Public toilet
A public toilet, restroom, bathroom or washroom is a room or small building with toilets and sinks for use by the general public. The facilities are available to customers, travelers, employees of a business, school pupils or prisoners. Public toilets are typically found in many different places: inner-city locations, offices, factories, schools, universities and other places of work and study. Similarly, museums, cinemas, bars, restaurants, and entertainment venues usually provide public toilets. Railway stations, filling stations, and long distance public transport vehicles such as trains, ferries, and planes usually provide toilets for general use. Portable toilets are often available at large outdoor events.
Public toilets are commonly separated by sex into male and female toilets, although some are unisex, especially for small or single-occupancy public toilets. Public toilets are sometimes accessible to people with disabilities. Depending on the culture, there may be varying degrees of separation between males and females and different levels of privacy. Typically, the entire room, or a stall or cubicle containing a toilet, is lockable. Urinals, if present in a male toilet, are typically mounted on a wall with or without a divider between them.
Local authorities or commercial businesses may provide public toilet facilities. Some are unattended while others are staffed by an attendant. In many cultures, it is customary to tip the attendant, especially if they provide a specific service, such as might be the case at upscale nightclubs or restaurants. Public toilets may be municipally owned or managed and entered directly from the street. Alternatively, they may be within a building that, while privately owned, allows public access, such as a department store, or it may be limited to the business's customers, such as a restaurant. Some public toilets are free of charge, while others charge a fee. In the latter case they are also called pay toilets and sometimes have a charging turnstile. In the most basic form, a public toilet may just be a street urinal known as a pissoir, after the French term.
Public toilets are known by many other names depending on the country; examples are: restroom, bathroom, men's room, women's room, powder room ; washroom ; and toilets, lavatories, water closet, ladies and gents.
Alternative names
Public toilets are known by many names in different varieties of English.In American English, "restroom" commonly denotes a facility featuring toilets and sinks designed for use by the public, but "restroom" and "bathroom" are often used interchangeably for any room with a toilet. "Restroom" is considered by some to be slightly more formal or polite. "Bathroom" is quite common in schools. "Comfort station" sometimes refers to a visitor welcome center such as those in national parks. The term restroom derived from the fact that in the early 1900s through to the middle of the century up-scale restaurants, theatres and performing facilities would often have comfortable chairs or sofas located within or in a room directly adjacent to the actual toilet and sink facilities, something which can be seen in some movies of the time period. An example of this is the description of a "movie palace" which was opening in 1921 which was described as including "... a rest-room for the fair sex and a lounging room for the sterner sex... off these rooms are the toilets."
In Canadian English, public facilities are frequently called and signed as "washrooms", although usage varies regionally. The word "toilet" generally denotes the fixture itself rather than the room. The word "washroom" is rarely used to mean "utility room" or "mud room" as it is in some parts of the United States. "Bathroom" is generally used to refer to the room in a person's home that includes a bathtub or shower while a room with only a toilet and sink in a person's residence is typically called a "washroom" because one would wash one's hands in it upon returning home or before a meal or a "powder room" because women would fix their make-up on their faces in that room. These terms are the terms typically used on floor plans for residences or other buildings. Real estate advertisements for residences often refer to "three-piece washrooms" and "two-piece washrooms". In public athletic or aquatic facilities, showers are available in locker rooms.
In Britain, Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore, and New Zealand, the terms in use are "public toilet", "public lavatory", "public convenience", and more informally, "public loo". As public toilets were traditionally signed as "gentlemen" or "ladies", the colloquial terms "the gents' room" and "the ladies' room", or simply "the gents" and "the ladies" are used to indicate the facilities themselves. The British Toilet Association, sponsor of the Loo of the Year Awards, refers to public toilets collectively as "away-from-home" toilets.
In Philippine English, "comfort room", or "C.R.", is the most common term in use.
Some European languages use words cognate with "toilet", or the initialism "W.C.", an abbreviation for "water closet", an older term for the flush toilet. In Slavic languages, such as Russian and Belarusian, the term sanuzel is sometimes used for public facilities which include a toilet, sink, and possibly a shower, bathtub, and / or bidet. Public urinals are known in several Romance languages by the name of a Roman Emperor: vespasienne in French and vespasiani in Italian.
Mosques, madrassas, and other places Muslims gather, have public sex-separated "ablution rooms" since Islam requires specific procedures for cleansing parts of the body before prayer. These rooms normally adjoin the toilets, which are also subject to Muslim hygienical jurisprudence and Islamic toilet etiquette.
