The toilet paper: Bathroom dwell time observations at an airport

Abstract

Assessing the number and position of bathroom facilities is an important part of designing public buildings, transport hubs and urban spaces. Providing insufficient facilities might lead to congestion, discomfort and in extreme conditions to health concerns. It is therefore important to provide adequate bathroom facilities to help ensure comfort and safety. For practitioners who conduct spatial analysis to plan for the flow of people (for example, in pedestrian and evacuation simulation) and the provision of such facilities, there are few available data-sets to account for realistic bathroom dwell times (i.e. the difference in time between entering the bathroom facility and then leaving it). Such data-sets are necessary evidence to configure engineering tools and inform the planning of such facilities. This paper adds to our understanding of the use of bathroom facilities by describing the collection of bathroom dwell data (representing the time spent by a bathroom user inside the facility) that might then be used for planning purposes. Data from 502 bathroom users are presented, including those using designated female, male and accessible bathrooms. This data was collected from bathroom facilities located in a North American airport. The results indicate that people spent an average of 155s using the bathroom facilities when there was no queuing (i.e. there was ample provision). Those using female bathroom facilities in the structure examined spend on average 22% longer in the bathroom than those using male toilet facilities. This supports the previous evidence collected that dwell times associated with female bathrooms tend to be longer than those associated with male bathrooms. This data, in conjunction with other data-sets, might be used to model the use of bathroom facilities in different airport designs (when coupled with specific information on population size and demand, and other behavioural aspects of bathroom use including frequency of use) to establish the sufficiency of the design or contribute to regulatory changes to more effectively and fairly support population needs.