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Comment by ecshafer | Hacker News Reader

Battery operated garbage trucks don't sound like a great idea, at least for all day use.

With the push for EV I am not sure why we aren't seeing a push for the installation of streetcar power lines, these already exist and are used for busses. If we have a garbage truck that has the battery capacity for say 30 minutes, then it could be on the power line for the majority of the time.

This would limit battery waste as well. There could be some solid engineering reasons for this, but I suspect that coolness is a big factor.

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Garbage trucks are probably one of the best places for it actually, because they stop so frequently. Unfortunately the article is about plow trucks instead which have a very different use case - New York just happens to use the same vehicles for both so they have a smaller fleet that's not as well suited to either task.

For garbage trucks you have stop and go movement so EVs eliminate idling. Given the size of the trucks it's probably not a big deal to make sure they have adequate battery capacity.

Plow trucks have a completely different use model where they're run at speed for long periods and one day of plowing could have the same distance traveled as weeks of trash collection. Hybrids would likely be an improvement in efficiency but the same way they do for other trucks - batteries support high demand periods while the generator is fine for the lower sustained loads.

Edit: a drawback of the smaller fleet for snow management is that garbage trucks aren't as well suited for salt/sand/deicer distribution. Nobody designs their garbage trucks to spray. I hope.

Edit2: garbage trucks also have a lot of additional mechanical systems that are probably already electrical, so among other things the ICE versions likely have an oversized alternator to power that.

Seems like plug in hybrid is the best approach with current tech. Battery in the neighborhoods, and gas powered when you are hauling it back to the landfill.

Maybe. Others have talked about the problems with hybrids and they might not make as much sense as simply expanding either the fleet as a whole or the parts of the fleet used for plowing. Also worth considering the city's whole vehicle fleet - use the garbage trucks as appropriate for mass response, but also use dump trucks, etc from public works.

Eventually there may also be more options with battery swapping - that's a lot more feasible with a fleet within a relatively small geographic region.

> so EVs eliminate idling.

The vehicle, when stopped, has other functions to perform. It has hydraulic lifters and compactors that need quite a bit of power to operate. It's a working platform, not a simple garbage transportation mechanism.

Even to the extent is isn't for transportation, see how far away the dump is from your home. That distance has to be covered twice at least once a day, and possibly as much as 3 times per day.. and during one of those legs the truck is fully loaded with possibly up to as much as 20,000lbs of trash.

Finally, they have to operate in all conditions, in both very low and very high temperatures. The logistics of this aren't as simple as it would be for a standard vehicle.

Somewhere as densely populated as NY is surely best served by those rubbish bins that empty into a trash vacuum tunnel.

Massive upfront cost (infrastructure and NY seems to be a bit fraught) and also likely expensive to run, but with high population density it’s got to be better.

However this would then have a fleet of snow trucks that weren’t used 99% of the time, as the rubbish was mostly sorted.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_vacuum_collection

"[A] bit fraught" is an understatement. Any excavation under the right of way in New York immediately runs into undocumented tunnels, steam conduits, sewers, and water pipelines from the past 400 years of development.

They're trying to map these things out but it will probably take more than a decade. Until that happens you can't even begin to budget for a new city-wide underground infrastructure project. Any project has to be point to point and focused.

Let alone the issue of the rats.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-08-10/nobody-kn...

Between the subways, underground rail lines, etc, you’d probably have to put them 100ft underground to get clearance. That’s 100ft through solid rock. Great for building skyscrapers, not fun for digging.

Ironically one of the largest vacuum trays system in the world IS in NYC… but it serves Roosevelt Island, not the “mainland”

In New York City, do the garbage trucks drive a long distance to unload their waste?

In much of London, they drive a relatively short distance to offload the waste. Some is handled locally (e.g. composting food and garden waste). The rest is taken the much longer distance by barge or rail.

Barge: https://www.wandsworth.gov.uk/news/2019-news/june-2019/thame...

Rail: https://westlondonwaste.gov.uk/where-your-waste-goes

As an industrial EE dealing with hydraulics of much larger scales than those on a garbage truck, those other functions do not require significant power to operate when compared to actually accelerating the vehicle and cargo up to speed (and then slamming on the brakes/regen again for the next stop).

The engines in diesel garbage trucks often run at idle when those hydraulics are working, lifting a 100 kg residential can or a 1-ton dumpster through a few meters of motion is not noticeable to a 350 HP diesel, accelerating 30 tons of truck and trash in the same amount of time is why they're equipped with so much more engine power.

