Sunday, April 5, 2015

Guilty Elite: Toilets #1

This is the first post in a start of a series (hopefully) which will show inequality. I will try and keep judgment out of it.

I went to watch Byomkesh Bakshi at R-City Mall today. When I was in the loo, it seemed like they had managed to fit in an inordinately large number of urinals in that space. I don't think anyone would ever have to wait for someone else to finish. Feeling very curious, I counted.

In a Cinema in Tokyo (from Wikicommons)
Another place where I have never had to wait is the public toilet at CST Station in Mumbai. It has many stalls for men to stand and pee on the wall. It doesn't have urinals. I remember counting the stalls there as well.

I did some basic finding and calculation about the number of people visiting at each location. R-City mall has 8 theaters. One theater I counted had around 250 seats. Let's take that to be the average. Tomorrow, 6th April Monday, there will be 42 shows running during the day. So the maximum number of people that can ever watch a movie in a single is day is roughly (250 x 42) 10,000. I think, R-City would be happy to have even 7,000 people in a day and the average would be more like 5,000.

So here are the statistics (minor errors possible):

Movie show timings - 9 AM to 1:30 AM
Train timings - 4 AM (ish) to 12:45 AM

Number of people visiting daily

  1. CST Terminus: More than one lakh -  > 1,00,000
  2. R-City: 5,000 average (10,000 is the absolute best case)
So CST has at least 10 (usually 15-20) times the number of people.

Toilet Facilities

  1. CST Terminus: 42 urinals. 4-5 taps. Don't know about toilets.
  2. R-City: 47 urinals. 7 wash basins. 7 toilets. 
More number of every facility and obviously, much better in quality. I don't have pictures of either since I couldn't find any of them empty at any point of time.

P.S. As much as things change, the more they remain the same. :)
Our consecutive seat numbers. 17 after 15

1 comment:

ABHIMANYU DHAMIJA said...

You are curious about strange things. :)
Usage pattern of loos at CST and R-city would be pretty different.
Usage of loos in movie theatres happens during the interval breaks which lasts for roughly 10 mins.
Assuming no 2 screens' interval clashes, 50% utilization of seats, and 50:50 men:women ratio.

We get to 62 men in one screen. 47 urinals mean 75 % of that audience can pee simultaneously during the interval break.

Seems pretty fair. Although the loos would be empty for most part the day.

Same is not the case with CST loo usage pattern as trains keep running throughout the day.