Park Restrooms
PARK RESTROOMS
When heading out with your friends and family to visit your local park, would the prospect of dealing with a lack of decent restroom facilities keep you from going? Users of city parks and playgrounds say that the lack of restrooms is a source of frustration for them. Many people say that they will avoid going to a park or will visit less often if the bathrooms are inadequate, uncomfortable, or unavailable.
It’s easy to see why many parks without restrooms now consider obtaining one to be a top priority for them. But once you decide to add a restroom to your park, you must next plan for it properly.
Here are the factors (explained in greater depth here) that you should consider when creating your restroom plan:
The Importance of Location for a Park Restroom
Your restroom should be where the people are. Before choosing a location, you should consider where people are entering, exiting, and gathering in your park.
If you have a large park with multiple areas where people congregate, you may wish to consider a few smaller restrooms instead of one large restroom. Do you have utilities (water, sewer, electrical) at the desired location? If not, you have two choices: expand the utilities or choose a utility-free alternative. Extending the utilities to your desired location can be incredibly expensive, even costing more than the building itself.
Anticipating Crime and Vandalism
Nobody knows your park (and the surrounding area) as you do. Do you feel that your park is at risk for vandalism?
We recommend studying the principles of CPTED (Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design). To summarize, criminals like dark places that are hard to see from the street where the police do their patrols.
The location of the restroom is important to prevent crime and damage to your restroom building. Try to ensure that the location for your restroom is close to the street, and well lit at night.
If you know your park is susceptible to vandalism, even when steps are taken to prevent it, we can help. By learning about your situation, we can plan with you and customize your restroom building to be resilient to everything from graffiti to fires to physical damage, all based on your needs.
Choose an Appropriate Restroom for Your Park
A restroom should maximize your park’s appeal, not be a source of discomfort or frustration for those stuck in long lines. Opting for a larger restroom or perhaps multiple restrooms will be an investment well-made if you anticipate heavy usage periods.
When estimating the number of users to size up your restroom needs, keep two things in mind. First, if your area is experiencing population growth, then the number of users in 20 years could be substantially more than today. Second, more people are willing to use traditional restrooms than waterless ones. Expect longer lines for real restrooms than for porta-potties. If you are uncertain about your level of need, we’d be happy to discuss and share our experiences with you.
The more welcoming a place feels for the elderly and disabled, the more they will want to come back! At Green Flush we will go out of our way to make our restrooms accessible and inclusive, so that people of all levels of physical ability can enjoy the outdoors.
Lastly, be sure to consider winter conditions when building your restroom. Do you have freezing winters? If so, you’ll need to build your restroom to be warm enough and heated enough for winter use, or shut down your restroom for the season while winterizing it to prevent freezing damage to plumbing and fixtures.
Budgeting
Determining the number of restrooms and the size of those restrooms will have the biggest impact on your budget. For example, if you can’t afford two medium-size restrooms, you could save money by getting one large restroom instead.
Location for your restroom is also a huge factor in your costs. Your most ideal restroom location might require extensive site work that costs a fortune; it’s not uncommon at all for these to exceed the cost of the restroom building itself. If this is a problem for your budget, we recommend our utility free restroom buildings or choosing a location with easy access to utilities.
Don’t forget to factor for winterization, vandal resistance, and especially aesthetics when planning your restroom budget.
Green Flush Restrooms at Parks:
- Can be wherever your people are, even if utility connections aren’t
- Are built to the size and number to meet your volume needs
- Utility-free can be a huge money saver over trenching utilities
- Can be heated and operate in winter conditions
- Are customizable to be vandalism resilient depending on your needs
- Are customizable aesthetically to match the look of your park
- Our flush restrooms are ADA compliant
- Commercial quality
- Built to withstand decades of the hard use
- Less expensive than a site-built public restroom
- Our restrooms are better for the environment