How about compacting the trash in the truck?

Assuming a 100mm bore cylinder with a 1.5m stroke (~10L volume), operating at 150 bar, with a stroke time of 1 minute, the power required is:

Power in kW = Pressure in bar * Flow in liters per minute / 600

2.5 kW = 150 bar * 10 l/min / 600

or a little more than 3 horsepower. That gives you about 15 tons of force. Maybe the trucks use two cylinders, one on each side, so double it? Plus 10% for pump inefficiencies, and 5% for electric motor inefficiencies (200% for diesel-to-kinetic losses)?

Still negligible compared to accelerating a huge steel box plus dozens of tons of trash to roadway speeds 1000 times a day.

Looking up some existing PTOs and pumps on munciepower.com, it looks like typical refuse systems are provisioned with PTOs and pumps rated for on the order of 10-50 kW, and diesel "prime movers" of 200-400 kW.

Nit: Hydraulics do require a great deal of power, but often delivered over a short time or distance, meaning the total energy demand is low. Which is what NYC's concerned with.

EV's are great at delivering high power on demand, for short periods. A selling point of Tesla since the Roadster days was the astounding acceleration. Peak torque at a dead start is a key characteristic of electric motors.

What's far more challenging is range, a problem Tesla has addressed quite capably for passenger vehicles, though which remains largely unmet for cargo and heavy-transport equipment (including snow ploughs).

Interestingly, there was a period where a non-electrical power network was fairly frequently encountered at neighbourhood or city scale: hydraulic power networks. These often operated high-power loads, though typically for short periods or efforts as my first paragraph describes. Hydraulic accumulators lifted weights or water and provided on-demand power for moving lock gates, cargo hoists, and other typically industrial tasks. These were developed in the early 19th century and many remained operational well into the 20th, with the Wikipedia article below listing several operating into the 1970s.

Smaller such networks exist in dentist's offices, auto repair shops, and in many Amish workshops, based on compressed air, and utilising similar principles.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_power_network>

(I'm presuming LeifCarrotson knows much of this, others may not. I didn't myself until a few years ago.)

> Even to the extent is isn't for transportation, see how far away the dump is from your home. That distance has to be covered twice at least once a day, and possibly as much as 3 times per day.. and during one of those legs the truck is fully loaded with possibly up to as much as 20,000lbs of trash.

Swappable batteries at the dump depot? There's a company in Australia doing swappable batteries for trucks (https://thedriven.io/2022/03/25/worlds-largest-electric-truc...)

Wouldn't hybrid make a lot of sense here? Engine working at max efficiency for most time or turned off completely.

Even to the extent is isn't for transportation, see how far away the dump is from your home.

I may be biased by my experiences. At home the transfer station is about 4 miles away, and at my parents' place that I've been cleaning out it's probably 1.5-2 miles by road - or less than half a mile if I could go up a couple hundred yards of steep forested hillside.

Around here, a notable number of Garbage trucks are LPG or some variant [1].

Having driven a Hybrid 'Truck' (really more of a ute[2]) for just under a year, I can say that EV plows will likely show their deficiencies when you need them the most [3].

[1] - On the whole, this is still better than doing nothing with it and just allowing it to vent, or burning on-site (which, sometimes you do see at local landfills.)

[2] - The Maverick -does- do a decent job IMO of showing what's possible with a small purpose-built hybrid truck or truck-like thing; However manufacturers that make bigger EVs are likely reluctant to build a truly 'minimum viable product', as it will bite into fleet sales of larger EV/Hybrids introduced.

[3] - Recently, we had sustained sub 10F temps. My overall mileage went from 35-42MPG to 25-30MPG.

>EV plows will likely show their deficiencies when you need them the most

Not necessarily. The heaviest snow falls just below freezing. Very low temperatures bring light, fluffy stuff — the kind skiers crave, and that a human can lift huge shovels of.

a notable number of Garbage trucks are LPG or some variant

Be interesting if they're able to clean/compress/use methane produced by the dump itself instead of having it flared off - or drive a generator tied into battery charging. It really needs to be burned instead of just being released as-is, might as well get use from it.

It’s also great for noise reduction, particular since they often run in the mornings.

