#6: Your single-user restroom is probably underused →

From Emma:

I thought of this tip by seeing it in action. It’s a good example of how a headache-inducing change in the library can have unexpected good outcomes. When I worked at the Downtown Lansing branch of the Capital Area District Library in Michigan, the public elevator in our old building was increasingly unreliable but the library put off working on it because it was by far the easiest way for patrons who couldn’t do stairs to get to the upstairs half of the collection and to the main bathrooms and the program room in the basement.

The only bathroom on the ground floor of the library was a single-user restroom in the children’s area that had to be unlocked by staff if someone needed to use it. The reason for that was quite clever, actually: it was intended to be used as a children’s restroom and kids don’t tend to be good about locking doors behind them, so having an automatically-locking door protected them from being walked in on. Because of that setup, we’d always treated that as the “kid’s bathroom” and directed adult patrons to one of the other bathrooms in the building. Once the elevator was down, we had a lot of patrons with limited mobility asking to use that restroom, and our head librarian took down the “Family Restroom” sign and altered the policy to “anyone who asks can use this bathroom.” It was great for people who had limited mobility or people who might not be comfortable using a shared bathroom to all of a sudden have this option, but the fact that you had to ask for it to be unlocked left enough of a barrier that people who could easily use one of the other ones rarely asked, meaning the bathroom was usually open when a kid had to go right this minute.

This was a particularly useful one for me to see because it also showed me how restrictions can be helpful in serving a particular group, and that total openness to everyone isn’t always the best way to go. I had originally been an advocate of re-keying that bathroom and having it operate just like all the other ones, based on a vague principle of maximum access. However, watching how that bathroom was actually used helped me understand the usefulness of keeping it semi-reserved for people who had specific reasons (from “I’m trans and not comfortable using a gendered restroom at this stage” to “I’m two years old and haven’t learned how to anticipate when I will need to go”) to use that particular bathroom. Turns out our head librarian knew more than I realized she knew (spoiler alert: this will be a recurring theme in posts about that library—she is great and is a big role model for me).