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Comment by chimeracoder | Hacker News Reader

The only reason this is a problem is because the city refuses to use containerized trash collection (such as dumpsters). Turns out, dumping trash bags on the street for 12 hours 3-6 times a week is basically a free buffet for rats.

The reason the city doesn't implement containerized trash collection is because that would mean giving up a few free parking spots every block.

It got worse during COVID-19 because the city temporarily suspended collection/extermination, which caused the rodent population to explode, and it's never recovered from that. But eliminating the regular meals for rats would be an easy, no-brainer way to fix it.

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An anecdote: My NYC neighborhood has seen a building boom over the past decade. As far as I can tell, every new building puts its trash out on the street.

Some particularly memorable examples include a 75 story residential tower with absolutely record-breaking trash piles, and a ~25 story residential tower with a trash collection point on the onramp to the Williamsburg bridge. Garbage trucks have to stop in the road to collect trash, manually, bag-by-bag, at every stop.

This is the policy for trash in NYC, and rats will remain a problem as long as it stays that way.

Also probably due to corruption in the waste management industry. Why make it efficient if it makes it harder to graft?

Go look at the absolutely massive piles of trash bags outside 20 Exchange Place in the financial district (huge office tower retrofitted to rental apartments) for an example of this. There's nowhere to put dumpsters and obviously no alleyway...

The US confuses the hell out of me sometimes.

How do you get to the moon and invent the internet, but can't figure out how to collect refuse in arguably your most prominent city?

These problems were not around during the Giuliani/Bloomberg administrations. I would look who has been the the mayor after them for a culprit.

> These problems were not around during the Giuliani/Bloomberg administrations. I would look who has been the the mayor after them for a culprit.

These absolutely were problems during the Giuliani and Bloomberg administration. People have been complaining about them for decades.

It got markedly worse in spring 2020 because sanitation services were temporarily reduced, but it was an issue long before that.

There's no confusion.

The only solution are distributed dumpsters/large containers, which are not popular because nobody wants a dumpster in from of their building

Not meaning to come off condescending, but have you considered how other cities around the world have solved this?

The Taiwan solution (garbage truck comes at the same time every day, stops briefly, you throw your rubbish in) seems to work well.

> The Taiwan solution (garbage truck comes at the same time every day, stops briefly, you throw your rubbish in) seems to work well.

That requires

- not running trash collection overnight/early morning when people are sleeping

- guaranteeing that the truck arrives at a consistent and predictable time

- forcing people to be at home at a certain time to throw out their trash

All of those are absolutely non-starters in NYC.

Much better to use the solution that every other city in the developed world uses (putting trash in dumpsters)

> nobody wants a dumpster in from of their building

Yet they are happy with a large pile of black plastic trash bags leaking all over the sidewalk in front of their building?

> Yet they are happy with a large pile of black plastic trash bags leaking all over the sidewalk in front of their building?

Trash bags don't block parking spaces. That's what the elected officials blocking this actually care about.

This notion confuses me (I’ve never been to NYC)

Couldn’t they put smaller dumpsters in the same space the trash bag piles currently occupy?

> The only solution are distributed dumpsters/large containers, which are not popular because nobody wants a dumpster in from of their building

That's not been the sticking point, empirically. The issue is that the politicians who can implement this don't want to give up the free parking spots.

It's the loss of free parking that's the motivator, not the dumpster itself.

> How do you get to the moon and invent the internet, but can't figure out how to collect refuse in arguably your most prominent city?

Most of us figured out that NYC is a (very expensive) cesspit and have no desire to live or work there. /s

I don’t know why you added the /s. Most people don’t live in NYC or want to.

You may have been hypnotized by movies.

  - New York City Population [0]: 8,804,190
  - Population of the United States [1]: 333,327,000
  - Percent of people living in NYC: 2.6%

0: https://www.nyc.gov/site/planning/planning-level/nyc-populat...

1: https://www.census.gov/popclock/

Well, your examples are from 50 years ago...

Some cities in Europe use underground containers. (An arm on the collection truck can lift them right out of the ground. It's pretty neat.) I wonder if that is feasible for NYC.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JtoSafhvLM

There are probably too many underground utilities in most areas.

This would be prohibitively expensive due to the number of underground utilities. In Manhattan, there isn't even a map of all pipes/etc. under a given street or sidewalk, because they were laid so long ago - every time digging is done, they need to carefully dig it up and see what's even there and document it.

So there's no way to even figure out how this could be done without doing all the digging, etc., and at that point the expense is prohibitive.

Not to mention that building that system would require giving up parking spots for the construction, which would cause the same political pushback from the same opponents, so at that point you might as well just do above-ground collection for a fraction of the price, since you'll be fighting the same political battles either way.

They are still not going to allow for parking spaces. They need to be crane lifted to empty so it's a no parking area anyway.

Still great! No smell, less sidewalk space wasted, and garbage trunks can be less frequent since the containers are a huge underground volume.

I once stayed at a flat in Berlin and there were rats living in the building trash container. They would literally be scurrying on the top of the pile when I opened it up to throw trash bags away. Hands down my worst experience with rats, even coming from NYC.

This was in Kreuzberg and there seemed to be a lot of rats there because of some abandoned buildings and construction + fields of dirt for them to burrow in

They could adopt Taiwan's musical garbage trucks with zero investment in new garbage containers or loss of parking. Garbage bags go directly from properties into the truck, spending no time festering on the sidewalk.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMQ1NfjPauw

That would require:

- ensuring the truck arrives at or around the same time every week

- forcing people to be at home to throw out their garbage

Both of those are complete non-starters in NYC.

Much easier to use the system that nearly every other large city in the developed world uses (containerized trash collection).

Well, except that folks already get murdered over parking spots in NYC [https://www.ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/public-safety/2022/07/1...], [https://pix11.com/news/local-news/queens/man-sentenced-to-10...], [https://www.nytimes.com/1997/10/11/nyregion/dispute-over-a-p...

Great, then removing parking will also reduce the homicide rate, in addition to starving the rats, speeding up the bus service, and keeping everyone from getting cancer and dementia. Really, is there anything that banning cars doesn't solve?

I take it you're talking about removing street parking altogether? If they just remove a few parking spots on each block for dumpsters, I can only see that leading to more tension and disputes over the even scarcer parking spaces. Why anyone would want to drive in Manhattan is beyond me.

You're not thinking it through. If you dress your car as a locked dumpster, you can park anywhere!

Accessibility for people with disabilities.

NYC has tons of accessibility cabs that you can flag on the street or order with an app.

Replacing parking with dumpsters helps there?

I was watching a Disney+ documentary on the making of Disney World and was impressed that all the garage cans use pneumatic tubes to empty in a central dump not visible to guests. Is such a solution not possible at NYC scale?

> I was watching a Disney+ documentary on the making of Disney World and was impressed that all the garage cans use pneumatic tubes to empty in a central dump not visible to guests. Is such a solution not possible at NYC scale?

There is one portion of Manhattan where that is done, yes.

That would be cost-prohibitive in most of the city due to the amount of digging required, and the expense of digging in NYC (an old city which has extensive underground piping and infrastructure that was laid before these things were regularly documented, so there's no way to know which water/electricity/etc lines are in an area before you actually dig there).

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