I remember looking into this a little bit and the conclusion seemed to be that for most garbage truck uses the range was not the limiting factor. Pickup time was more important, and batteries are attractive given that most garbage pickup is stop-pickup-start-drive a short distance then stop again. In Seattle I believe I saw the longest route was less than 70 miles but I can't find a source. There was a purchase of battery garbage trucks with a range of 55 miles a few years ago. https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/05/seattle-makes-history-w...

Caternary lines have always seemed like a good solution but there must be a good reason they aren't more popular.

Also, garbage collection in NYC seems to be a weird mishmash of rules and providers. Again there must be a historical reason but from the outside it has never made sense to me. https://www.propublica.org/article/trashed-inside-the-deadly...

> Caternary lines have always seemed like a good solution but there must be a good reason they aren't more popular

What reason?

Ugly, expensive, maintenance headache. What's not to like... They are however more environmentally friendly than diesel engines and it works well if you only have a few well trafficked routes. But you can't do this for a whole city, and garbage trucks and snowplows need to go into every street, not just the main boulevards.

Agreed on all points, though I notice everyone says they are so expensive and hard to maintain, but nobody cites anything (not a criticism - I have no idea myself).

However, you don't need availability on every street, just enough to charge the vehicles sufficiently for the smaller streets.

Arnhem in NL and Riga in Latvia, both cities I spend a lot of time in still have them, but I wonder for how long. They're pretty iconic but every few years there is debate about whether or not it is still worth it. Another problem I forgot to mention is that these systems are not very flexible in dealing with mishaps, you can't overtake another trolley bus so if one has a problem the whole system grinds to a halt. An ICE bus just goes around the obstacle and continues.

I agree about the trolleys on rails and obstacles, which I've seen for myself, but electric vehicles would likely have some battery and run on tires, allowing diversions from the route.

Anyway, I'm guessing it's been considered and I'd love to see the study.

I've been reading a bit more about it in the meantime: so, the trolley network in Arnhem is slowly diminishing in size, but it's still there and it will likely be there for quite a while to come. They are looking at ways to use a combination BEV / trolley system to allow the buses to recharge when they're on the line so they can depart from the route for longer stretches.

The maneuvering in case of trouble situation is covered by a tiny diesel engine that can move the bus around to the point where it can reconnect to a working segment of the network.

One problem with reducing the coverage is that it is relatively easy to take away the lines but the poles are in large chunks of concrete and not easy to remove at all.

I think that battery vehicles with substantial batteries (and so could be run on lines without ANY overhead infrastructure in a pinch) but that usually charge via overhead lines on a portion of the route is the ideal option. No charging time, no massive new infrastructure (the catenary only needed on a small fraction of total served lines) but also full flexibility. Actually better than fossil fuel variants which need usually to be refueled at the end of the shift at a depot or whatever.

Yes, it certainly looks like a very clever solution. I know they tried the same thing with a flywheel based bus but that ultimately did not work out. Let's see how this works in practice.

It helps that batteries have literally two orders of magnitude greater range than an old school flywheel.

Yes, definitely, they are trialing this in Arnhem, I'll go have a look at it to see how it is all put together. By the looks of it they take a 'normal' trolley bus, remove diesel engine + tank + associated bits and pieces then put a battery in the spot where the tank used to be, and a bunch of electronics (regulator/inverter/charger) to create a voltage high enough to run the normal bus hardware of and to recharge the battery when the bus is connected to the overhead grid.

Another thing is that battery-electric vehicles can be used as drop-in replacements on all existing routes. You don’t need to do environmental reviews or meet with NIMBY stakeholders or shut down local businesses while you install the overhead infrastructure, you just buy the trucks and go (can charge overnight using on-board charger and existing electrical infrastructure… can expand this to accommodate the increased load like you would for any other increased electrical load like the move to air conditioning… but you can get up and operating immediately).

The buses I’m familiar with that use overhead power lines don’t use them exclusively - they have batteries or diesel for when they venture off the powered lines.

Interesting, I've seen them stuck more than once, I'll have to check up on what the deal is there, I walk by the depot every couple of days and I'm sure they'll be happy to talk about it.

I wonder what they do when a bus runs out of power - towtrucks? Charging trucks?

The only ones I have spent a lot of time looking at are in Seattle and at least they used to all be diesel and could hookup to the lines or lower them to run off the lines. For pure electric I assume they must tow them away but I don't know enough about the failure modes.

This is a good chance to share a link to the guy with a Prius modified to run on the bus power in San Francisco: https://thebolditalic.com/hacked-prius-running-on-muni-power...

