Automated public toilets get off to very slow start in L.A.

It's a luxury automated toilet, the kind seen on the streets of world-class cities such as Paris and New York and a prototype for as many as 150 that officials plan to roll out across Los Angeles in the next few years.

Costing as much as a small downtown condo, it offers instructions in Vietnamese, French, Italian, Spanish, English and Braille, advising passersby to drop a quarter in the slot and step inside.

Unfortunately, the bathroom doesn't work.

Six months after the arrival of the automated public toilet in Pershing Square -- and 2 1/2 years after officials began installing public toilets in the city -- only one of seven facilities actually works. In downtown, where they were supposed to help tourists and homeless alike, there is only one working automatic lavatory.

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.

The city plans to install the APTs, as they are known, around the Westside, the Miracle Mile, the San Fernando Valley and Hollywood, and by doing so, it joins more than 600 cities around the globe that have installed the toilets.

In Los Angeles, the facilities are part of a 20-year contract between the city and a joint venture of two companies: CBS Outdoor and JCDecaux. The latter, a French firm, has installed thousands of the sleek units worldwide, mostly in exchange for the right to sell the ads that adorn them. It's a common model that is used by the majority of American cities looking to install the loos. L.A. is guaranteed $150 million in revenue over the course of the contract.

Backers say the toilets are needed to instill a more pedestrian culture in places such as downtown, Hollywood, Westwood and Ventura Boulevard. They note that they are a big step up from the Porta Pottis used in some parts of downtown.

But skeptics wonder whether the toilets are needed, and whether they are less about serving a public need than selling ad space.

"There is a price for it," said Kevin Fry of Scenic America, a nonprofit organization dedicated to scenic conservation. "The city streets become increasingly commercialized