Posted on 10/05/2006 11:22:54 AM PDT by Sopater
We have these all over San Francisco. When Decaux, the French company that owns and maintains them got the contract to put them around the city, "disability advocates" insisted that ALL of them be accesible to disabled people. Decaux told us that the regular ones, which only hold one person, were a better fit, but the "disability advocates" threatened to sue.
So we have dozens of them. The one I pass by every day next to the BART station is used by the heroin-addict hookers doing their "monicas" for cash. No one else can use it.
That is just a staggering sum of money. If that's the going rate, I'm going to become a washroom attendant.
Around 15 years ago, after Willie Brown visited Paris. San Francisco decided to install 25 of these self-cleaning toilets.
They were originally going to be small single person toilets, like the one's you see in Europe. But the "Advocates for the Handicapped" yelled and screamed that these were too small for a wheelchair to do a 360 degree turn, and was a violation against the ADA.
The French makers warned that if you use these large handicap toilets, people will "copulate in them and do drugs". They suggest that only a few be handicap toilets and that after 10 minutes a warning alarm would sound and then the doors would automatically open. The civil libertarian howled.
Then is was found out that it would cost 25 cents to use them (necessary to defray the cost and maintance). Homeless advocates yelled that it was unfair. So government now hands out tokens to bums and dope fiends to use the toilets.
When the toilets were installed, merchants screamed because these things are huge, imagine a 10x10x20 green metal box in front of your store. So they had to be relocated.
Since their installation, all the dire predictions have come true. The toilets are primarily used by drug fiends to shoot dope and smoke crack. Even bums don't use them because of that. Most are heavily vandalized. They've had to remove them from skidrow.
Suprisingly the only area were these toilet have been a success is in the tourist area of Fisherman's Wharf. But then again most tourist use the toilets for what they're designed for as opposed to using them to copulate and do drugs.
There is no greater symbolism of the failure of Socialism then these public toilets.
Mindless Leftist dogooders would have the entire U.S.A. in the toilet if the rest of us gave serious attention to their nitwit approach.
The most mindnumbing thing about them--though not the most frightening--is their ever predictible self-congratulation on the benevolence of their intentions--as though the rest of us didn't have good intentions. It invariably escapes these twits that many "solutions" don't have to be tried to know that they won't work--or will make matters even worse.
Between that and a tip jar they could probably clear 250k/year.
(You might want to run those tips through a wash cycle in the Maytag though)
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