MPPNBA Revisited

The main guideline behind urinal selection is the MPPNBA:

Maximum People Peeing Not Beside Anyone

Catchy, isn’t it? What this means is that for any given bathroom configuration, you want to select urinals so that you can have the highest total occupancy (ie number of guys peeing), all the while ensuring that no two adjacent urinals are occupied.

Shawn provides us with this wonderful diagram of a bank of 7 urinals as the perfect example of the MPPNBA in action:

Say the outer two urinals are occupied. The temptation might be to take the central urinal (#4), but this means that urinals 2, 3, 5 and 6 are now off limits and only 3 men can pee at once. Selecting urinal 3 or 5 leaves the other open, and allows for a total of 4 men to pee simultaneously in comfort, rather than only 3. This is the MPPNBA - 4 men peeing at once, nobody beside anybody else.