waterless ones are patented and without a water line you'd be locked in to higher priced products and/or have to spend a lot of extra money to run a new water line after the walls go up. Generally the situation with waterless ones is people endlessly social signal their green superiority about them, then the incredible stench makes them install real urinals. Even if only 5% or so install real urinals the net cost is still lower.
Its kind of like an electrician demanding a ground line be run to every outlet while someone who knows nothing about electricity demanding that ground wire almost never carries current therefore is a waste of money.
Perhaps a better analogy is its like adding another fiber optic strand, before or during the project the marginal cost is extremely cheap, after the project is complete its unimaginably expensive to add another strand after the dirt has gone back in the ditch.
I think it's very important to be able to let people make these decisions. It's inefficient to add a water line if it's never going to be used. You might believe I'm going to use it, but I might know I'm not going to use it. Maybe you're right, but I am the one paying the bill to tear off finishings to run water lines in the walls.
Kiiiinnnnda. People make bad decisions, and the only architecture that matters is the one that lets you change. It's like the dig-once fiber policy for roadways, and is all part of the "don't build to peak value" idea; it's also like a usual problem with user interface design: if you only ever built user tools to do what you imagined, users (or later owners / tenants) are limited to your imagination.
I go to a gym in an office building; there are showers. Do you think the floor was built with anyone thinking: "Oh, one day there might be showers here!"?
I worked at a company with a (big) 3d printer - we had to rinse part afterwards, and kinda managed to wedge the rinser into the (extra extra large) handicapped stall in the men's bathroom.
Don't just build to what YOU can imagine, give people rope to make more things.
Running unused water lines [while it's cheap to do so] sounds like a good plan.
On the other hand, future proofing, and enough rope to hang yourself.
Construction codes are all about outlawing bad decisions.
Of course, those are "bad" decisions that save a few penny from the builders, and stay hidden until they surprise the building owner with a huge unpredictable cost. No water lines to urinals fits that descriptions nicely.
> Of course, those are "bad" decisions that save a few penny from the builders, and stay hidden until they surprise the building owner with a huge unpredictable cost.
I thought law is about forbidding harmful decisions, not bad ones? (At least in theory) Most of the stupid things you do to yourself, without affecting others are not regulated.
Bad decisions are bad because they are harmful. And most stupid things you do to yourself do affect others, and they are regulated according to the significance of the damage, not merely predicated on its existence.
Yet we still find some reason to regulate just about everything, because people are pretty creative about finding ways to pass the consequences of their bad decisions onto other people.
I don't know real estate developers to be any sort of exception, do you?
I can actually see this effect in my flat. I live in a fairly old building; it's been renovated and I really like it, but the location of the power plugs is the same as when it was constructed (except for one room in my flat). This means each socket is located at the entry of the respective room - the result being that I have extension cords all over the place. I especially find this interesting since this means the pattern of power consumption by "normal people" must have shifted drastically in the last 60-100 years.
On another note, the obvious parallels to software engineering tasks seem very interesting. This shows that ideas like YAGNI very much depend on a cost-benefit-calculation that's very dependend on variables like scale and the anticipated cost of changes.
Dig-once policy for roadways makes sense because the roadway is a public good, and digging multiple times would cause problems for the public, and would cost more for the public, so the _public_ is well within its rights to require this policy.
Requiring a water line in a building is not the same thing. It's a private building, and the people who own it are well within their rights to decide to risk later disruption and cost if they need water lines. Legislating away that right is insanity and just make-work that costs the building owner money up-front for something they've decided they don't need.
The problem is that cities don't want buildings torn down every 10 years because it's cheaper for the buyer to just rebuild from the ground up than to fight what essentially amounts to a heap of technical debt. Well-constructed buildings can last centuries: future-proofing is a pretty big deal.
Are you familiar with the concept of opportunity cost? Effort spend redoing things all the time instead of improving and building new things is not making a city better.
We do this in lots of places. For example, it's against building code in most places to build a house without power grid feeds, running water, or septic/sewer access. Sometimes there are exceptions for "tiny houses" but other times not.
