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Comment by _carbyau_ | Hacker News Reader

I have long wondered why unisex bathrooms are not the standard now.

Easily implemented for newly built places, can be retrofitted to some, hard to retrofit for some.

But make it a new standard and let time solve the rest.

I visited nude beaches regularly because there are some in my vicinity. Although not for quite some time anymore since smartphones became that prevalent. Denying feelings of shame often is an indicator that there is a problem.

Any bathroom wouldn't be able to accommodate everyone. For these exception there can be single cabin room or something else.

There are a lot of bathrooms for both sexes, mostly in places where space is limited. But having segregated bathrooms is in no way a problem anywhere and I think many people are happy with that.

Not sure what your "feelings of shame" lines are about.

Also, I agree that any bathroom won't accommodate everyone. But no current bathroom does that either.

For unisex purposes it depends on the bathroom design surely.

People have this idea you have some semi-public space because people might see each other in a state of undress.

But almost all westernised bathrooms contain a bunch of toilet stalls.

If everyone is going into a toilet stall to do their business - standing or sitting - then the only shared space is for washing hands or preening in front of a mirror. And if that's an issue, optionally put that in the stall too.

If security is a problem - many toilet stalls have limited doors/walls around them - then make it secure. This effort would benefit everyone.

Then humans - whatever their persuasion - could simply do their business in peace and get on with their life.

Considering that one of the key arguments for gun legalization in the US is self defense - due to the argument that a criminal will find a way to get a gun anyways - is an interesting parallel to the lack of unisex bathrooms. Creeps will find a way to violate the privacy of bathrooms regardless, so why don't we just simplify things for building codes.

Granted, I really appreciate urinals and I feel like they might be a casualty of switching over to unisex bathrooms in a lot of cases.

I've been in unisex bathrooms with urinals. The people who can't use them just, well, don't use them.

Exactly why make everyone wait in one line when half the group goes way faster?

I doubt that's coming anytime soon. Would be big dumb and have no real support

So if I had a series of heavy processing tasks to run - your approach to optimizing them would be to divide the tasks by whether they're above or below the median and then execute each half of tasks on separate equally equipped computers so that half of your computing resources are sitting idle for a good portion of the time?

Huh? I dunno, but I do believe no guy wants to wait 4x as long to be politically correct or for whatever marginal perceived benefit there may be for some tiny population. Nevermind the cost

Your example is way off because they are not equal processing tasks obviously and resources may not be mostly idle you just made that all up

And even if there is an inefficiency or inequality that doesn't mean the answer is unisex bathrooms I could come up with an equally contrived example for how inefficient that is

Large venues can trivially have one large room full of urinals and another large room full of cubicles.

Ok...What are you talking about? Don't they already? How does changing that help anything? It would certainly still be a massive slowdown for half the population and certainly not "trivial" to change them all

While it would be a slowdown for half the population - it would equally increase accessibility for the other half of the population and society would more efficiently utilize the bathroom facilities we have. If we get unisex bathroom out of trans rights I'll be happy both to see their rights respected and for society to drop an outdated prudish concept.

When I'm out at the theatre with my partner - we don't go back to our seats until both of us have taken care of business - I'd be happy to accept a bit of a personal delay in order to speed up the process overall (and I'd be even happier if an appropriate amount of urinals still existed - I don't know what that ratio is, maybe a quarter of the floor space or so, but eliminating them would likely make restrooms less pleasant for everyone).

... of course this is so redundant but urinals are an obvious solution for half the population and already in place... Like I said there would be a massive cost this is nowhere near trivial like someone stated. I also mentioned there may be other solutions (like redistributing the resources in another way, while probably similarly expensive for little utility imo). unisex bathrooms is a separate idea. Most of the time there aren't huge discrepancies anyway it's not like men's bathrooms are always idle while women's are always out of control so the efficiency isn't really an issue 99% of the time. If we are just moving urinals inside a shared area why are we doing it at all? We're just making one big line. It's nice that you don't mind waiting for your partner but try selling that to the guy who takes 15 seconds and has to go to the back of this new line. It doesn't make any sense

Intelligent building would forecast demographics and optimize for the future I guess if you really just want "max efficiency" I assume this is already being done to an extent, but changing things already built sounds expensive af for little to no value in my opinion.

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