If you’ve ever run to the bathroom after
eating at your local mall’s food court, you’ve probably spent enough time there to
notice some bizarre things. For instance, why don’t the doors on public bathrooms go
all the way to the floor? It seems like a place that practically begs for privacy, and
yet there are gaps on top, on the bottom, and even those small cracks on the side of the
door that would allow anyone positioned just right to get a good sense of how much fiber
you’re eating. Why not just put a door in? Well, for people with such high brow bathroom
musings, we created this video just for you. Since we’re not ones to shy away from the
grosser side of life, we sent our public bathroom examination squad to discover why it is
that public bathroom doors don’t go to the floor, as well as 25 other insane public bathroom facts. Let’s start with the most important
question first. Even though it might make you feel uncomfortable
when you’re inside the stall, there are actually several practical reasons
why public bathroom doors don’t go to the floor. First off, the visibility is good for keeping the
line moving and for deterring unwanted behavior. The gap at the bottom of a bathroom stall allows
people to quickly check if a stall is occupied or not. So instead of the next person who just walked
in knocking on every single bathroom door, a quick low check will tell them if there’s an available
space. Also, the fact that you are partly visible from the outside serves as a deterrent to gross
or illegal behavior - even though anyone who’s worked at a Starbucks and dealt with unwelcome
bathroom guests is aware this doesn’t always work. Doors that don’t go to the floor also
make public bathrooms easier to clean, as power washing the space will be able to
clean inside the stalls as well. Lastly, the gap exists for safety reasons.
Someone having a medical emergency or passed out inside will quickly
be identified from the outside; and if someone gets stuck insidem they can easily
crawl out from underneath as a last resort. However, Americans in the audience might
be surprised to know that this door gap is almost uniquely a feature of US
toilets.Our next public bathroom fact is that toilets in Europe tend to have a
top to bottom door that fully closes instead. So cleaning the stalls may take more time,
but perhaps the extra privacy is worth it. In fact, there are a few ways in which
toilets across the Atlantic differ, and one is the sheer amount of water in the bowl. The
reason why US toilets are filled almost to the brim with water is public bathroom fact #4!
US toilets flush differently than European toilets; they rely on suction rather than
water pushing the waste down. The reliance on suction means US plumbing that sucks waste
out the toilet’s “trap way” has to be narrower, and is therefore more prone to blockage, which
means much more water is required in the bowl. Toilets blocking, people relieving
themselves...one of the most frequent complaints for public bathrooms is that they’re disgusting.
If you need to go, how do you pick the cleanest stall? Well, science actually has an answer here!
Studies show that the cleanest stall tends to be the one nearest to the door. Why? People have a
tendency to skip over the first stall they see to use ones further in. You might notice yourself
doing this too in public bathrooms. So next time you’re in one, resist your natural instinct
and instead, head straight to the first stall! We can’t promise it will be clean, but it will
probably be the least likely to make you vomit. However, let’s say you’re not too worried
about how clean the stall is. After all, you wash your hands thoroughly every time you
use the bathroom. Well, we have some bad news in the form of fact number 6 almost 25% of soap
found in public bathroom soap containers is contaminated. In fact, most soap is so bacteria
laden that after conducting a study on it, microbiology professor Charles P. Gerba said,
there’s “so much fecal matter that you’re almost better off washing your hands in the toilet
after you flush it.” How is this possible? Well, the refillable containers housing
the soap tend to attract a lot of bacteria, and public bathroom soap is usually over-diluted, which makes it less resistant to germs and less
effective for sanitizing your hands. A good fact to keep in mind before you exit the bathroom
to get back to your five-star gourmet dinner. Still, you think to yourself, you barely touch
ANYTHING in the restroom. You’re safer than most. You even insist on using the air-dryer
to avoid touching the paper in the bathroom. Well, this actually turns out to be
another big public bathroom no-no, and fact seven. Air-dryers tend to
blow bacteria right off peoples’ hands, and therefore all around the area where they’re
installed. A University of Leeds study - yes, there are an awful lot of scientific
studies on public bathrooms, it turns out - found that jet dryers have 27 times the
bacteria levels of paper towel dispensers. So what now? How can you possibly protect
yourself from all these germs everywhere? How many more layers can you possibly put on
the toilet seat to keep yourself protected? Actually, fact number eight says covering
the toilet seat might be one precaution you’re taking that’s..pretty much useless.
Even though it sounds disgusting to sit naked where others have sat, glute to glute
disease transmission isn’t really a thing. There’s only one transmissible skin to skin
virus you could fear from public bathrooms, called CA-MRSA, but there hasn’t been a
confirmed bathroom case transmission...ever! You’re more likely to come into contact with germs
after flushing, especially if you leave the lid open. Germs can spray up to six feet in the
air this way! That’s why most scientists advise closing the lid, and if possible, flushing
with your foot. Your hands tend to be the biggest disease carriers, so avoid touching
them to too many surfaces, and wash them well. And why do women have longer usage times? Any
woman who has impatiently ducked into the mens’ room knows this is always the case. The answer
is a combination of factors. Mens’ bathrooms cram many more available spaces inside thanks
to urinals, while women need to enter a stall. Women also menstruate, and are usually the ones
to have to accompany children to the bathroom, all of which take longer. And since
women almost always have to sit down, while men just stand for #1, covering the toilet
in paper - which we already discussed as kind of pointless - or using the infamous hover-pee
technique usually takes much more time. The following fact might also play a role in
different wait times for different genders: only 30% of men, as opposed to 60% of women, wash
their hands properly after using the bathroom. Ladies, that’s not great, but gentlemen, you
definitely [emphasis] need to do a lot better. Women also use more toilet paper than
men, averaging seven square toilet paper squares per bathroom visit, while men
average two. We actually aren’t sure why, but if your straight relationship is in a rut, you
now have a sad new way to start a conversation. Perhaps there’s a small upside in men not washing
hands though, as researchers consistently found that the dirtiest place in a public bathroom
is almost always...the sink?! Yep, toilet bowls and lids are actually not nearly as dirty
as the place where you’re supposed to wash up. Are you ready to find out where the dirtiest
public bathrooms in the world are? The answer is simple: airplanes. Airplane bathrooms
rarely get disinfected well between flights, and one study found E. coli on
the door handles almost 100% of the time [emphasis]! Now that you know, good
luck holding it from New York to Hong Kong. For some of us, this whole public bathroom
debate is moot, because some people aren’t able to use a public bathroom at all.