You yourself might want to go totally off the grid and/or rustic, but the reality is that you are likely not going to be the last person who ever lives in that house. Maybe you don't pay your taxes and the township ends up owning a lien on your house. They don't want to have to spend fifty grand installing electricity or running water before they can sell the house.
Depending on how big the technical deficit is here, it may not even be cost effective to retrofit after the fact (after all it still needs to meet code). And knocking down a house because the previous owner was a weirdo is terribly wasteful.
I suppose I didn't make it explicit, but my point is that these regulations can be costly and/or stifling for a future benefit that may never come.
Costly in the original example would be that waterless urinals are installed for the life of the building.
Stifling in your example would be because much land will never be used because it's infeasible to bring power, water, and septic. Someone could have a home, but nothing will happen instead due to the regulation.
Just to meet your last point:
- Is today's weirdo tomorrow's visionary?
- Is a weirdo not allowed to create what he wants if he's not hurting anyone?
> these regulations can be costly and/or stifling for a future benefit that may never come.
You could say the same thing about much of the building code.
A lot of code is there to ensure that the floor doesn't collapse if you fill the tub up with water, have a room full of people jumping up and down, or buy a piano. There's more on ensuring the roof doesn't collapse if there's lot of snow on it, and making sure the house is solid enough to safely sustain reasonably high winds or an earthquake.
If there are no earthquakes, wind or snow storms, you never buy a piano or have a party and only ever use the shower, is the effort put in satisfying these codes wasted?
I think it's important to consider the difference between "possible benefit" and "avoiding injury/death".
When it comes to safety--because we understandably put such a large value on human life--small risks are something we consider.
I believe all of your examples fall into the safety category. Even worse about your examples is that the situations are unsafe and misleading. I think our regulations surrounding the safety issues that you listed are reasonable.
(Additionally, building codes do consider expected usage and alters allowances. No one expects a piano in an attic and the floor load per square foot requirements reflect that.)
You'd be surprised at the prevalence of regulations! ("You have one flush toilet. U.S. regulations require every legally habitable dwelling to have at least one flush toilet connected to an approved sewer or septic system." -- So a composting-toilet-only house seems to be illegal everywhere in the US.)
Someone could buy an incredibly valuable vacant lot and fence it and never use it. As far as I know, that's not illegal but would cause the same problem you've pointed out. I don't think the utility hookup regulations are based on such "waste of space" reasoning.
In practice, your urinal is often bundled with things I don't have much choice in, like a university or employer. I'm not going to transfer to a new school because i don't like the urinals.
> waterless ones are patented and without a water line you'd be locked in to higher priced products and/or have to spend a lot of extra money to run a new water line after the walls go up.
Urinals have a very long life cycle, and by the time one needs to be replaced, it is likely any patent left would be in Design only, and thus other manufacturers can build and sell them, allowing the market to rebalance the cost.
In other words, "they're patented" is a bogus argument for needing a water line.
There are better arguments which you tried to hit on - what if you want to replace a urinal with a stall or some other fixture, e.g. - but this one alone isn't a good one. There are also plenty of counter arguments for why this kind of thing is a really bad idea in the case of a water line (e.g., a blind water line is going to be a much more ugly problem when renovations do happen if they aren't well enough noted in the designs or if the designs are unavailable, and what happens when a blind water line leaks, bursts or corrodes through inside a wall due to freezing/accidentally drilling or nailing through a pipe/etc.)
What about the flip side of it - someone wants to put in a few waterless urinals someplace where they can't run water line, and the alternative is no urinals at all? You've literally outlawed a portion of the utility of the invention.
Water supply lines are easy, sanitary waste lines are harder and messier. A location that will support a few 2" sanitary waste lines connecting to a 4" will support a 1" supply line.
Its kind of like an electrician demanding a ground line be run to every outlet while someone who knows nothing about electricity demanding that ground wire almost never carries current therefore is a waste of money.
Perhaps a better analogy is its like adding another fiber optic strand, before or during the project the marginal cost is extremely cheap, after the project is complete its unimaginably expensive to add another strand after the dirt has gone back in the ditch.