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Remember just last week, when the city’s soon-to-open pay toilet was all rainbows and puppydogs? Yeah, well… apparently not.
A few years ago, Seattle installed pay toilets for about $600,000 a year. The Seattle Times editorializes for the toilets’ removal, citing, oh, quite a few things:
The high-tech toilets were launched a few years ago to provide a safe, clean place to go to the bathroom for Seattle’s homeless, tourists and others with no other place to freshen up. Cost to the city is about $600,000 a year. The toilets have turned into publicly subsidized drug and prostitution parlors. A security guard at the waterfront location filmed nine people piling into the bathroom at once.
The bottom line is the toilets are not used often enough for the original purpose. Some homeless people say they wouldn’t dare venture in because of safety concerns about unsavory activities going on inside. Bathroom cleaners often find drug paraphernalia left behind. [...]
The original idea for the toilets came from the need to stop people from urinating and defecating in public — all of which is still going on.
What, those nine people all really had to go!
Seattle’s gold-plated toilet mistake [Seattle Times via The Next Mayor]
Nov. 2: Flushing Philly’s Troubles Away
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