Extension cord into the nearest bodega? :P

Trolley buses in Lausanne are(were?) equipped with small auxiliary ice engines that would take over in case of loss of power. In the hills with passengers it was just enough for the bus to go at walking speed but that was enough to move out of the way or overtake a stranded vehicle.

The "E" in ICE means engine.

> Agreed on all points, though I notice everyone says they are so expensive and hard to maintain, but nobody cites anything

Because it's a complete fabrication -> every ton of conducting wire could replace 100 tons of battery in busses and trucks. It is also over 10 times cheaper per ton, so in material costs it is less than 1/1000th of the cost.

The only issue is that the city needs to pay for the wire, but it does not know how to charge a large array of private companies that might want to use the wires, there is lack of standardisation and metering.

Manhattan used to have hundreds of miles of street level trolley - but mostly powered by underground center third rail because overhead wires just didn't work with the density of lines and equipment. When the system needed to be cleared after snowfalls they used horses and later ICE trucks to plow. See any book on the Third Avenue Railway system for details

Here in Massachusetts we just removed our streetcar power lines (MBTA 71 and 73 trolleybus) because the wires needed to be removed during construction. This might be a logistical issue for NYC.

https://www.mbta.com/news/2022-01-27/beginning-march-2022-mb...

Yeah having street car power lines can be a nightmare in densely crowded cities with a lot of pedestrian traffic and tightly packed buildings. It would be a nightmare to implement in a place like New York City, and I'm not surprised that cities that have them are slowly removing them.

Don't get me wrong, I think they are a great solution electrically and for efficiency / sustainability, but require an enormous geographic footprint, central planning and a lot of overhead space which is difficult to find in dense cities.

> street car power lines can be a nightmare in densely crowded cities with a lot of pedestrian traffic and tightly packed buildings. It would be a nightmare to implement in a place like New York City

They've been used in dense cities for generations. How hard can it be?

> require an enormous geographic footprint

What footprint is needed for additional overhead wires?

I wonder is it is more of less efficient for land use as they don’t need fuelling and the associated land that uses, but do need a pair of lamp posts every 10m.

One point in favor of running these lines — city already has lots of lamp posts.

In many cities they just bolt these support wires into adjacent buildings when there isnt a convienent lamp post.

Electrifying core parts of the route (eg: the most heavily travelled bottlenecks these trucks travel) could fix this issue, enabling charging and heating the battery and cab while still en route or plowing snow.

I don't think the reason that street cars lines were removed is because they're hard to implement, I think they were removed for political reasons.

So just to be clear they shouldn't cost anywhere near as much as a subway or even tram rails. With a decent bit of battery on the vehicle, you could even have < 100% coverage and have outage resiliency.

one of the worst decisions the MBTA has ever made. battery buses are inferior to trolleybuses in pretty much every scenario, but especially winter. the battery buses they're replacing the trolleybuses with have diesel heaters to keep the batteries warm.

Wow, why not ethanol heaters or something similar? Volvo did that several years ago in one of their first EV buses.

why not leave the wires up

This, This, This.

We think "Well gas cars transport their own energy source, so electric cars must too" and that will probably be one of the things future generations laugh at us for (in the same way older generations thought flapping wing costumes could generate heavier-than-air flight).

Hydrocarbons are an extreme outlier in terms of energy density (vs. weight) and the fact that we are trying to replicate that model with other non-outlier materials is crazy.

Cars travel on roads almost exclusively. In the US, 90%+ passenger miles are on roads that already have some amount of power infrastructure (lightposts) and if we just made it so that our vehicles could plug into electricity at all points of their journey, then EVs are basically solved.

The sad part of Elon being so successful is that all he does is see places where we used to do things well (we electrified the whole country very quickly, built an advanced space program in 2-3 decades, etc.), notices we lack the will to keep doing those things (even I understand the overhead wires thing is a moonshot), and comes up with the pragmatic "OK but not really great" solution.

Seriously, if you had said in 1960 "the richest man in 2020 will focus on cars, low-earth-orbit rockets, and tunnel boring machines" people would be extremely bummed by the lack of progress.

> and if we just made it so that our vehicles could plug into electricity at all points of their journey, then EVs are basically solved.

One thing I have often wondered is how often they'd need access to electricity if they had a small battery to cover for the times they're not connected.

i.e., do they need to be connected at /all/ points of their journey? Or just often enough that they can get enough of a charge to make it to the next point? e.g. if there was induction charging at stop signs or traffic lights, would that be enough for a majority of trips?

