Not enough toilets in theatres. For women

[RedToothBrush]

Hands up. Who is remotely surprised by this...?

www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-46735513
Women's toilets an issue for West End theatres

A survey of West End theatres has found there is an average of just one toilet for every 38 female audience members.

The research by The Stage calculated that women would need a 57-minute interval to all visit the bathroom. The average interval is 20 minutes.

The Old Vic had the fewest with one toilet for every 56 women.

Many theatres struggle to increase the number of toilets due to their buildings having listed status and the Old Vic is a Grade II-listed building.

The theatre recently launched a £100,000 public fundraising campaign to improve the toilets and access to the theatre featuring Glenda Jackson and Joanna Lumley.

The works will more than double the number of female loos. They have so far raised £52,482.

I'm not sure where the much touted unisex toilets were, what floor? At the dress circle it is male and female - and the queues were enormous,

There also seems to be little thought generally.

At local station they used to have set of mens, set of womens, 1 accessible.

The women drivers needed to make the womens loos just for them as due to queues is was affecting the trains running on time.

So now there is the gents and 1 accessible toilet.

So men have their toilet which presumably has urinals + at least 1 cubicle.

Then there is 1 accessible which is shared by people who need accessible facilities, women and men who feel like using it (it's unisex).

So the reasons were sound but the result is ridiculous.

I went to a museum recently and queued forever. The facilities were pretty new as well. The annoying thing was that there was bags of hall space so they could easily have used some of that space for more cubicles. No queue for the men's obviously. I was very tempted to identify as a man for a couple of minutes.

Good places are motorway service stations and my local shopping mall. But I suppose that is more a steady stream (no pun intended) of customers rather than everyone in a 20 minute interval.

There is a partial solution to the common toilet problem in theatres that I have seen.
After the initial rush during intervals there will probably still be woman waiting to use the ladies toilets but no men waiting to use the gents.
In that situation the gents should revert to been free for use by both men and women.
I have seen this done with a member of staff at the door of the gents informing users of the now changed use.
It worked very well and could be made more user friendly with information signage at the door.