Rest Room Redundancy on the Road
You may recall curiosity almost killing this cat in December-the rest area that wasn't as open as the signs implied. Well, it's open now, and I stopped in last night. I was excited to see what lessons Pennsylvania had learned over the decades about rest areas and how they might be improved. The key innovation I noticed was the bifurcated bathrooms. Men and women each have two bathrooms now, but they're subtle about it. It's one of those designs where you go through a doorway and then immediately around a wall. In this case, though, turning left and turning right to get around the wall yield different bathrooms. This lets them close one half for cleaning without cutting off the supply of stalls completely. Now that's good redundancy! In a surprising departure from utility, each half of the men's room only had one hand dryer and one paper towel dispenser. Worst of all, the hand dryer is blocked if anyone's standing at the leftmost sink. Way to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, PennDOT!