This seems like it should just be a bit of a game of statistical coverage of charging points, time spent at them, speed of charging, and so on.

> Cars travel on roads almost exclusively. In the US, 90%+ passenger miles are on roads that already have some amount of power infrastructure (lightposts) and if we just made it so that our vehicles could plug into electricity at all points of their journey, then EVs are basically solved.

So, your solution for EVs is overheard wires or third rails for every lane of every roadway?

>So, your solution for EVs is overheard wires

I think that is a much more solvable problem than charging and batteries yes.

Do I think it will happen in my lifetime? No. But there's a reason that we don't have battery-powered trains, and it's not like in 2022, cars are that much more "off-road" than trains are "off-track"

Roads with tram lines are short to drive on. There’s even a phenomenon called “tram lining” where the road is toomhumped in the middle and makes lane changes sketchy.

Tramlining is when the topography of the road causes cars to move differently than how they are steered (somewhat similarly to tram tracks) and has nothing to do with overhead electric or actual trams.

https://www.tirerack.com/tires/tiretech/techpage.jsp?techid=...

> So, your solution for EVs is overheard wires or third rails for every lane of every roadway?

Do you think adding hundreds of KG of batteries to two billion cars is more reasonable?

We produce enough conductors to wire every street in America in a couple years. At the current rate of battery production, replacing all cars in the world will take over 100 years.

kg, not KG. K is Kelvin, G is giga - this unit does not make sense.

The power lines that trolleybuses use don’t cover an entire city. They’re only installed on the routes the buses are scheduled to run on, and only for the parts of the streets buses will use. They’re like train tracks in that way, but hanging in the air instead of embedded in the ground.

Garbage truck fleets are expected to cover every street and every block in their service area which adds up to more of a city than bus services cover since they don’t stop on every block at every house and building. The lines also require maintenance and you also need to train operators to re-establish the connections not if they drop but when they drop. Doesn’t seem worth it to me, at least not for New York.

They are also a maintenance headache, especially in icy conditions.

In 1875, Philadelphia had electric street car lines going through every numbered street in the city, and through every cross street in central Philly[1].

[1] https://i.redd.it/zidqa2mbmav31.png

That's neat. Thanks for sharing!

No problem. If you visit there, you can still see some of the rail lines in the streets.

They've paved over the rails in the 90's, but a few bus routes are still powered by the overhead lines. I forget the numbers, but one of them starts at the Frankford transportation center.

NYC garbage trucks spend a very long time parked in front of the same building all night, crushing bags full of plastic coffee cups. Ask anyone who has ever tried to sleep in Manhattan. A completely reasonable solution that doesn't require a wholesale change in the way refuse is collected in that city would be to plug the truck in at the building where it is standing.

That said, a wholesale change is what they need.

It never ceases to amaze me that the self styled "Greatest City on Earth" can't come up with a reasonable solution for its garbage.

They also call it "the city that never sleeps" but they misleadingly omit the reason.

That reason being what? Cocaine?

Edit: oh, you must mean noisy garbage trucks

Except that it does sleep, and deeply... The bars close really early, cabs get very hard to find shortly after, the streets of Manhattan are deserted. The only thing that’s 24H is some rent a cop telling you not to sit on some park bench.

Have the bars stopped closing at 4am?

Garbage is a difficult issue everywhere. Part of the entropy problem of the universe…

I can't think of another major city where there are piles of garbage bags on the sidewalks everywhere.

Tokyo ? Business there place their garbage bags out on the sidewalk in the evenings, garbage trucks scoop them up early in the morning.

> I can't think of another major city where there are piles of garbage bags on the sidewalks everywhere.

Other cities have alleyways.

Garbage is absolutely not as big of a problem as it is in NYC though. You don't get to blame the fact garbage collection is awful on entropy when other cities very visibly do not have the same issues.

Do you live there? It seems pretty effective IME.

HN's take on NYC is very confusing. Everyone has "obvious" answers to problems that residents don't even consider problematic, and oh by the way, they've never left their town of 600 people.

I remember a debate here where people were claiming how lawless NYC was for allowing people and services to double-park to load/unload. They should park in a loading zone!

You must recognize the general GOP-led campaign that democratic-run places like NYC and CA are nightmares. It was Trump's theme for the 2020 GOP convention, but was overshadowed by Coronavirus. I think it spreads here too. NYC (and CA) need to take it on and remind people what makes them so fantastic.

