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When I had digestive issues, I was a shy pooper, and just the thought of a stranger lady, let alone a stranger dude making eye contact thru the stall gap was... Unpleasant. Now that I learned very simple exercises to push the poop thru the intestines, and I drop human scat that could choke an anaconda. You are all welcome to bask in my glory in a unisex bathroom if that is truly what you wish.
stall gap
Just get rid of the door gap too. Having a gap in the bathroom stall instead of a proper door is an American thing, not a public rest room thing.
What's the gap for anyway? Do they think someone's going to lock themselves in and they'll need to perform some commando rescue?
The doors can be unlocked from the outside anyway with a coin
It started as a cost savings measure for prefabricated bathroom hardware. Tight joints need to be precise and loose ones can work around existing stuff. If your 1913 factory bathroom has rough cement floor, needing to cut wood for a tight fit is expensive, but installing some posts and hanging wall panels from them to the walls doesn't change in price. If your plumbing hardware isn't under the floor or behind the wall you can just put the panel over the pipe, or in front of it. No floor corner means no dust buildup, just spray the whole thing down with a hose and let it dry or flow to a floor drain if you're fancy.
For modern cost savings: if you have a 9" floor gap a much smaller bathroom qualifies as an ADA compliant accessible stall since it doesn't block wheelchair users feet. Full length panels require a larger stall to allow the wheelchair user to turn the chair.All of that made it cheaper to have awful gaps, so people did. Now it's cheaper to replace panels with equivalent ones, and use the most readily available cheap panel when building new bathrooms.
All the moral panic reasons are also true, but they're the last step before"... And that makes costs go up". Drug use and lewd activity occupy stalls, which reduces availability which means you need more. Relaxed environment makes people take longer, which reduces availability.
So why are they a uniquely American feature. I don't even think Canada does that like that, let alone anywhere in Europe where some of our buildings were built 100 years ago that we have to accommodate, because it's got a random cafe in it.
My only guess is an earlier start to wanting low cost prefabricated bathrooms, and then just momentum keeping it up. I'm seeing more places that do it right, but they're invariably new construction.
Not that Europeans didn't want bathroom dividers, just that they decided to use non-mass produced ones a little longer for whatever reason, and then the prefab ones were more customizable so they went with the sane option.
At least that's my guess. I only read the history of American prefabricated bathroom dividers, and can only speculate on why so many others went a different direction.
Moral excuses aside, it's money. Huge gaps means less material, one-size-fits-all installation, and arbitrary tolerances in production. Same reason the latches constantly break or get stuck - the whole setup is mass-produced as cheaply as possible.
But it's not a good way to save money. On top of the obvious safety and privacy benefits, bathroom quality can completely change a person' opinion of an establishment and is worth investing in.
The excuse is usually something about some moral panic like people doing drugs or having sex in the stalls.
There's only really two things I want in life now.
Bathroom stalls that you can't see in.
And to be an anaconda.
But if you're an anaconda you'd get trapped in there without the gap.