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?
Most of us figured out that NYC is a (very expensive) cesspit and have no desire to live or work there. /s
- 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%
The only solution are distributed dumpsters/large containers, which are not popular because nobody wants a dumpster in from of their building
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)
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.
Couldn’t they put smaller dumpsters in the same space the trash bag piles currently occupy?
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.
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.