We also should write off real criticism as a “GOP” campaign. I live in one of their favorite cities to attack (not NYC) and they’re close to spot on

So there's no GOP campaign? We should pretend it doesn't exist? All criticism is "real"?

For what it's worth, NYC has been designating some parking spots on city blocks in largely residential areas for local deliveries, so UPS/Amazon/FedEx trucks don't have to double park and hold up traffic. I'm sure it was due to the pandemic, where online ordering became a lifeline for many.

> Do you live there? It seems pretty effective IME.

I live in NYC, and I'll go on the record stating that NYC's trash collection system is an absolute disaster, because the city has long-refused to use containerized trash collection (the way every other city in the developed world does), and instead tells people to dump trash bags on the sidewalk 3-5 times per week, where they sit for 12 hours at a time before being picked up.

This is not an effective system at all. It exists only because elected officials have not wanted to give up a few free parking spaces every block in order to allow for containerized trash receptacles.

Thankfully, there's a pilot program on one block in midtown Manhattan to "trial" containerized trash collection. It began a few weeks ago, and is scheduled to last one year. Hopefully that will be followed by a wider rollout.

> never ceases to amaze me that the self styled "Greatest City on Earth" can't come up with a reasonable solution for its garbage

The status quo is sanitary and efficient. All things considered, New York’s garbage problem is on par with its snow problem. Well managed enough to work, but annoying enough around the edges to be fun to bicker about.

If you live in low-density New York, your experience mirrors suburbia; high, and your trash disappears down a building chute. It’s only we who live in the middle density who have to haul garbage to the basement and hear the beeping trucks at night. Even then, it’s clean and works.

> The status quo is sanitary and efficient.

Are we talking about the same NYC? Visit Manhattan in mid July/August. Bags of garbage leaking juices and oil out onto the street into a huge greasy spot where the designated collection spot is near the curb. The whole city smells like a toaster oven roasted ballsack.

Then combine that with all the cumulative liters of urine per day from dogs and humans all throughout the city.

It could be worse, and was once:

<https://99percentinvisible.org/article/cities-paved-dung-urb...>

Cleaning up after horses (including, often, the horses themselves) is a large part of why and how NYC's municipal waste system evolved to its present state.

What do you think happens to the trash after it "disappears down the chute"?

You might not haul it to the curb yourself but the building as staff still has to unless you're in a building big enough to have a loading dock that can accommodate a truck to haul away a roll-on container. Most high rises don't even fall into that category. I live in a 20 story building with 157 units and the building staff has to drag the piles of trash out of the compactor room to the sidewalk on collection days.

Doesn't basically every city call itself the greatest city on earth?

Not like NYC. Not even close. At least, I've never visited or lived in one that rivaled it.

I've never heard Red Deer, Alberta make that claim.

You don't even hear people from LA or SF boast the way they do in New Yawk.

> don't even hear people from LA or SF boast the way they do in New Yawk

Every borough except Staten Island is larger than San Francisco [1][2]. Manhattan together with Queens or Brooklyn is bigger than LA, the second-largest city in America. (Staten Island is about the size of Raleigh or Atlanta.)

New York solves problems at a scale no other American city comes close to imagining.

[1] https://www.nyc.gov/site/planning/planning-level/nyc-populat...

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities...

This is exactly what I mean. You guys have no idea how silly you sound everywhere else.

I also noticed your sleight of hand. "Greatest city in the world" includes Tokyo, Paris, Seoul. All far superior to NYC in almost every way, with similar issues of scale.

Sounds to be like it’s you just having an issue with NYC

What does the size of the city have to do with it? When thinking about "greatest city", I don't think "solving problems at scale" is one of my criteria.

I love visiting Manhattan and Brooklyn, but frankly have a hard time imagining living there. And I live in SF, which is far from being an ideal city.

The LA municipal boundary is a small sliver of what people broadly call "Los Angeles. Here's Manhattan projected over the LA metro: https://i.imgur.com/ff7Vs1k.jpeg

Staten Island isn't as big as Raleigh or Atlanta. Its much smaller population and area-wise, focusing on just their metro areas. Denser for sure, but not larger.

> Staten Island isn't as big as Raleigh or Atlanta

Staten Island (~475k) has the same population as Raleigh (~470k) and is a hair smaller than Atlanta (~500k). This isn’t a density argument. It’s an illustration of New York City’s scale. The forgotten borough is larger than most of our cities.

