10 ms·
waterless ones are patented and without a water line you'd be locked in to higher priced products and/or have to spend a lot of extra money to run a new water l
by VLM 10y ago
waterless ones are patented and without a water line you'd be locked in to higher priced products and/or have to spend a lot of extra money to run a new water line after the walls go up. Generally the situation with waterless ones is people endlessly social signal their green superiority about them, then the incredible stench makes them install real urinals. Even if only 5% or so install real urinals the net cost is still lower.
Its kind of like an electrician demanding a ground line be run to every outlet while someone who knows nothing about electricity demanding that ground wire almost never carries current therefore is a waste of money.
Perhaps a better analogy is its like adding another fiber optic strand, before or during the project the marginal cost is extremely cheap, after the project is complete its unimaginably expensive to add another strand after the dirt has gone back in the ditch.
- fiter 10y agoI think it's very important to be able to let people make these decisions. It's inefficient to add a water line if it's never going to be used. You might believe I'm going to use it, but I might know I'm not going to use it. Maybe you're right, but I am the one paying the bill to tear off finishings to run water lines in the walls.
- brudgers 10y agoBefore sanitary sewer regulations, people got cholera and such: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/15/science/15chol.html http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/15/science/15chol.html
- LordKano 10y agoIn principle, I agree with you but in practice, I so loathe the stink of waterless urinals that on the inside, I'm glad they did that.
- jlg23 10y agoIn principle, I agree with you, but in practice: Don't use my urinal if you don't like it. Liberalism goes both ways.
- andrewflnr 10y agoIn practice, your urinal is often bundled with things I don't have much choice in, like a university or employer. I'm not going to transfer to a new school because i don't like the urinals.
- LordKano 10y agoIn principle, I agree with that but in practice; when you've got to go, you've got to go. I have been nauseated every time I entered a public lavatory where waterless urinals were installed. I have certainly avoided those lavatories in the future but once I'm nauseated, the damage is done.
- RangerScience 10y agoKiiiinnnnda. People make bad decisions, and the only architecture that matters is the one that lets you change. It's like the dig-once fiber policy for roadways, and is all part of the "don't build to peak value" idea; it's also like a usual problem with user interface design: if you only ever built user tools to do what you imagined, users (or later owners / tenants) are limited to your imagination. I go to a gym in an office building; there are showers. Do you think the floor was built with anyone thinking: "Oh, one day there might be showers here!"? I worked at a company with a (big) 3d printer - we had to rinse part afterwards, and kinda managed to wedge the rinser into the (extra extra large) handicapped stall in the men's bathroom. Don't just build to what YOU can imagine, give people rope to make more things. Running unused water lines [while it's cheap to do so] sounds like a good plan. On the other hand, future proofing, and enough rope to hang yourself.
- djrogers 10y ago> Kiiiinnnnda. People make bad decisions You can't outlaw bad decisions - but it seems that some people will never get tired of trying...
- marcosdumay 10y agoConstruction codes are all about outlawing bad decisions. Of course, those are "bad" decisions that save a few penny from the builders, and stay hidden until they surprise the building owner with a huge unpredictable cost. No water lines to urinals fits that descriptions nicely.
- brudgers 10y agoAs they say: Built to code == the worst construction that is legal
- btschaegg 10y ago> Of course, those are "bad" decisions that save a few penny from the builders, and stay hidden until they surprise the building owner with a huge unpredictable cost. Another case in point: http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN0UG0H720160102 http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN0UG0H720160102
- gingerbread-man 10y agoThe problem is that cities don't want buildings torn down every 10 years because it's cheaper for the buyer to just rebuild from the ground up than to fight what essentially amounts to a heap of technical debt. Well-constructed buildings can last centuries: future-proofing is a pretty big deal.
- jonknee 10y agoWhy would a city care? That's just more permitting money and local jobs.
- Anderkent 10y agoAre you familiar with the concept of opportunity cost? Effort spend redoing things all the time instead of improving and building new things is not making a city better.
- hinkley 10y agoYou're replying to a story about a guy who wants to replace tower cranes because two of them fell over and killed people in the same year. That's why the city cares. Every time one goes up or comes down there's a risk involved.
