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Seattle Flushes $5M High-Tech Toilets
theodp writes "Hopes were high back in 2004 as Seattle's posh public potties opened for business. But four years later, city officials have said good riddance to the five high-tech toilets, self-cleaning and cylindrical, that had cost Seattle $5 million. The city unloaded them on eBay for just $12,549. The commodes had become filthy hide-outs for drug use and prostitution."
I'm guessing you have never been to the downtown east side in Vancouver.
They are not even close to decriminalized. Just because they have one safe injection site does not mean that the police won't arrest you for dealing. It also does not mean they won't arrest you if they catch you using drugs in public.
The reality of the downtown east side is that injection drug use is so rampant that the police couldn't arrest everyone who did it even if they wanted to. The single safe injection site isn't even close to large enough and neither are the detox centers. The result is that the dug users still shoot up in the alleys.
How can it be decriminalised in Vancouver? Drug use and prostitution is a federal offense written in the criminal code of Canada, no city law can change or overrule that.
There was an article on this in the NY Times a couple of weeks ago. In addition to drug use and prostitution, people would leave so much trash in the toilets that the automatic scrubbers had to be disabled or they jammed on the trash... and as a result, the toilets became so disgusting that even the druggies avoided them.
""I'm not going to lie: I used to smoke crack in there," said one homeless woman, Veronyka Cordner, nodding toward the toilet behind Pike Place Market. "But I won't even go inside that thing now. It's disgusting.""
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/17/us/17toilets.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=seattle%20public%20toilet&st=cse&oref=slogin
IMO, the reason this works in other countries but not in the U.S. has nothing to do with our "puritanical mindset": instead, it's because Americans have no concept of public common space. We feel that everything on Earth is for our exclusive personal use until someone tries to stop us.
The reason they can't open the doors after a couple of minutes has to do with ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act). At least that is according to Norman Augustine in Augustine's Laws. By law the toilets must be accessible to handicapped persons. It can take a handicapped person a long time to get there business done.
Another reason it fails in the U.S. is that it has a much larger homeless and mentally ill population roaming the streets of its major cities than just about any other first-world country I can name.
IT's against state law in Washington to charge for public toliets. Otherwise, they probably would have a small fee.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
As a Parisian, I can tell you that the people here will probably not move their finger to prevent druggies and prostitutes in toilets. But the cops will.
I think the issue in Seattles is the classic political correctness of Americans:
Toilets had to be accessible to disabled people.
Due to that requirement, you end up with huge toilets, which, by definition, have more use than the Parisian sanisette (I think that if a prostitute went with customers in a sanisette, there would probably be people outside clapping their hands when they would come out, due to sheer awesomeness of such an act).
Also, being huge, Seattles sanisettes were costly, so they ended up with only 5. 5 is a very small number, so of course they have been broken very fast.
In Paris, sanisettes are NOT accessible to disabled people. There are special ones that ARE accessible, but those are NOT accessible to the general public (you need a specific card), so they are kept in a correct state.
That is not politically correct. But it works.