Urinals exist because they solve a specific set of problems that standard toilets don’t handle well in public spaces: they use less water, take up less floor space, move people through restrooms faster, and require simpler plumbing. What looks like a basic porcelain fixture is actually a surprisingly efficient piece of infrastructure that saves building owners thousands of dollars a year and conserves billions of gallons of water nationally.
They Fit More People in Less Space
The single biggest reason urinals became standard in public restrooms is density. A toilet stall requires a minimum clear space of 60 inches deep and 60 inches wide under U.S. accessibility standards, plus door clearance of 42 to 60 inches depending on the approach. A wall-hung urinal, by contrast, needs only about 13.5 inches of depth from the wall and can be installed with minimal side partitions. In practical terms, you can line up three or four urinals in the same footprint that two toilet stalls would occupy.
This matters enormously in stadiums, airports, concert halls, and office buildings where hundreds or thousands of people need to use a restroom during a short window. Urinals also have no door to open, no lock to fumble with, and no seat to manage. The average interaction takes well under a minute, which means a bank of urinals can cycle through far more users per hour than the same number of enclosed stalls.
Water Savings Are Substantial
Older urinals use up to 5 gallons per flush. The current federal standard for commercial urinals is 1.0 gallon per flush, and fixtures carrying the EPA’s WaterSense label use no more than 0.5 gallons. Compare that to a standard toilet, which flushes at 1.6 gallons (or 1.28 for high-efficiency models). Replacing just one older 1.5-gallon urinal with a WaterSense model saves a facility more than 4,600 gallons per year. The EPA estimates that if every outdated urinal in the country were swapped out, the national savings would reach nearly 36 billion gallons annually.
Waterless urinals push this even further. Instead of flushing, urine drains by gravity through small holes in a cartridge at the bottom of the bowl. Inside the cartridge sits a layer of oil-based liquid. Because urine is denser than oil, it sinks through the barrier, which then reseals itself, trapping sewer gases below. The urine collects in an exit chamber and spills over into the drain pipe once the fluid level is high enough. No water, no flush valve, no supply line. The only maintenance is periodic cartridge replacement.
Cheaper Plumbing, Smaller Pipes
Urinals are simpler to plumb than toilets. Under standard building codes, a toilet (water closet) carries a fixture-unit value of 6 and requires a 3-inch drain pipe. A standard wall-mounted urinal has a fixture-unit value of just 2 and needs only a 1.5-inch trap and drain. A waterless urinal drops to a fixture-unit value of 1. Lower fixture-unit values mean smaller branch pipes, less load on the building’s main drain, and reduced installation costs. For a commercial building installing dozens of fixtures, these differences add up quickly in both materials and labor.
The Public Health Trade-Off
Urinals improve public hygiene in some ways and create risks in others. Because there’s no seat, there’s no seat contamination to worry about, and restroom turnover is faster, which reduces crowding. But flushing a urinal does generate airborne droplets. A 2020 fluid dynamics simulation published in Physics of Fluids found that when a urinal flushes, more than 57% of microscopic particles travel outward from the bowl. Those particles can reach a height of about 0.84 meters (roughly thigh level on an average man) in just 5.5 seconds. That’s considerably faster than the aerosol plume from a standard toilet, which takes around 35 seconds to reach a similar height. In densely used public restrooms, this creates a potential route for pathogen transmission, particularly with viruses that can be shed in urine.
Waterless urinals sidestep this issue entirely, since there’s no flush to generate a plume. For flushing models, the practical takeaway is that stepping back before flushing reduces exposure.
Behavioral Design and the Famous Fly
Urinals have also become a case study in behavioral science. The most famous example is Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport, where small fly-shaped stickers were etched into urinal bowls to give users something to aim at. The result: a reported 50 to 80% reduction in splashback and an 8% drop in cleaning costs. This kind of “nudge” design works because urinals are open fixtures with a visible target area, something that’s harder to replicate with enclosed toilets.
Modern urinal engineering has taken aim at splashback more broadly. Researchers have used fluid dynamics and differential equations to design bowl geometries that minimize splash, treating it as a physics problem with real implications for cleanliness, water use, and even accessibility.
Why There’s No Equivalent for Women
The absence of a female urinal equivalent is not for lack of trying. Inventors have patented devices like Le Funelle (a biodegradable paper funnel from the late 1980s) and the She-inal (patented in 1991), but none gained mainstream adoption. Marketing proved nearly impossible: radio stations refused ads, magazines rejected them, and retailers feared offending customers.
The barriers aren’t purely social. Anatomy plays a role in fixture design. Men use urinals facing the wall, which provides a natural degree of privacy even without partitions. Women would need to face outward from a wall-mounted fixture, creating an inherently different privacy dynamic. Rows of open toilets without stalls would offer less privacy than a bank of urinals does for men. This biological asymmetry is one reason women’s restroom lines are consistently longer: every user needs an enclosed stall, and each stall takes up more space and more time than a urinal.
Legal scholars have pointed out the economic dimension as well. In facilities where men’s restrooms historically had pay stalls but free urinals, women effectively paid more for an equivalent biological need. The urinal, in this framing, is not just plumbing infrastructure but a fixture whose design assumptions are built around male anatomy, with downstream effects on equity, wait times, and restroom planning.
From Street Corners to Stadiums
Public urinals have a long lineage in European cities. The pissoir, or vespasienne, was once a common sight on Paris streets, offering a quick, open-air option for men. While these largely disappeared from France, examples survive in the Netherlands and other countries. Outdoor urinals have seen a resurgence at music festivals, sporting events, and in city centers dealing with public urination problems, often in portable or pop-up form.
Indoor urinals became standard fixtures in commercial buildings throughout the 20th century as plumbing codes formalized and public restroom design became a matter of building regulation rather than improvisation. Today, they’re required by code in most commercial men’s restrooms above a certain occupancy threshold, not because of tradition, but because the math on space, water, and throughput still holds up.