Various news outlets this week covered Fort Lauderdale's decision to install an automatic public toilet on a beach strip currently lacking public restrooms.The punch-lines almost wrote themselves! The toilet, as envisioned, will:
- Ration toilet paper
- Clean itself after every use
- Blast a siren and automatically open the door if someone overstays their allotted time.
It also plays soothing music, and locks itself automatically every evening.
We can imagine that there are hundreds of thousands of households across the country with teenagers who would gladly line up to purchase the auto-cleaning and timer functions for their home bathrooms.
The serious part of the conversation is this: Fort Lauderdale, and other cities that have installed these types of toilets, are betting on the future. They're betting that the higher up-front purchase cost of these items will be recovered through reductions in the long-term operating costs. The same is true of the green buildings that are beginning to pop up throughout the country. With our rising energy costs and upcoming reduction in tax revenue, wouldn't we be foolish not to consider the same issues?
1 comment:
Other cities already have these in place. How would you like to be the unfortunate person that just left Taco Bell and are in desperate need of the services this restroom provides only to have the door fly open somewhere between taking care of business and doing the paperwork?
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