After one year and 20,800 flushes, the City of Vancouver's first high-tech self-cleaning toilet near the Main Street SkyTrain station has been judged a success worthy of further expansion.

Users step in, the door locks for up to 12 minutes, and when they exit, the facility flushes and cleans itself.

Vancouver will soon get six more high-tech public toilets.
(CBC)

But things have not be going so well at the city's second automated toilet, a smaller version installed near Davie Street and Richards Street, which has been out of order since mid-February, after being hit by vandals.

Although the toilets have been criticized as smelly havens for drug users and homeless people, and as targets for vandals, City of Vancouver engineer Grant Woff told the CBC the city is standing by the automated design.

To alleviate the problems, the contractor sends a cleanup crew four times a day, according to David Struthers, the operations manager for CBS/Decaux in Vancouver, which installs and maintains the toilets for the city.

"You're always going to have issues. I mean we've had lots of graffiti. We've had vandalism in the units. We've had drug use in the units. These are things that we expected, so we're basically working through it and try to resolve it the best way we can," said Struthers.

The company plans to send a technician from France to fix the broken unit soon, said Struthers.

Meanwhile there are six more of the toilets in the CBS/Decaux works yard, and over the next few months crews will install them beside downtown city streets.

The city maintains the toilets are a good deal because CBS/Decaux installs and maintains them as part of a larger contract with the city to provide outdoor furniture in exchange for the right to sell advertising space.

But down in Seattle, similar toilets without a similar contract have not been as well received. That city has been debating whether to do away with its version of the expensive self-cleaning toilets, because the city itself has been picking up the multimillion dollar tab for four years.