Business commuters, local travelers, tourists, and shoppers: you'll find ALL of them waiting to use the ONE set of toilets at the new central train station in Berlin. For the largest railway station in all of Europe, built at a cost of nearly $615 million dollars [2], you'd think the designers would have used their heads and put in more, well, heads. Women in particular have been complaining about the long lines, and a spokesman for the station said that they're working as quickly as possible to build a "second" set of toilets.
A "second" set? For 300,000 people a day? It's not mentioned how many stalls either the existing or the planned washrooms have, but Berlin is a busy crossroads [3]; the station [4] is filled with people at all times of the day and night. Is even "another" set of toilets going to be enough? That place is HUGE! What were they thinking?
(Editor's note: And how about this [5]. Coincidence?)
This lack of lavs poses an interesting design question: how many bathrooms do 300,000 people actually need? For comparison, here's an article about Grand Central Terminal in New York: 700,000 people, 32 women's toilets. [6] (It doesn't say how many there are for men.)
