Hi Rebecca,
Could you give some insight on the following scenarios?
Program: 50,000 sf Sports stadium with (2) 8000sf restaurants. How many ADA restrooms required? Would I include the restaurants in the calculation or just the seating for the stadium?
Program: 10,000sf B use with 5000sf E use (classroom). Would each use require its own restroom count or could they be combined into 1 total located centrally between the uses?
Thank you
Hi @wildlandguy !
Thanks for your question!
For scenario 1, you would separate out all the programmatic elements. So the stadium would have it’s own restroom requirements and each restaurant would have it’s own separate restroom requirements.
The first step is to look at the occupant loads of each. The stadium is tricky because I assume it has fixed seats, and to determine the occupancy load of the stadium we need to know how many fixed seats it has. The restaurants would each have an occupancy load of 15 net, which means each has an occupancy of 533 if we’re looking at Table 1004.5 unconcentrated assembly. I’ll go ahead and do the calculations for the restaurants since I know those numbers.
The next step is to look at table 2902.1 to determine the restroom requirements for the 50,000 sf stadium and the two 8000 sf restaurants. A restaurant requires 1 water closet per 75 males and 1 per 75 females with lavatories 1 per 200 occupants. So we’d need 3 lavatories. We divide 533/2 = 267 males and 267 females which means we’d need 4 stalls in each restroom. Again, I don’t know how many restrooms are required for the stadium because the number of seats is unknown.
After determining the restroom requirements (for one restaurant in this example I’m calculating), we need to look at section 1109.2.2 and 1109.2.3. Water closet compartment: “Where water closet compartments are provided in a toilet room or bathing room, at least 5 percent of the total number of compartments shall be wheelchair accessible.” This means that each restroom needs to have 1 wheelchair accessible stall. Lavatories: “Where lavatories are provided, at least 5 percent, but not less than 1 shall be accessible.” So we’ll need 1 accessible lavatory.
In total each restaurant needs 3 accessible restrooms (1 male WC, 1 female WC, and 1 lavatory). I suggest looking at how I calculated the restaurants and try calculating the stadium if you have the fixed seating count.
For scenario 2, you can technically combine them. I just recently did this in a mixed use B/S-1 project I’m working on. You’d still have to do the calculations out separately for each use like I did above to ensure that your fixture counts meet each of the B and E requirements. You also need to take into consideration the maximum travel distance of 500 ft to a restroom when planning out your central restroom location.
Let me know if you have any other questions. Thanks!
-Rebecca