$300,000 Toilet a Fine Use of City Funds... Okay, at Least We Didn't Pay for It

A toilet. You can go down to the hardware store and grab one of those for less than $200, right? Maybe pay the plumber a little for installation and all that. But if you're the City of Boston, you need to go all out and spend two years and $300,000 to create a coin-operated toilet at Christopher Columbus Park on the waterfront that desperate people will be unable to afford and normal people will be unwilling to use. (Especially when everybody knows you can just pee at the Marriott, anyway.)

At least the city itself didn't spend the money, exactly. A company called Wall Decaux is building the toilet in exchange for being able to advertise in it—captive audience and all that. The company's difficulties resulted first from plumbing problems and then from accessibility issues reminiscent of a certain sidewalk. The toilet is expected to open soon, though no one's sure exactly when.

But that's not even the ridiculous part: the Globe notes this is "the seventh city toilet out of a planned 10 that have been built since Mayor Thomas M. Menino vowed to bring such a fundamental amenity to Boston in 1997, after admiring a public toilet in San Francisco." So Menino can't get ten toilets built in twelve years? (Here are the six existing, none of which this Bostonist has ever used. San Francisco, by contrast, has 25 public toilets.) The toilets do bring in revenue to the city ($1.4 million in 2006), so maybe it's a sign we need new leadership: and a toilet-sharing plan, perhaps?