"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."

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/htm...ilets15m0.html

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.

On Mon, 18 Aug 2008 16:08:59 -0500, "HeyBub"
wrote:

"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."

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.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/htm...ilets15m0.html

"HeyBub" wrote:

"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."

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.