Well, actually, we can. This is an existing public toilet in San Francisco—note the charming pumpkin tile to match the fall foliage (when it’s, you know, fall). It’s just that we can’t have too many of them, because they cost about $1.7 million apiece and take about three or four years to build.
Slate’s Henry Grabar (and a lot of other people, because who doesn’t like making fun of expensive toilets?) has the story:
There was plenty of blame to go around. A construction union said the city was trying to funnel grant money into staff salaries, hence the bathroom’s inflated price; the parks department said the left-wing city council had banned it from doing business with most red-state suppliers, driving up materials costs. Other potential culprits included the uncooperative utility company, the high cost of union labor, and the obligation to review the project under the California Environmental Quality Act.
It was this sort of thing that caused me to cast a cold eye last year on Joe Biden’s $2.7 trillion infrastructure proposal, which shrank to $1 trillion by the time he signed it last November, and which I suspect he wishes had shrunk to nothing, because, as it turned out, a “stimulus” was the last thing our economy needed. Well, live and learn, but it won’t be fun, not with a Republican Congress.
I confess that my major concern was not excessive stimulus but rather gross inefficiency and dysfunctional delay, as illustrated, not only by the Frisco fiasco but the Washington, DC Metro’s $2 million bike shelters, New York City’s $3.5 billion a mile subway, and the California Flyer, the Golden State’s bullet train to nowhere, whose combination of massive sunk costs and utter uselessness has started to assume almost Pentagonian proportions. (Just kidding. No one can waste money like the Pentagon.)
SF’s public toilets are a sad microcosm of contemporary liberalism’s pathetic need to both posture and control—was the toilet’s design especially sensitive to the needs of both persons of color and the greater LGBTQIA+ community? I’ll bet it was—combined with the need to pay off every one of these constituencies with contracts, kickbacks, and consultants’ fees. Well, at least we can get a laugh out of this one. And be glad we don’t live in San Francisco.
