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!