Blessed by the Potato

Close your eyes (wait, text-based communication… scratch that part) and imagine that we’re standing in a kindergarten class. There’s you, and me, the teacher, and maybe an assistant. Four tall people to a veritable sea of shorties. The majority of users of that room are less than 3 feet tall. Why, then are we building doors with 7′ clearances when clearly the majority of people could be served by a 4′ door, with room to spare? We shouldn’t make the regular people pay more for tall doors just to suit people who are heavy height users. If they can’t get by crawling through, then that minority should pay for bigger doors through usage fees, and not be subsidized by everyone else.

Of course, this is silly: the incremental cost of making the doors taller is not very much compared to the fixed costs of putting in a door in the first place. And, the short people in the room won’t always be short: they’re just children. They’ll grow up.