Think about this practically.
The article was one of many. I thought you may like the pathogens article. I have condensed a lot of information into one handy post for you.
Good luck with getting lids on public toilets, and then getting people to shut them. Perhaps very quickly shutting automated lids are the answer for you? The problem is you need the gap between the lid and toilet bowl to be closed too. Else the pressure shoots pathogens out the sides and front. There’s some displays of that too if you research.
The door handle problem is a problem when you look at places like schools. A toilet cleaning company, at best, will come in once a day after the children go home. Do you think they have the cleaning regime of a hospital?
Again re mechanical ventilation - this is due to retrofitting universal toilets - you are not going to start creating loads of little windows and neither are these toilets likely to be against an outside wall if they are next to a main thoroughfare.
It is rare that mechanical ventilation is as good - there’s a lot of studies after covid. Look them up.
The door problem doesn’t solve the real life problems of when someone has collapsed. This is particularly tragic in a hospital where it could have been prevented but I have evidence of people dying of cardiac arrests, overdoses and suicide etc, (both of patients and staff in hospitals and doctors practices) as well as assaults in enclosed designs.
Who said anything about a 12 inch gap? You didn’t read my earlier post discussing the differences. In this country the standard is 15cm. A few millimetres isn’t enough. In English schools they based in on 5mm, the standard deemed necessary to prevent a boy using his phone camera on girls, but this doesn’t give enough ventilation or space for a mop or visual supervision in case of emergencies.
One of the reason for bigger door gaps in American is to accommodate people’s feet who are in wheelchairs. We don’t do this in this country. We have private, accessible toilets which are much bigger. This means mums and dads with pushchairs have a problem. They either have to leave the pushchair outside or use the accessible. What would be great is if new builds or refurbishments in large venues had a new design of accessible within the single sex suite as I have suggested before. This would tick many people’s needs.
At least people have been saved your plastic chemical loo. Can you see how much regulation and thought there is now and how that was a bit of an insult as a solution?
I will give you some tips because you actually seem invested in this. Look at local newspaper websites and search for toilet terms. They usually more useful at a more individual level. Look at why they closed or why people died in them or got assaulted. The difficult bit is to workout the layout and design. Sometimes police and coroner reports are useful. Then maybe do freedom of information (or USA/Canada equivalent wherever you are) if you can, to get some more statistics. Then work it backwards as to how you could prevent bad outcomes in toilets. I have a 90+ page report that does similar with real life incidents based on the last few years in this country, with a few international examples thrown in to show the problems worldwide. Some of that info I have given you here.
What you end up with is single sex toilets, with door gaps, in a single sex washroom. Frustrating if you want to be innovative but there’s a reason most countries in the world settled on a variation of this design. It’s safest, healthiest and the most economical.
There’s an excellent book called The Big Necessity that focuses on sanitation and how important it is to have it. Someone on here recommended it to me. It’s good you have now started thinking about toilets in terms of sanitation rather than a political statement. Toilets are misused for all sorts of things but really what everyone needs is a toilet that is clean and safe.
*‘Anthropologists and sociologists should be infesting public toilets. There’s nothing else in human society quite like them. Not in society, not quite out of it. Needed but rarely demanded. A place where all sorts of human needs and habitats intersect: fear, disgust, conversation, grooming, sex. It’s an
ambiguous space that is not quite in the public eye, though the public uses it. A place of refuge and sociability: of necessity and criminality.’ *
Rose George, ‘The Big Necessity’ (2008)
What’s changed is the ‘demanded’. People suddenly are very invested in toilets. Hopefully, a good thing to come out of this is that provision is looked at as the necessity it is.