17 million Americans have paruresis, more commonly known as “shy bladder”. They can’t
use restrooms knowing others are around them, and they avoid restrooms like the plague. And, one can
only assume, they have the bladders of champions. When you hear a fact like, that after just one
hour of being used, an average public bathroom has approximately 500,000 bacterial
cells per square inch on its surface, you might actually be inclined to
develop this shy bladder yourself. But scientists caution people not to worry
too much. You’re carrying an equivalently ridiculous amount of bacteria on your body
and on your phone already, and most of the bacteria shed in public bathrooms dies pretty
quickly in the cool, dry atmosphere there. We’ve listed plenty of the bad - and flat out
disgusting - parts of using public bathrooms, but there are some ways in which public bathrooms
can be extremely helpful - even save lives! That’s right. Some womens’ bathrooms in bars and clubs
have posters with codes women can use, usually either a fake drink order or asking the bartender
for a specific fake employee, that lets the bar staff know the woman is either feeling unsafe or
in trouble with a date and needs help. The codes can mean everything from “escort me to a taxi” to
“call the police” if the situation is truly dire. Do you know why mens’ and womens’ toilet
separation came about in the first place? Contrary to popular belief it’s
not because of different male and female….forgive us for the pun....“plumbing”.
Rather, up until the late 1800s in the US, womens’ bathrooms tended to barely exist in the
public sphere at all, as women were expected to generally stay at home. However, when women
started going out and about in society and entering the workforce, they obviously needed
restrooms as well - because yes, women do poop, as much as your new girlfriend may try to hide
it. Give it a few more months of relationship. So bathrooms were designed using the, at the
time, popular “Separate Spheres” philosophy, which stated that men and women should have
predefined and strictly separated gender roles, even extending to the spaces they use. Therefore,
the men designing buildings and passing bathroom code regulations thought that womens’ bathrooms
should be kept separately from mens’ facilities so the genders could retain those separate spaces. However, modern public bathrooms seem to pose
a lot of social challenges to men as well. Thanks to urinals, there are a lot of unwritten
social rules men must follow in the bathroom, such as picking a urinal far away
from another user if possible, and not making eye contact with
a fellow bathroom attendee. Because of the public, visible nature of urinals,
this also might explain why men are much more prone to shy bladders than women are, and are
much more likely to report a phobia of peeing in public bathrooms. In fact, the amount of
time it takes men to start relieving themselves directly correlates to how many people are
around them. Scientists conducted a study to observe this effect - something which probably
didn’t help those shy bladders in the first place - and found that a man alone in a restroom
takes on average 4.9 seconds to start urinating, while men with a neighbor in the next urinal
take an average of 8.4 seconds to start a stream. Let’s switch gears - to a bathroom’s
musicality! If you had to guess, at what pitch would you say your toilet flushes?
There is a real answer to this, and it’s fact #23. Scientists with too much time on their hands have
determined that toilets flush in E flat. So if any of you decide to use your bathroom time to tune up
your guitar, you have that point of reference now. You might scoff that people would engage in
prolonged activities in a public bathroom, but studies show that 75% of people in public
bathrooms report using their phones. And not just to swipe through Instagram and Tinder; many
people will actually make calls in the bathroom. Good thought to keep in mind next time you
call your friend or co-worker and they sound strained. It might, really
honestly, not be about you. However, this unfortunate habit means that
phones are about ten times dirtier than your average toilet seat. So why are you sitting
here worrying about a public bathroom? Go wipe down your iPhone! Or Android, if you’re THAT
green bubble texter in your group of friends. Our final public bathroom fact explains one of
those annoying smaller mysteries of the universe. When bathrooms have two-roll dispensers,
they tend to run out at the same time. Why? Well, because the world seems to be pretty
evenly divided between what scientists term big-choosers and little-choosers.
Big-choosers will choose the bigger, fuller roll of toilet paper, and little choosers
will go with the underdog - AKA the scrawnier roll. Meaning at the end, both rolls tend
to balance out and finish at the same time. Now that we’ve reached this note of harmony and
the end of our insane public bathroom facts, are you ready to learn a whole lot more about the
world, outside its bathrooms? For more fun facts, click on this video right here, or this video
instead! And if you have to take a break before the next video to use the bathroom,
we’re begging you: please wash your hands!
This post should resolve of its own volition.
I think it's for ventilation.
In many European countries and Middle Eastern countries, you get George's dream public washroom stalls, that go all the way to the floor and have their own ventilation. Pure privacy. Plus bidets.