safety from electrical shock (keeping the lights outside the toilet), hygiene (no cracks or openings), security (no way for vandals to access the light bulbs), and aesthetics (clean architectural lines that maintain a continuity of whatever aesthetic design is present, e.g., the raw industrial urban aesthetic that works well with glass brick).

Cisterns (tanks)

Older toilets do not often have service ducts and often in old toilets that have been modernized, the toilet cistern might be hidden in a purpose-built 'box' tiled over. Often old toilets might still have high-level cisterns in the service ducts. On the outside, the toilet will be flushed by a handle (just like an ordinary low-level cistern toilet) although behind the wall this handle will activate a chain. Sometimes a long flushing trough will be used to ensure that the cistern can be refilled quickly after dual flushes. This trend of hiding cisterns and fittings behind the walls started in the late 1930s in the United States and in the United Kingdom from the 1950s and by the late 1960s it was unusual for toilet cisterns to be visible in public toilets. In some buildings such as schools, however, a cistern can still be visible, although high-level cisterns had become old-fashioned by the 1970s and a lot of schools now have low-level cisterns.

Fixtures

Public toilets by their nature have heavy usage, so they may rely on a flushometer with a stronger and louder flush than a home-usage toilet. Some high-vandalism settings, such as beaches or stadiums, will utilize metal toilets. Public toilets generally contain several of the following fixtures.

In the lockable cubicle (stall)

At the point of handwashing

Elsewhere

Graffiti and street art

Public toilets have long been associated with graffiti, often of a transgressive, gossippy, or low-brow humorous nature (cf. toilet humour). The word latrinalia—from latrine (toilet) and -alia (a collection)—was coined to describe this kind of graffiti. A famous example of such artwork was featured on the album cover of the satirical Tony Award Broadway musical Urinetown, using felt-tip pen scribblings.

As graffiti merged into street art, so some public street-level toilets began to make a feature of their visibility. The Hundertwasser toilet block is a colourful example in Kawakawa, New Zealand, designed by an Austrian artist and viewed as a tourist draw in a small town.

Drugs and vandalism

Some public toilets are known for drug-taking and drug-selling, as well as vandalism. This is associated with all "neglected, unsupervised buildings", not just toilets, and good cleanliness and maintenance, and ideally an attendant on the premises, can act as a protection against these problems.

Anonymous sex

Before the gay liberation movement, public toilets were amongst the few places where men too young to get into gay bars could meet others who they knew for sure to be gay. Many, if not most, gay and bisexual men at the time were closeted, and there were almost no public gay social groups for those under legal drinking age.

Sexual acts in public toilets are outlawed by many jurisdictions (e.g. the Sexual Offences Act 2003 in the UK). It is likely that the element of risk involved in cottaging makes it an attractive activity to some.

Privatization and closures

In some places, the provision of public toilet facilities is under great pressure. One response by public authorities is to close the buildings, often citing criminal activity. The United Kingdom government austerity programme has led to major council cut-backs to public toilet provision, with knock-on effects on the public realm as a whole. Some of the buildings, particularly the underground ones, are sold and used for other purposes, e.g. as a bar.

Another response is to privatise the toilets, so that a public good is provided by a contractor, just as private prisons are. The toilets may fall under the category of privately owned public space - anyone can use them, but the land ultimately belongs to the corporation in question. When toilets that have been privatised are improperly run, or closed, there may be calls to take them back into the control of the public authority, as with Westminster Council in central London - one of the wealthiest places in the world, where members of the public are reduced to urinating in the parks and streets for lack of available facilities.

Racial segregation

In parts of the United States, public toilets were subject to racial segregation, due to the Jim Crow laws prior to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This imposed significant restrictions on the lives of African-Americans. Those who were able to afford cars could avoid the indignities of segregated trains and buses, but they faced the difficulty of finding a public toilet they were allowed to use. Courtland Milloy of the Washington Post recalled that on cross-country roadtrips in the 1950s his parents were reluctant to stop the car to allow the children to relive themselves – it just wasn't safe. One solution to this was to carry a portable toilet (a sort of bucket-like arrangement) in the trunk of the car.

This treatment led to the creation of The Negro Motorist Green Book, an annually updated guidebook. Coping with discrimination on the road took some planning:

Uncle Otis had made this trip before, and he knew which places along the way offered "colored" bathrooms and which were better just to pass on by. Our map was marked and our route was planned that way, by the distances between service stations where it would be safe for us to stop.

Once the traveler had found the correct "colored restroom", however, it could serve "as a respite from the insults of the white world", akin to what is now called safe space.

Toilet symbol in unicode

Unicode provides several symbols for public toilets.

Legislation

Employees' rights to use the toilet vary between jurisdictions.

United States

The Restroom Access Act is legislation passed by several U.S. states that requires retail establishments that have toilet facilities for their employees to also allow customers to use the facilities if the customer suffers from an inflammatory bowel disease or other medical condition requiring immediate access to a toilet.

