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Comment by midasuni | Hacker News Reader

Older toilets were far smaller with a normal kayak handle which opened and closed quickly and had a big simple lock.

However those don’t work with some passengers - wheelchair users for example, people with difficultiy holding handles etc.

Making toilets more accessible for some groups makes them less accessible for others (. As a society we choose what level to have it at.

Some trains in the U.K. have a good balance - a large wheelchair accessible toilet, and a small traditional one, although they sometimes struggle with communicating it.

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That's a nice excuse at first sight, but there is no reason not to just use a normal, physical lock, instead of making the lock worse for absolutely everyone and excusing it with "but accessibility!", all because a few people with lots of good intentions but absolutely no clue at all want to pat each other's backs for being oh so considerate.

The increased size is indeed very nice from an accessibility perspective, but it seems to me that practically everyone capable of going to the lavatory on their own is also capable of operating a (well-designed) mechanical lock on their own. And for everyone who needs help to do this it's a non-issue because the person helping them can close and lock the door.

The caveat here is that I'm not an expert on this, and that I'm possibly argueing from a position of ignorance. But none of the people claiming accessibility benefits (there are several) have made a very convincing case, beyond a mere assertion that it's more accessible. The door design as such is more accessible, but I don't think it actually matters in this context.

You’re right that a normal toilet can have an appropiate physical handle. Howver normal toilets are easy to push open as they aren’t moving. Opening a large (and thus heavy) swing door, wide enough to allow a chair to get in, manoeuvre, and close, without it smashing back when the train lurches, doesn’t work, meaning a sliding doors which isn’t appropriate.

As such the solution is an electronic sliding door (as many couldn’t provide enough strength over distance to open a sliding door manually), meaning an open/close button

Once you have that feature adding an electric lock makes sense. A physical lock would be trickier to incorporate.

> As a society we choose what level to have it at.

It's kind of off-topic but please correct me if I'm wrong.

Local government chooses the train service operator. The operator chooses the providers of machines (trains and carriages). Engineers design those machines according to some more or less specific guidelines from product designers. Their managers and peers provide the missing details.

National government specifies the disability requirements, the rest flows from that.

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