Adding urinal stations vs more toilets: which cuts the line more at a festival?

Urinal stations cut the men's wait more than packing the same footprint with extra full toilets when the crowd is mostly male.

At a two-day outdoor music fest with beer tents, men move through a standalone portable urinal a lot faster than a standard portable toilet. The urinal also takes less ground space, so you get more throughput along the same fence line. That is why a mixed bank (full toilets plus urinal stations) usually beats an all-toilet row on the men's side.

You still need enough standard units for women, kids, and anyone who needs a stall. Urinals only fix half the queue. Keep the women's and accessible units as full toilets, then put the urinal stations on the men's approach so the beer-tent rush does not back up into the shared path.

If your headcount is still mostly men this year, add urinals before you add another full row of toilets. If the gender mix is closer to even, lean toward more full toilets and only a small urinal bank. On the outdoor weekends I have worked, extra toilets alone helped a little, but the line only really moved once we mixed in urinals near the beer tents.

Dave's strategy works best when you plan the urinal placement to split the male traffic. The festival setup needs a separate approach path to the urinal stations so men who only need to urinate bypass the full toilet line entirely. This prevents the line for the full toilets from being blocked by urinal users. The truck access for your flat field also matters; a vacuum truck needs clear space to service both the urinal stations and the standard units. If the urinals are placed in a tight cluster without room for the truck hose, they cannot be pumped on schedule. Check that your service frequency increases for the urinals during a beer-heavy event, as they will fill faster than the standard units.