No more toilets in Seattle

[HeyBub]

"Seattle has officially washed its hands of the five self-cleaning toilets. The toilets cost the city $5 million. They sold on eBay Thursday evening for $12,549."

I think the city fathers are going to take the money from the sale of the toilets and invest it in "free" bicycles. They'll paint them green and scatter them around the downtown area so that folks can "get it here, leave it there."

This plan has been a disaster in every city that's tried it, but that won't stop Seattle. No sir.

[mm]

They made a mistake by having all the auctions end within about ten minutes of each other, every 2 minutes or so.

They should have spaced them out every two hours so that people would bid on one, lose, then bid higher on the next. More people would have bid on the first one, if they knew that still had time to bid on the second, and third.

I don't consider this such a big mistake of whatever city employee ran the auctions. It's not the sort of thing a newbie would think of. OTOH, if they have a running agreement with Bidadoo, maybe they should have been given better advice. OTOH, it's in Bidadoo's interest too to get as much as possible, so I don't know.

[Robert Neville]

That's too bad. I've used these type of public facilities in the UK and they work well when the local users aren't one step removed from primates.

The original design was quite clever, allowing just enough room for one person and having the door open automatically after 15 minutes if the person didn't leave sooner. In the US, the ADA mafia got after them, forcing the redesign to a larger size to accomodate wheelchairs, which led to enough room for prostitution and anonymous encounters and other antisocial behavior.