- aljones 10y agoIf a city had the narrow concerns of a business then that might make sense.
- namlem 10y agoBecause construction sites are ugly and noisy.
- paulmd 10y agoWe do this in lots of places. For example, it's against building code in most places to build a house without power grid feeds, running water, or septic/sewer access. Sometimes there are exceptions for "tiny houses" but other times not. You yourself might want to go totally off the grid and/or rustic, but the reality is that you are likely not going to be the last person who ever lives in that house. Maybe you don't pay your taxes and the township ends up owning a lien on your house. They don't want to have to spend fifty grand installing electricity or running water before they can sell the house. Depending on how big the technical deficit is here, it may not even be cost effective to retrofit after the fact (after all it still needs to meet code). And knocking down a house because the previous owner was a weirdo is terribly wasteful.
- fiter 10y agoI suppose I didn't make it explicit, but my point is that these regulations can be costly and/or stifling for a future benefit that may never come. Costly in the original example would be that waterless urinals are installed for the life of the building. Stifling in your example would be because much land will never be used because it's infeasible to bring power, water, and septic. Someone could have a home, but nothing will happen instead due to the regulation. Just to meet your last point: - Is today's weirdo tomorrow's visionary? - Is a weirdo not allowed to create what he wants if he's not hurting anyone?
- rtpg 10y agoThere aren't that many building regulations in the middle of the countryside. Building busted stuff in the middle of NYC hurts everyone, because there's limited space. Visionaries can build where other people don't want to be, or convince the people around them that what they want to do is a good idea.
- fiter 10y agoYou'd be surprised at the prevalence of regulations! ("You have one flush toilet. U.S. regulations require every legally habitable dwelling to have at least one flush toilet connected to an approved sewer or septic system." -- So a composting-toilet-only house seems to be illegal everywhere in the US.) Someone could buy an incredibly valuable vacant lot and fence it and never use it. As far as I know, that's not illegal but would cause the same problem you've pointed out. I don't think the utility hookup regulations are based on such "waste of space" reasoning.
- aaron695 10y agoDo you think it should be code that toilets have to be installed? You could shit in a box? Personally this is not tooooo far off that. Ensuring toilets always work.
- djrogers 10y agoWhat about the flip side of it - someone wants to put in a few waterless urinals someplace where they can't run water line, and the alternative is no urinals at all? You've literally outlawed a portion of the utility of the invention.
- x0x0 10y agoThat's disgusting and unsanitary: no water == no sink.
- tempestn 10y agoOuthouses don't have sinks and are pretty common. A hand sanitizer dispenser would do the job.
- akvadrako 10y agowaterless hand sanitiser doesn't actually work
- jrochkind1 10y agocite?
- natosaichek 10y agoEver used an outhouse? or been to a concert or event venue with portable hand-wash units?
- alphabettsy 10y agoSince when are those things regulated by the same building codes as a permanent building?
- Retra 10y agoA pipe that runs to a waterless urinal doesn't actually waste any water.
- awalton 10y ago> waterless ones are patented and without a water line you'd be locked in to higher priced products and/or have to spend a lot of extra money to run a new water line after the walls go up. Urinals have a very long life cycle, and by the time one needs to be replaced, it is likely any patent left would be in Design only, and thus other manufacturers can build and sell them, allowing the market to rebalance the cost. In other words, "they're patented" is a bogus argument for needing a water line. There are better arguments which you tried to hit on - what if you want to replace a urinal with a stall or some other fixture, e.g. - but this one alone isn't a good one. There are also plenty of counter arguments for why this kind of thing is a really bad idea in the case of a water line (e.g., a blind water line is going to be a much more ugly problem when renovations do happen if they aren't well enough noted in the designs or if the designs are unavailable, and what happens when a blind water line leaks, bursts or corrodes through inside a wall due to freezing/accidentally drilling or nailing through a pipe/etc.)
- sfall 10y agowaterless urinals require a cartridge which has to be replaced
- trapperkeeper79 10y agoThe plumbing unions made some dumb arguments about toxic gas coming up from the sewer IIRC. Why does the regulation care about costs anyways?