Mayor Giuliani and the City Council worked out plans to put up hundreds of self-cleaning public toilets on the streets, to be subsidized by selling advertising space.

San Francisco, by the way, has at least 17 of the self-cleaning public toilets that are wheelchair-accessible and have received good ratings from users.

That would help pay for building and maintaining the expensive self-cleaning toilets - at locations still undetermined - while generating profits the builder and city would share.

In addition, every modern city in Europe has had self-cleaning public toilets on its streets for years.

In 1992, JCDecaux, the world's most experienced public-toilet company, tested its self-cleaning automated toilets in Manhattan.

It costs a quarter to enter one of the self-cleaning toilets, housed in green or gray kiosks from 10 to 15 feet tall.

The north (lower) mezzanine is home to Metro's only fully public restroom, an automatic self-cleaning toilet manufactured by Exeloo, opened in October 2003.

A different type of public facility was introduced to the citizens of Toronto in 2010, when the city approved a contract for the installation of 20 self-cleaning public toilets.

The contract, which would be awarded to one company, would cover the design and construction of as many as 3,500 bus shelters, 500 newsstands and 100 automatic self-cleaning public toilets.

Mr. Decaux and his father, Jean Claude Decaux, are spending $700,000 to see if their coin-operated, self-cleaning toilets hold up under New York-style demands.