While automatic bathroom fixtures are a bit touchy, I think the author hasn't really considered how much they improve the worst case.
I used to regularly walk into public bathrooms in which someone had used the toilet and simply not flushed it. That doesn't happen much any more. I'm willing to deal with a lot of phantom flushes to not deal with someone else's literal shit.
I used to regularly find public bathrooms where someone (I'm assuming a vandal, although it could just be a distracted or careless person) has left the water running. A fully open faucet can erase the gains of more judicious human usage pretty quickly.
The author waxes nostalgic about those cloth towel roll dispensers. His experience does not match mine. I generally see those things in old gas stations where the cleanliness of the towel is deeply suspect.
Automatic faucets are one of my favorite examples of positive added technology. They're flaky and annoying to activate, but compared to the possibility of leaving a faucet running full-blast for (potentially) hours? That's a huge improvement.
Automatic soap dispensers are much less persuasive to me, though. There was no "just open" state to get rid of, so the flakiness is offering much less benefit. You have to touch pump-dispensers, sure, but that's also done before you wash your hands.
Automatic soap dispensers aren't addressing the "dispenser left running" problem (which, as you note, doesn't exist), they are addressing the "user interaction with pump mechanism breaks pump mechanism requiring replacement of mechanism or whole dispenser" problem.
I do share the article's vague irritation at trading user convenience (the dispenser works) for owner convenience (the dispenser doesn't break), but it's hardly a huge deal.
A dispenser that has broken also doesn't work. I think the trade-off with (poor, I've seen good ones where this isn't the case) automatic dispensers is reduced median performance in exchange for reduced frequency of total unusability.
What's wrong with the faucets that instead of turning, you push down and they run for a few seconds before stopping?
My pet hate of public toilets now are the airblade style hand dryers. My hands are seemingly too big, so to dry the top (closest to my wrist) I need to bend my fingers to avoid touching the puddle of water and dirt in the bottom.
Without towels you're going to touch the door handle on the way out anyways. People that don't wash their hands touched the door handle. My point is to stop pretending you can keep your hands clean for any significant duration
With doors you can push to exit, sure. More troublesome are those you have to pull. I basically have to wait impatiently by the door for the next guy to come in so I can get out without touching the door with my hand.
While the airblade dryers aren't a big deal to me, the ones I really hate are the ear-splitting Xcelerators and such. Couldn't they at least mount those on a sound-absorbent board so that my ears don't ring after using it?
Those things are evil. Your comment just made me actually check, and it is as bad as I thought: they're right on the edge of causing hearing damage.
Company-promised volume claims ~78dB with spikes to 90, but a couple of studies suggest all hand-dryer companies are lying (or rather, using favorable bathroom layouts). It looks like the Xcelerator has hit 97dB in studies, and I could swear bad layouts are worse than that - they sound about rock-concert loud.
Which isn't a huge threat to users, it's just aggravating, but is actually enough to break labor laws if you have a bathroom attendant working in there.
I do wish the stream was a bit longer - thorough non-surgical handwashing might take 30 seconds, longer with very dirty hands, and the usual push faucet is perhaps 10 seconds. But the idea is great; my core desire isn't for motion-sensing sinks but automatic-shutoff ones.
I share the airblade problem. The basic model is brilliant, they work far better than traditional hand dryers, but the hand space is perhaps 30% smaller than it needs to be for large hands.
The stream lasts for some amount of time between 3.5 and 8 seconds. Each sink has a different pressure, most too high, a few too low, one just right. When one hundred people go to use the bathroom in a five minute period, that one functioning (other than turning itself off) sink is certainly not available, so the only means of pressure control is to use multiple faucets simultaneously as pressure reliefs, turning hand washing into a soapy game of whack a mole in which your pants come out sprayed from the knees up. Hope you weren't wearing khakis.
I confess I don't care about the toilets flushing multiple times. With how little water toilets use per flush now, it always takes multiple passes to do the job properly, anyway.
At 5'1 I'm often too short to easily use them, I have to stand on my tip toes and try to balance and not hit the walls of those air blade monsters that like to fling water in my face. I guess children have to just walk around with wet hands. I hate those things.
Being tall, I usually have to hunch over to activate airblades placed somewhere south of my waist, which would be viable for anyone over about 4'. Apparently there's not much consensus on how to place those things.
