Having had to use a handicap stall on a few occasions, I’ve had the opportunity to observe first hand just how positively immense they are compared to conventional stalls. I would guess that they are typically around 7 ft. x 8 ft., but one I used recently was approximately 7 ft. wide and 12 ft. long-- large enough for an entire basketball team to relieve themselves in simultaneously.
Why would anyone need a stall that has roughly 4 times the footprint of a conventional stall? Why is it required that handicap stalls be so vast, when very few handicapped people would have bathrooms that large in their own homes, unless they lived in a mansion??
Presumably to meet the requirements of the local building authority, based on the amount of space that is needed to allow a handicapped person to manoeuvre a wheelchair inside the stall.
Anecdotally, when my best friend broke his back and spent 5 or 6 months in a wheelchair, it was the bathroom that was the weak spot in his home. The chair couldn’t get through the door, and it took some interesting work to get him to the pot.
Likewise, I’ve been in regular stalls where I was hard pressed to get in and get the door shut without having to stand on the commode; I imagine the space is needed to assure the wheelchair can get in, the patron can get the door shut, and still have enough room to move from one seat to the other, particularly if the patron was morbidly obese.
There needs to be room for a wheelchair to enter and maneuver, room for it to be set aside in front and alongside the toilet, and room for an assistant.
Actually, in a new house designed properly a wheelchair bound person could easily have a bathroom large enough to handle a wheelchair. Picture the handicapped stall with a sink as one wall and a shower as the other. Doesn’t really seem too enormous now.
If you try to use a wheelchair in there you’ll see it’s not excessively large. I recently had to find a new place to live, and the size of the bathroom was the most limiting factor. I didn’t have the time to build, and ended up buying a condo with a bathroom I can’t turn around in or close the door once I’m inside.
I wonder if some stalls aren’t created out of two old stalls by simply removing the barrier in between them and reworking the plumbing a bit. The end result would be bigger than two stalls since you no longer have the space taken up by the barrier, but sometimes it might be unavoidable because you might not have enough space to fit an extra stall elsewhere.
I think another reason is that in retrofitted public or office restrooms they tend to occupy what used to be two regular stalls at the end; then the front part with the door is extended outward to provide more space.
I like to be near wall anyway, so I usually head for the handicap stall if the one at the other end is taken, the chance that that would displace an actually handicapped person being virtually nil.