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Comment by afavour | Hacker News Reader

I live in NYC, I’ve lived in a bunch of cities globally and I’d say you’re exaggerating to the extreme here.

“The streets all smell like piss” genuinely sounds like a take from someone that visited midtown while on a three day conference and then left. There are some disgusting streets, no doubt. There’s too much trash on the street on trash days. On rare occasions a subway car has homeless people in it and it smells. None of this is great by any means. But the idea that all New Yorkers are walking around smelling piss 24/7 and saying “huh, guess it must be like this everywhere” doesn’t pass any kind of sanity test.

Reminds me of the Principal Skinner meme: “am I wrong? No, it is the eight million inhabitants of NYC who are all wrong”

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Both sides are exaggerating.

Some streets do smell like piss at some times. The building superintendents periodically hose off the front sidewalks to wash away the dog urine, especially during the hottest parts of the summer. Especially on nice streets.

Oh, I’d never deny that there are streets that smell like piss from time to time, it’s the OP’s assertion that “all” streets do. It’s just silly, as is the extrapolation that New Yorkers must be clueless about the disgusting filth surrounding them.

>I’d never deny that there are streets that smell like piss from time to time

in my city we somehow contrive not to have any streets at all smell like piss, ever. in the civilized world we stopped using streets as outdoor latrines over a century ago.

I’m not trying to suggest that NYC is a utopia. Far from it, I’m very well aware of its shortcomings. But they can be pointed out without resorting to hyperbole.

I wonder how it compares to other cities: Melbourne, Tokyo, Paris, London, Munich, Boston, San Francisco, etc.

Then, I think we can pin-point exaggerations from objective truth. I admit, when I visited NY, it was very nice but we went around central park and such.

I just dislike this law, this is a great way to make NY city worse - pitting citizens against each other. There are other ways to solve this issue through proper law enforcement channels.

> There are other ways to solve this issue through proper law enforcement channels.

Unfortunately for New York, the closest they have is NYPD, which I don't think I've ever heard anything good about - but have heard plenty of bad.

the one time i visited NYC i naively tried to use a public toilet at a subway station. entered the stall -- faecal matter coating every surface. filthy is an understatement.

I once saw a subway car where someone had not just defecated, but had defecated on each and every seat individually - and with amazing uniformity. Standing in the next car for the remainder of my commute I worked out that either multiple people had to have participated (entirely possible there is public defectors club around here someplace) or one super-constipated individual had cleared out the entire length of an average human’s large intestine. Could one person be that backed up and not only walk around but have the control to squat over each seat and leave a uniform amount? The smell was horrific so I’m pretty sure it wasn’t an art project. I wonder if someone cleaned that car, or if they just rolled it into the ocean one dark night.

Cleaning the subway cars overall is a joke - they have people with mops at the terminus stations and they get 30secs to 2 minutes to mop the first and last cars before they go out again. All the cars in the middle just accumulate debris and stains until the train is taken out of service for regular maintenance.

One side effect of the pandemic is I have to leave the apartment so infrequently that I can take Lyft everywhere and still come out ahead of what I used to spend on metrocards - I don’t miss riding the subway at all.

Try the Rest Rooms in the city Emergency Rooms where there is all that and blood, too everywhere or the police stations even in the time of COVID and AIDS!

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