Types
Many public toilets are permanent small buildings visible to passers-by on the street. Others are underground, including older facilities in Britain and Canada. Contemporary street toilets include automatic, self-cleaning toilets in self-contained pods; an example is the Sanisette, which first became popular in France. As part of its campaign against open defecation, the Indian government introduced the remotely-monitored eToilet to some public spaces in 2014.Public toilets may use seated toiletsas in most Western countriesor squat toilets. Squat toilets are common in many Asian and African countries, and, to a lesser extent, in Southern European countries. In many of those countries, anal cleansing with water is also the cultural norm and easier to perform while squatting than seated.
Another traditional type that has been modernized is the screened French street urinal known as a pissoir.
The telescopic toilet is designed to extend and retract vertically from a cylinder relative to street level depending on the time of day. It is typically installed in entertainment districts and operational only during weekends, evenings, and nights. The first such toilet was a telescopic urinal invented in the Netherlands, which now also offers pop-up toilets for women.
Private firms may maintain permanent public toilets. The companies are then permitted to use the external surfaces of the enclosures for advertising. The installations are part of a street furniture contract between the out-of-home advertising company and the city government and allow these public conveniences to be installed and maintained without requiring funds from the municipal budget.
Various portable toilet technologies are used as public toilets. Portables can be moved into place where and when needed and are popular at outdoor festivals and events. A portable toilet can either be connected to the local sewage system or store the waste in a holding tank until it is emptied by a vacuum truck. Portable composting toilets require removal of the container to a composting facility.
The standard wheelchair-accessible public toilet features wider doors, ample space for turning, lowered sinks, and grab-bars for safety. Features above and beyond this standard are advocated by the Changing Places campaign. Features include a hoist for an adult, a full-sized changing bench, and space for up to two caregivers.
Public toilets have frequently been inaccessible to people with certain disabilities.
Purposes
As an "away-from-home" toilet room, a public toilet can provide far more than access to the toilet for urination and defecation. People also wash their hands, use the mirrors for grooming, get drinking water, attend to menstrual hygiene needs, and use the waste bins. Public toilets may also become places for harassment of others or illegal activities, particularly if principles of Crime prevention through environmental design are not applied in the design of the facility.History
Europe
Public toilets were part of the sanitation system of ancient Rome. These latrines housed long benches with holes accommodating multiple simultaneous users, with no division between individuals or groups. Using the facilities was considered a social activity.By the Middle Ages public toilets became uncommon, with only few attested in Frankfurt in 1348, in London in 1383, and in Basel in 1455. A public toilet was built in Ottoman Sarajevo in 1530 just outside a mosque's exterior courtyard wall which is still operating today.
Sociologist Dara Blumenthal notes changing bodily habits, attitudes, and practices regarding hygiene starting in the 16th century, which eventually led to a resurgence of public toilets. While it had been perfectly acceptable to relieve oneself anywhere, civility increasingly required the removal of waste product from contact with others.
New instruction manuals, schoolbooks, and court regulations dictated what was appropriate. For instance, in Galateo: or, A Treatise on Politeness and Delicacy of Manners, Giovanni della Casa states “It does not befit a modest, honourable man to prepare to relieve nature in the presence of other people, nor do up his clothes afterward in their presence. Similarly, he will not wash his hands on returning to decent society from private places, as the reason for his washing will arouse disagreeable thoughts in people.” Historian Lawrence Stone contends that the development of these new behaviours had nothing to do with problems of hygiene and bacterial infection, but rather with conforming to increasingly artificial standards of gentlemanly behaviour.
These standards were internalized at an early age. Over time, much that had to be explained earlier was no longer mentioned, due to successful social conditioning. This resulted in substantial reduction of explicit text on these topics in subsequent editions of etiquette literature; for example, the same passage in Les règles de la bienséance et de la civilité Chrétienne by Jean-Baptiste de la Salle is reduced from 208 words in the 1729 edition, to 74 words in the 1774 edition.
The first modern flush toilet had been invented in 1596, but it did not gain popularity until the Victorian era. When hygiene became a heightened concern, rapid advancements in toilet technology ensued. In the 19th century, large cities in Europe started installing modern flushing public toilets.
George Jennings, the sanitary engineer, introduced public toilets, which he called "monkey closets", to the Crystal Palace for The Great Exhibition of 1851. Public toilets were also known as "retiring rooms." They included separate amenities for men and women, and were the first flush toilet facilities to introduce sex-separation to the activity. The next year, London's first public toilet facility was opened.
Underground public toilets were introduced in the United Kingdom in the Victorian era, in built-up urban areas where no space was available to provide them above ground. The facilities were accessible by stairs, and lit by glass brick on the pavement. Local health boards often built underground public toilets to a high standard, although provisions were higher for men than women. Most have been closed as they did not have disabled access, and were more prone to vandalism and sexual encounters, especially in the absence of an attendant. A few remain in London, but others have been converted into alternative uses such as cafes, bars and even dwellings. In Paris, underground public toilets were introduced in 1905 with the Lavatory Madeleine, which is preserved as a Monument historique.