Eli5: Why do urinals exist over just having more toilet bowls?
In: 0
They’re more space efficient, they’re arguably more sanitary (no touching doors), they can use less water (or even none), and they’re faster.
All around more efficient design for what most people are going into a bathroom for anyways.
Because if dudes are going to stand and pee, having a dedicated ‘stand to pee’ appliance is way less gross. Standing and peeing into a regular toilet makes a mess no matter how ‘skilled’ the dude is. Seats, floors, etc all get peed on.
Available space, and most-often biological processes needed.
Walk into a men’s room of an old-school sports stadium in the US and it’s a metal trough where you squeeze into the available space and do your thing. At some, you can lock eyes with a guy across from you.
People tend to treat a bathroom stall like a quiet place when it comes to toilet stalls at work. Check your phone and get a few minutes of peace. It’s better to have at least one urinal so if you just have to pee you don’t have to wait on a stall to open up.
Ever seen a queue/line outside of a men’s room at a large event?
They are much faster as 90% of people going to the restroom in public just wanna pee. You can fit a lot more urinals than cubes and the turnover is quicker.
You must be a woman. Men pee all over the place. Most of the time it isn’t intentional. It just happens. Urinals are easier to aim into due to the height and better contain the dreaded dual streams.
This is just speculation based on having used them before, I could be completely wrong: Compared with normal toilets, they’re easier to install, maintain, and clean. They take up less space, use less water, and require less robust plumbing (no solid waste drain – hopefully). On top of all that, and because of the intersection of all of those factors, they’re probably cheaper too (although I don’t know that for sure, I’ve never bought one). Theoretically, if 70% of men use the bathroom just to pee real quick, and you could have exactly 10 toilets/urinals total… then 7 urinals and 3 toilets would make more sense than 10 toilets.
Since men can aim their pee while standing up there’s no need to use a traditional bowl if you just need to go number 1. This means the urinal can be built smaller and use less water and not use up as much time.
They take up less space.
It’s one of the reasons the queue for the gents’ is always shorter than the one for the ladies’.
I went to a pub once where instead of having individual urinals they converted the whole fucking wall into a urinal so you just peed on the wall, don’t know how they did it but it didn’t smell bad
Latest Answers