Have anything to say about Tokyo, Paris, or Seoul? Your silence in that part of the thread is conspicuous.

I'm forced to consider the likelihood that you are a typically provincial New Yorker with no real perspective on global megacities.

I’ve never heard New Yorkers call New York the greatest city on earth in earnest. It’s a great city in a way no other city in America truly is. In a league with Tokyo, Delhi, Shanghai, Paris or London. Density and cosmopolitanism bring a unique combination of economic and cultural gifts that set these cities apart, and have for similar cities across history. New Yorkers also tend to be well travelled to those cities, because that’s how cosmopolitan culture works.

> I’ve never heard New Yorkers call New York the greatest city on earth in earnest.

My Uber driver said that to me within the first ride of my landing, and I heard it again and again, from millenials, Gen X, Boomers, basically every type of person I met and from every walk of life, during the many years I lived there.

You guys play this game where you don't say what you mean, and you don't mean what you say, in any context where it's marginally convenient/inconvenient to do so. It's eat or be eaten in NYC. I would hope longtime residents like yourself are just BS'ing the HN community, and not actually delusional about the waters you swim in.

So I'm actually quite confused here, because Wikipedia lists and cites a number from the US Census which puts Raleigh's population at about 1.1M.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_urban_ar...

That's pointing to this spreadsheet hosted by the census:

https://www2.census.gov/geo/docs/reference/ua/2020_Census_ua...

But, if we go to this fact table, they give that ~470k number.

https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/raleighcitynort...

You definitely hear people from LA say this

They can sacrifice street parking spots systematically throughout the city for garbage dumpsters, as many others have suggested, but it's politically untenable to do so because americans love their cars, even in NYC.

Another politically untenable solution is to do what Taiwan does and force people to put out their garbage in very tight time windows and otherwise store it privately in their houses and businesses, but that is a unproductive use of human time on net.

The reality is that most other major cities have garbage collection figured out in a better way. For instance in my city, garbage is kept in a dedicated garage area in each apartment building, and on a scheduled day, it's picked up either right in the building or in the alley after the caretaker moves the dumpsters there. The fact that this is considered politically untenable in New York is frankly insane, glad I don't live there.

> in a dedicated garage area in each apartment building

NY has a lot of row houses, there's no room for a dedicated garbage area. And the alleys are not wide enough for a garbage truck.

Before criticizing a place, at least understand it first.

People in row houses can't walk to the corner of the street? That's how it works in much of the Netherlands, underground bins spread over suburbia, which is like 90% row house. Works fine. I wish we had it here (still need to put my bin/bags out on the designated day).

This is also how they do it in Zürich. You walk your garbage down to the corner. Recycling is the same way. The only thing that gets picked up from houses is paper and cardboard.

In NYC, in very dense areas like of Manhattan, I would expect it would make sense to put a container in the bottom of every building, but in rowhouse areas it is reasonable to expect the occupants to walk down to the corner.

The main thing is like so many other aspects of American life we have no domestic examples of best practices. You have to visit foreign cities and pay attention, or invite their experts to come teach your city.

And neither of those things happen in the USA. We kicked England out like 250 years ago, and our general belief is that Europe hasn’t had a good idea since they chose to colonize the Americas. Reasonable people think this is stupid, but we have a lot of unreasonable people here.

If I'm to believe what I read online, especially here on HN, Europe has everything figured out and is so much better than the US. So yes, we do have a lot of unreasonable people here (on HN).

Infrastructure wise, central Europe + Scandinavia has things "figured out", which is what the topic is about.

Transport infrastructure in dense areas is "solved" by reducing individual means of transport and increasing shared means of transport. This doesn't align with hyper-individualistic people seeing car transport as their right.

A "fat government" helps building out shared infrastructure, America doesn't have that.

Some people like sharing and cooperating, some people like living under the false impression that they're independent of society.

In certain states there are still laws around water rights that cause unnecessary shortages that could be solved by cooperation, but the laws are there and the big consumers upstream lobby to keep them that way.

Not saying the US isn't great, you've been the economic powerhouse of the world for awhile now, you have accomplished many great things (research topping my list). I just think somewhere you forgot to invest back into shared infrastructure, and that "ours" is better (with exceptions both ways).

There's a bit of my reasoning, which if you wildly disagree with makes us both unreasonable to eachother, whoever is right is up to the future to decide independent of us two.