In my neck of the woods, they're usually on the walls. There doesn't appear to be any standard for how high to place them, it's just wherever it happens to fit. Probably fine for most adults, but shorties and children...nope.
I've seen one recently that was attached to the sink, which was better for being able to reach it, but the place where the water dripped was maybe 6 inches below the air output, so water went -everywhere-.
I enjoyed sinks activated by pushing down on a pedal with your foot. Maybe there are problems for handicapped people but I find this to be a nice solution to those that complain the water stream always stops before you're done.
It's not just me then! I hate these things with a passion too. I have largish hands, but hardly out of the ordinary, and yet I find it difficult to put my hands in and out of the drier without touching the bottom or sides. Another problem I find with these is that they tend to spray the water coming off your hands all over your face.
Why not have faucets that you can turn on and off at will, but after N seconds of no "user input" they turn off automatically? Don't even make a super complicated faucet, just add an automatically operated valve to the pipe, and make it open quickly, but not instantly (so when you touch the faucet that was running at full blast you don't have an instant mess). Anything that involves a timer or a fixed water speed drives me nuts, and it's not because I like to waste water, at all. It's because I know how to use the thing, and might even want to use less than the fixed dose I'm offered.
The article makes the case of these technologies being positive for parties other than the end user, even when the result for the end user is a net negative. (I.E., automatic faucets save water by preventing it from running full-blast for hours, which saves money for the building owners, but it does so by annoying end users.)
In almost all cases, it's possible to optimize to make both parties happy; when this doesn't happen, it demonstrates a power asymmetry: the people who use these mechanisms (usually installed by an institution: public bathrooms, office coffee machines) matter less than the owners.
> I used to regularly walk into public bathrooms in which someone had used the toilet and simply not flushed it
I use public restrooms once ever two days (sometimes even more) and I very rarely see that. Maybe people in your part of the world are less educated when it comes to using public toilets, or the janitors are not doing their jobs properly (if it matters I live in an Eastern-European capital city).
As for the automatic toilets, I hate them. I only had the displeasure of using them once or twice, and let me tell you, to have that flush of water invade your lower exposed parts all of the sudden while you're doing your toilet-related stuff is not at all nice, quite the contrary. Those toilets are the work of the devil.
I live in the US. I'm fairly sure that the average user of public restrooms knows how toilets work. I think there are just a bunch of jerks who don't bother to flush.
I recently went on a month-long trip to New Zealand. I have never seen so many clean restrooms in my life. Sure there were a few that were kinda nasty, but the overall cleanliness was super impressive. Even the bathrooms in gas stations were always clean.
I mean, I spent a month traveling there, and had no problems using public restrooms on a regular basis. If I'm traveling here (mostly West Coast US) I have to make multiple stops before I find a clean restroom.
It could be that NZ relies a lot more on tourism, so people try harder to keep things nice. But hey, hope you enjoyed my anecdotal story.
Maybe people in your part of the world are less educated when it comes to using public toilets
It occurred to me (and people I know) more than once that I did flush, multiple times, and that the damn toilet just refused to suck up everything I put in there. And for some reason this was always in public bathrooms, across Western Europe. Hypothesis is that due to being used a lot and possibly not cleaned in the correct way there's to much deposit of bicarbonates limiting water flow and the force/pressure of the water being flushed isn't high enough to flush everything in there. Not much an automatic toilet could do about that btw.
> The author waxes nostalgic about those cloth towel roll dispensers. His experience does not match mine. I generally see those things in old gas stations where the cleanliness of the towel is deeply suspect.
The author was talking about hand-cranked dispensers for paper towels, not cloth ones.
I used to regularly walk into public bathrooms in which someone had used the toilet and simply not flushed it. That doesn't happen much any more. I'm willing to deal with a lot of phantom flushes to not deal with someone else's literal shit.
I used to regularly find public bathrooms where someone (I'm assuming a vandal, although it could just be a distracted or careless person) has left the water running. A fully open faucet can erase the gains of more judicious human usage pretty quickly.
The author waxes nostalgic about those cloth towel roll dispensers. His experience does not match mine. I generally see those things in old gas stations where the cleanliness of the towel is deeply suspect.