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Comment by elchief | Hacker News Reader

Did a fun project for my MBA. A bike parking facility downtown, where you can park your bike securely, showers, lockers, towel service, ironing boards, buy some coffee and a snack. Raised $80k for it...needed 100. Anyways

We modeled the showering process. Had some data on how long people took to shower. Needed something like 3 showers per gender to get good throughput

One of the MBA profs didn't like this for some reason. Didn't believe it would be enough (without any numbers to back it up). We were like, well if we add a fourth shower we can accommodate dozens of more people. He liked that even less

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Why gender the showers in the first place? Seems like added complication for little to no benefit by splitting into separate queues.

I would guess the showers were inside of a gendered locker room.

If you had them as self-contained shower rooms with changing area, that would probably be better from a personal standpoint and also alleviate the issue you raised.

Not the OP though, so who knows.

Yeah it really slows throughput, especially if your users aren’t 50/50 men women. There are locker room layouts that can accommodate mixed genders, like ones where each shower is in a changing stall, e.g. https://i.pinimg.com/originals/1a/ec/31/1aec3156f4f31ca42540...

An event venue near me does a genius thing with the bathrooms.

The restrooms have single line of stalls. There's a moveable wall between the stalls to change the allocation of how many men's stalls there are versus women's. That makes it so if you're running an event that tends to attract more people of one gender than the other, you can create more toilets for that gender. Quilting expo? More women's stalls. PC gaming event? More men's.

we did a survey of cyclists and gendered bathrooms were much preferred. this was 9 years ago though...

Community consultation is the right thing to do! I wonder if modelling might have predicted better service times for the majority gender with non-gendered bathrooms, and that might have swung the survey result.

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