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Comment by NovemberWhiskey | Hacker News Reader

In other cities, mountains of garbage pile up in alleyways or other just-off-the-street venues. Since there basically are no alleyways in Manhattan, the garbage goes in the street instead. I'm not sure the rats care very much either way.

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In other cities they provide trash bins and dumpsters. Only in NYC do you just put a bag of trash on the side of the road. My city doesn't even take anything that isn't in a bin that you haven't specifically ordered pickup for (like a big couch)

Wait what are you on about? Are you serious that you just stick bin bags on the street full? Where are the bins? What?

I'm not from NYC or even the US, why wouldn't you just use bins that the bags go in? I don't understand, please help me understand this. I'm thoroughly confused.

Trash in NY is literally piled up for collection.

https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=new+york+trash

Most cities in the USA have either individual trash cans (suburbs/low density, once a week): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UluH0QmnwfM (ONE HOUR???) or dumpsters/dedicated crushers (high density, can be once a day): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDTrUs6TeNc

The sidewalks aren’t wide enough for the kinds of bins needed for the amount of trash generated (NYC is dense) and nobody wants to give up free parking spaces to put the bins in the street as of yet.

Many cities have a regular bin-sized contraption where you throw you stuff in and it gets compacted into a big underground container that is part of the sidewalk. They then either get lifted and emptied of sucked empty by a garbage truck.

The sidewalks are plenty wide for that, nyc doesn't even come close to how narrow some european cities without such problems are.

Are you referring to some sort of underground hatch that doesn’t take up any space on the sidewalk at all? That’d be very cool, just probably difficult to retrofit the whole city with.

The ones I've seen in Barcelona take up a fairly small amount of space. They do occupy some, but not much.

Seems to work really well tbh.

They do take up some space on the sidewalk, but less than a non-underground version. Here's what they look like: https://www.core77.com/posts/102208/Amsterdams-Smart-System-...

I've heard about this in the Netherlands I think, but don' think it's very common.

This is actually just a building code issue. In other cities, ordinances mandate trash rooms or trash chutes for mulitfamily buildings to avoid these issues. One could argue "but nyc grew before sane building codes," but so did boston, or chicago, and plenty of other denser cities that don't have this issue because they have sensible ordinances in place regarding waste management.

I'm willing to bet landlords don't want to make these investments to their properties in nyc, and have more of a voice in local government than their tenants, who are probably mostly indifferent about the issue at this point anyhow.

Buildings have trash chutes and rooms for collecting trash; the trash is held there and put out on the street before midnight and picked up the following morning 3x per week. They get fined for leaving trash out any other time.

The issue is the collection point, not the storage prior.

Then it seems like an even easier problem for nyc to fix overnight.

I love Boston and will vouch for the general idea that MA is better than NY, but I’m pretty sure Boston just gets by using the advantage of a smaller population and less density in this case. Although maybe the rats have as much trouble navigating as every other visitor…

You live in an apartment building that's 47 stories tall and has 350 units. Do you expect all of the residents individually to take bins out to the front of the building?

I understand what you're saying but NYC isn't exactly the only city in the world with large apartment buildings.

You would expect the apt building provides dumpsters

Usually such buildings would have a garbage room with big bins that get emptied regularly - at least in sane cities.

I've lived in a big apartment complex before. The invention that solves this problem is called a chute and a dumpster.

Buildings here have chutes and compactors. There aren't any alleys in Manhattan and the sidewalks are mostly quite narrow. The solution would be to eliminate some parking to hold bins that can be emptied by trucks but it hasn't been politically feasible.

If you have chutes and trash rooms already, then there's no point to bringing the stuff out to the street for holding. In my building the trash would be taken from the trash room directly to the truck. The chute would just drop into a dumpster that workers would wheel out and the truck would flip it into the bed. Seems like it takes less labor than having workers bring bags to the road and then have the trash workers spend time putting the bags in the truck by hand versus with a hydraulic arm.

> Seems like it takes less labor than having workers bring bags to the road and then have the trash workers spend time putting the bags in the truck by hand versus with a hydraulic arm.

You're getting to the heart of the problem. That would mean fewer workers and the sanitation union has a long and ironically sordid past of ensuring that less workers are never needed.

Well there are no alleys remember, so nowhere to pull up a truck other that on the street in front of the building. It’s also worth noting that the sanitation workers union fiercely opposes any mechanization in trash collection, the workers toss bags by hand. It’s absolutely ridiculous to see in person.

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