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Comment by jessaustin | Hacker News Reader

The comment about lockers is interesting. I have often found myself wishing that lockers were available when "traveling light", i.e. using various forms of public transport and walking/biking rather than driving an automobile. I have the sense that public lockers used to be common especially at e.g. bus stations and airports, but they are not common now. Were these eliminated in order to inconvenience the homeless?

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No because of bomb attacks during the 1970s. At least in Germany.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_von_Sprengstoffanschl%C3...

I never really understood this. Certainly it's easier to bomb a crowded place by putting something in a locker, and leaving it there until it's convenient to detonate it (even if that's done via a timer that's set a day or two in the future)... but it's not much harder to just toss a bag with a bomb in it in a public trash can, or even just leave it somewhere vaguely-hidden. Sure, the likelihood of discovery is higher, but it still seems to me that it would work most of the time.

Funnily enough, the risk of terrorism is why bins (trash cans) were removed from places like the London underground due to the IRA.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attacks_on_the_London_Undergro... [2] https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2012/09/throwing-it-a...

There was a wave of trashcan bombers in Paris in the 90's that's also why you have transparent or simple plastic trashcans now.

Many of these places also have transparent bag-only trash cans, and people are sent to investigate suspicious abandoned packages.

It was.... and then they removed all the rubbish bins. They eventually reinstated the bins after a lot of littering, but they're transparent: https://i.imgur.com/zLrhZwH.jpg

I feel like it'd be pretty easy to hide a bomb in a not-that-large food container and toss that in the bin.

Also, in the US, also in the 70's -- a bomb was put in a locker at Grand Central Station in 1976 and, a year earlier, a bomb was placed in a locker at Grand Central Station. Both bombs went off (and both may have been connected to Balkan politics) [0].

I believe one or both of these bombs explains why lockers were removed in NYC (and this may have led to other places removing them too).

[0] https://observer.com/2016/01/why-hasnt-washington-explained-...

Unless they're also doing away with trashcans, I don't see how that is an explanation.

In London, at the height of the IRA bombing campaign, they _did_ do away with rubbish bins in public places.

Even today, they're of a special design to limit their use as extra shrapnel around a bomb.

The UK does reasonably well at "hidden" security features. Another type are "decorative" features -- like the word "Arsenal" outside the football club, or the ponds in front of the Scottish Parliament building -- which just happen to be in the right place and of the right strength to prevent vehicles crashing through.

BART (Bay Area (San Francisco) Rapid Transit) removed trash cans in all underground BART stations for "security reasons" after 9/11.

Closed all the bathrooms too.

Nowadays almost every garbage can has its own CCTV. Even single suitcases or bags without an owner are found quickly. Lockers are much more difficult to monitor.

How old are you? The bins at high risk locations have been absent or transparent for years.

I guess I never frequent such locations. Which preserves the original question: why are the locations I frequent without public lockers?

I was mostly being a bit cheeky as I thought your “how old are you?” upthread was a bit uncalled for; but you’ve replied and I’m always open to discuss an interesting topic!

Alas I cannot answer your question really, if regular old “drop a bomb in me and nobody will notice” bins are common in your locale it seems safe to assume that public lockers have not been removed due to safety concerns. If I had to guess I’d say they were not utilised/profitable.

Maybe I am at a comfortable age, because taking offense to a question about my age doesn't cross my mind. I live in the Midwest USA, although I have lived lots of other places. I recently attended a playoff game at a stadium that seats 76,000, and I saw lots of normal opaque trash bins, both in and around the stadium. The bins inside were secured in that we had to walk through metal detectors and we couldn't bring big coolers in. The bins outside weren't secured by anything. A lazy terrorist could have backed his truck up to a row of bins and filled them to the top with explosives. This normal situation didn't strike anyone as odd. The military-media-industrial complex will have to do a lot more fear-mongering if they really want to drive us completely crazy. (White people in USA are fortunate to have never faced a sustained campaign of up-close terrorism.)

The "efficient market in lockers" theory is not a null hypothesis. ITT, we haven't eliminated the "because homeless people use them" explanation for the widespread lack of public lockers.

You’re in the Midwest. Big city or small city?

Terrorists tend to strike a major targets, so you’ll definitely find a difference in security measure between downtown Chicago and say Peoria.

Much of the time I'm not in a city at all. I have an apartment in Jefferson City, which barely squeaks over the line between "big town" and "tiny city". However I do a lot of the "light" travel I reference above. I've been in four different "big city" Greyhound depots in the last several months, and none of those had lockers. The playoff game mentioned above was in Kansas City, home of the Super Bowl Champion Chiefs....

They have in some places, though I think they're making a return.

In Japan they were pretty common and I really liked the system they had in Osaka. Made it much easier to put our bags down and go eat/etc. They had lockers both inside and outside the station (which kind of also doubled as a mall in this case)

Which is amusing given all the surrounding comments that suggest anti-terrorism as a motive for removing lockers, since it was the notorious terrorist attacks of the 90s that caused Tokyo to famously remove its trash cans.

I might be remembering from europe this past year, but I think in Japan they used a metal pole with a ring at the top which a bag was simply hung from. It had no “sides” which would become shrapnel.

Most in America were eliminated after the 9/11 attacks.

The idea was to reduce the number of hiding/storing places for bombs and weapons.

How old are you? Most of these lockers were eliminated long before that.

I'm not sure public lockers in the US were ever really part of the culture. They were probably more common in airports and the like at one point. And, yeah, maybe 9/11 eliminated some vestigial examples but having places to leave your stuff other than doing so surreptitiously at a hotel or whatever hasn't been routine for as long as I can remember.

I’m not from the US and know very little of the culture, but I would hazard a guess that they must’ve been at some point due to how many times I have seen them used in Hollywood (more often than not for illicit exchanges).

Was the whole idea of public lockers at transport terminals just poetic license?

I am... not young. I don't recall them ever being ubiquitous/expected like they are in, say, Japan. A few decades ago they were almost certainly more common. I can recall storing a bag to go into Manhattan for a few hours.

They may very well have been common at one point in train stations when people traveled that way more.

I also suspect though that, to the degree lockers were useful as a plot detail, they were possibly created when they weren't actually that common.

There used to be lockers at all bus stations, and most airports in the US. Maybe you didn't notice because you weren't interested. Those at airports usually had to be found by asking at the info desk.

Yeah, they were common, but started to disappear long before 9/11.

I know the Stockholm airport still has locker rentals.

I was in Busan, south korea, a few years back and they have lockers all over the beach. So practical!

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