United Kingdom

In the United Kingdom, the Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992 requires businesses to provide toilets for their employees, along with washing facilities including soap or other suitable means of cleaning. Guidance on how many toilets to provide and what sort of washing facilities should be provided alongside them is given in the Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Approved Code of Practice and Guidance L24, available from Health and Safety Executive Books.

But there is no legal obligation on local authorities to provide public toilets, and although in 2008 the House of Commons Communities and Local Government Committee called for a duty on local authorities to develop a public toilet strategy, this was rejected by the Government.

Gender issues

Public toilets are usually segregated by sex, as indicated by written signs or pictograms.

Separation by sex and issues

In many cultures, separation by sex or gender is so characteristic of public toilets that pictograms of a man or a woman are used to indicate locations of the respective toilets, often without explicit reference to the fixtures themselves. In restaurants and other private locations, the identifications can be designed to match the decoration of the premises. Some toilets also function, in part, as changing rooms (locker rooms), owing to their gender-segregated nature. For example, in beach areas, a portion of the building is equipped with benches so that people can change into or out of their bathing suits.

In jurisdictions using the Uniform Plumbing Code, sex separation is a legal mandate via the building code.Amnesty International includes segregated toilets among its list of suggested measures to ensure the safety of females in schools. In many places the queues for the women's toilets are longer than those for the men's; efforts to deal with this are known as potty parity. Pay toilets disproportionately affect women.

Gender-segregated public toilets are a source of difficulty for some people; for example, men caring for babies may find that only the women's toilet has been fitted with a baby changing facility. Single men (such as divorced fathers) have similar problems when exercising visiting rights to their young daughters if they have only public areas to resort to. Legislation has been proposed in California that "requires buildings owned or partially owned by state or local governments, as well as other private buildings open to the public, as specified, to maintain at least one safe, sanitary, and convenient baby diaper changing station that is accessible to women and men". People with disabilities who need assistance to use the restroom have an additional problem if their helper is a different gender to themselves.

Transgender issues

In the 21st century, with increased exposure of the transgender community, there have been some initiatives calling for gender-neutral public toilets, instead of only male and female ones, to accommodate genderqueer individuals. Political activists have drawn on the commonality between public toilets being segregated formerly by race and still by sex. This has become an increasingly contentious issue, as shown in the battles over North Carolina's Public Facilities Privacy & Security Act 2016. Transgender and gender non-conforming persons also may be subject to embarrassment, harassment, or even assault or arrest by others offended by the presence of a person they interpret as being of a different anatomical sex to themselves.

Gender neutrality

Many public toilets have either individual or gender-neutral facilities. These can accommodate people with disabilities, elderly persons who may require assistance from a carer of another gender, or other cases where public gender-segregated facilities might lead to discomfort. There are also gender-neutral toilets in cases where gender-segregated ones are not practical, such as in aircraft lavatories and passenger train toilets. Toilet facilities for disabled people, especially those reliant on a wheelchair, may be either unisex or gender-specific. Anthropologist Roger Lancaster draws the historical links between racial and sexual segregation of public toilets, and proposes future designs that re-think public space in a way "at once unsegregated, child-friendly, and handicapped accessible"

History

Public toilets were part of the Sanitation system of ancient Rome, often in the proximity or as part of public baths (thermae). By the Middle Ages public toilets became uncommon, with only few attested in Frankfurt in 1348, in London in 1383, and in Basel in 1455.

In the early 19th century, large cities in Europe started installing public toilets: first in Paris, then in Berlin in 1820 and in London in 1851.

George Jennings, the sanitary engineer, introduced public toilets, which he called "monkey closets", to the Crystal Palace for The Great Exhibition of 1851. He also used the euphemism "halting station", now in use in Indian English for a basic place to stay attached to a railway station. Public toilets were also known as "retiring rooms" (cf "Drawing room", from "to withdraw", and Waiting room.)

Underground public toilets were introduced in the United Kingdom in the Victorian era, in built-up urban areas where there was no space to provide them above ground. The facilities could be accessed by stairs, and were lit by glass brick on the pavement. Underground public toilets were often built to a high standard by local health boards, although there was a much higher provision for men than women. Most have been closed as they did not have disabled access, and were more prone to vandalism and sexual encounters, especially if there was no attendant. A few remain in London, but others have been converted into alternative uses such as cafes, bars and even dwellings.

Facilities for women sometimes had a wider emphasis, providing a safe and comfortable private space in the public sphere. The Ladies Rest Room is one example of the non-euphemistic use of the term: literally, a place to rest.

A notable early example of a public toilet in the United States is the Old School Privy. The American architect Frank Lloyd Wright claimed to have "invented the hung wall for the w.c. (easier to clean under)" when he designed the Larkin Administration Building in Buffalo, New York in 1904.

Toilets with a user fee

John Nevil Maskelyne, an English stage magician, invented the first modern pay toilet in the late 19th century. His door lock for London toilets required the insertion of a penny coin to operate it, hence the euphemism to "spend a penny".

The first pay toilet in the United States was installed in 1910 in Terre Haute, Indiana.