There are few moments more intimate than sitting on a public toilet and accidentally making eye contact with a stranger through the one-inch gap beside the door.
Neither of you wanted this. Neither of you will acknowledge it. But for one terrible second, you have seen each other more honestly than most married couples ever will.
If you grew up in the United States, you probably accept our bathroom stalls as another mildly degrading part of public life. But visitors from other countries regularly encounter them and ask a reasonable question: Why did Americans build a toilet enclosure that doesn’t fully enclose the toilet?
The answer is mostly money.
Privacy Costs Extra
Most American bathroom stalls are modular partition systems. Instead of constructing several little rooms with real walls and doors, builders order standardized panels, bolt them together and call it a day.
The gaps make this process faster and more forgiving. The bathroom floor doesn’t need to be perfectly level. The panels don’t need to be precisely measured. The door can sag slightly without scraping against the frame.
This is convenient for the installer and unfortunate for the person trying to poop six feet away from a school field trip.
Manufacturers can make doors that overlap the frame or add strips that block the sightline. You may have encountered these luxurious technological breakthroughs at a nice hotel or recently renovated airport.
They cost more, however, and most building owners have decided that preventing strangers from seeing your knees is not where they want to splurge.
The Giant Floor Gap Is More Defensible
The large opening beneath the stall helps custodians sweep and mop the restroom. Water can move toward a shared drain, and the bottom of the partition doesn’t spend its life soaking in a mysterious liquid.
It can also help during an emergency. If someone collapses or experiences a medical crisis behind a locked door, other people can notice and reach them more easily.
Then there is accessibility. Federal standards require wheelchair-accessible compartments to provide clearance beneath certain partitions so a person’s feet and wheelchair footrests have room to maneuver. Larger stalls can sometimes avoid this requirement, but leaving space underneath is cheaper than building a larger bathroom.
This does not mean the Americans with Disabilities Act personally demanded that every restroom in the country display your pants around your ankles. It means that open-bottom partitions are an inexpensive design that can help satisfy several practical requirements at once.
The Empty Space Above the Stall Also Saves Money
Short partitions allow the entire restroom to share its lighting and ventilation. If every stall were a fully enclosed room, the building might need to account for airflow, lighting and fire-protection coverage inside each individual cubicle.
The open design also allows employees to determine whether a stall is occupied and makes it more difficult for someone to hide inside, use drugs or spend the afternoon conducting private business unrelated to the toilet.
These are legitimate advantages. They still don’t explain why the door crack needs to provide a clear view of someone washing their hands.
Other Countries Somehow Solved This
Here is where the practical explanations begin falling apart.
Bathrooms in Europe and elsewhere also require cleaning, ventilation, emergency access and wheelchair accommodation. Yet many of them have doors that overlap their frames, concealing the person inside through a dazzling feat of engineering known as “making the door slightly wider than the opening.”
America possesses this technology. We have sent people to the moon, split the atom and built a machine capable of delivering a burrito to your house at two in the morning. We can close the gap beside a bathroom door.
We simply choose not to.
The Stall Is Exactly as Private as It Needs to Be
Most public restrooms in America are free. Businesses have to build and maintain them, but the bathrooms themselves don’t make money. This creates an obvious incentive: install the cheapest stall that meets applicable codes and doesn’t cause customers to revolt.
So far, we haven’t revolted.
Americans have accepted a strange social contract in which the stall isn’t physically private, but everyone agrees to behave as though it is. You could look through the gap, but you don’t. If accidental eye contact occurs, both parties immediately pretend it didn’t.
The system works—not because the stall protects our privacy, but because shame does.
So why do American bathroom stalls have gaps? Cleaning, accessibility, ventilation and emergency access all play a part. But the cracks around the door exist largely because modular stalls are cheap, easy to install and considered good enough.
Better stalls already exist. They are neither futuristic nor prohibitively complicated.
They just cost slightly more, and corporate America has reviewed the numbers and decided that your dignity did not make the budget.
