LA's Toilet Envy
As a former resident of Los Angeles, I've come to love the Big Orange more and more with each passing year when I don't actually live there (that's meant unironically). Yet one of the weirdest things about LA is its massive inferiority complex–or complexes, actually. Not only does the City of Angels feel second-rate to New York but even to San Francisco, and a bunch of other crap towns around the world, too.
Hence, all sorts of yapping about how great the art museums are, the symphony, blah blah blah. As if LA could only be great to the degree it approached stuff that other cities already had a lock on.
And, at least while I was living there, the inferiority complex was one reason why LA absolutely, positively needed a subway system. Because, you know, you can't be a world city unless you waste billions of taxpayer dollars on an overfunded and underutilized subterranean railway.
The Los Angeles Times adds another chapter in LA's ongoing inferiority complex. The subject this time is LA's relative lack of high-quality public toilets:
Though the luxury public toilet has become a status symbol in cities around the world, in L.A. it's a slightly complicated tale—one of the city's efforts to create a more pedestrian-oriented life, but also a story about its bureaucratic struggles to achieve that goal….
L.A. is a little late in embracing luxury toilets.
Singapore, London and Athens have more than 500 of the APTs [automated public toilets] each—most installed in their city centers.
In some cities, the facilities have been tailored to the needs of the toilet-going public. Those that adorn Bukit Bintang, for example, a shopping district in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, give users the choice of using a squatting bowl or a sitting pan. A deputy prime minister attended the opening of one of the public toilets there.
Yeah, those squat-or-sit crappers have really put Kuala Lumpur on the map.
Go here to read a story of bureaucratic constipation.
Second-generation tip o' the pixel to To the People, which wryly notes that thanks to idiotic special interests, "Angelenos couldn't give a crap, even if they wanted to."