By row house do you mean something like this? https://goo.gl/maps/XTDwyAZy6GoqPRXt7

That's 4-5 stories of ~4 apartments per floor, times however many of those buildings fit in the 900ft/247m length of a block. There's nowhere near enough space on the corner (here's the corner: https://goo.gl/maps/aszPHqrQVGftcqTCA) to collect that much garbage, much less to do it three times a week.

Yes they could build big underground containers. Yes they could reduce the amount of garbage generated. But both are massive projects far beyond "why can't they just".

> Yes they could build big underground containers.

Obviously. (What else?) Why would that be a massive project?

NYC's underground infrastructure, which is poorly mapped.

See: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34253193>

The Netherlands has absolutely nowhere approaching the density of NYC. Even Queens has a density twice that of Amsterdam, and Manhattan 7x. If you see NYC on garbage days the streets are lined with mountains of bags. Each corner would have to have a virtual mine shaft to hold 1000s of bags of garbage.

Also contrary to movies, Manhattan has almost no alley ways either. There's no space for anything. Even when it snows in many areas they have to take the snow and dump it in the East River.

> If you see NYC on garbage days the streets are lined with mountains of bags. Each corner would have to have a virtual mine shaft to hold 1000s of bags of garbage.

Or, you know, a commercial-sized dumpster.

The trash is already taking up space on the sidewalk. Putting a dumpster to contain it would save space, by keeping it contained.

> The trash is already taking up space on the sidewalk. Putting a dumpster to contain it would save space, by keeping it contained

It is always fun to see people resort to completely illogical arguments to defend the current habits and rat-feeding status quo.

> The Netherlands has absolutely nowhere approaching the density of NYC.

We were talking about the row houses, right?

As someone from a dense city with generally smaller roads than NYC (Philly), I think that's untrue. If NYC wanted to do it, it could be done. In Philly, trucks make it down alleys where the roadway is half the size of the truck. Or they wheel the dumpsters down the alley to the corner. That doesn't mean every alley is suitable, but you can put the dumpster on the main road where you put the trash, or do as our European friends suggest.

There are barely if any alleys in most of NYC.

> NY has a lot of row houses, there's no room for a dedicated garbage area

Most buildings in NYC already have a dedicated garbage area. The issue is that there isn't a dedicated spot for pickup.

That's a solvable problem: put containerized trash receptacles on the street, so the superintendent can put them in the containers, instead of dropping them directly on the sidewalk (which is what they currently do).

>For instance in my city, garbage is kept in a dedicated garage area in each apartment building

Most apartment buildings in NYC don't have garages.

It's not the parking spots - residents have zero interest in walking to the end of their block with garbage.

If they tried it people would just leave their garbage on the street. Have you been in NY? There's garbage everywhere.

Personally I have no idea what you're talking about...have visited the city many many times for work from bronx to manhattan, and come from a much "dirtier" city.

If you think there's garbage everywhere in NYC, I advise you to never visit most European capitals, and especially not the asian subcontinent. Which is not to shame these places, but more so to say that NYC is doing OK.

> It's not the parking spots - residents have zero interest in walking to the end of their block with garbage.

Nobody would have to do that. They'd have to walk an extra 10 ft from the front of their building to the curb. Unless they live in a multifamily building (which is most of the city), in which case the building superintendent would do that.

> Have you been in NY? There's garbage everywhere.

Because that's the city-sanctioned way for

> They'd have to walk an extra 10 ft from the front of their building to the curb.

I mentioned in another post it's mostly row houses, sometimes with the 1st and 2nd floor separate living areas. Not huge apartments - you can't put a dumpster in front of every house.

The dumpster would go at the end of the block, no one will support walking that far with their garbage. Not when they are used to a different way.

> I mentioned in another post it's mostly row houses

This is incorrect. That does not describe the majority of housing units in NYC.

> The dumpster would go at the end of the block, no one will support walking that far with their garbage. Not when they are used to a different way.

I don't know why you're so confidently making this claim, because that's not what's being proposed or being done. There already is a pilot program for containerized trash collection, and - surprise - there's not just one container per block.

It was always handled efficiently by the mafia guys in movies.

What are you talking about

I’m very much interested in this underground system (I don’t know if it is actually implemented): https://www.core77.com/posts/102208/Amsterdams-Smart-System-...

It seems to me this sort of trash deposit system would greatly simplify trash collection.

Roosevelt Island (which is a part of the Manhattan borough) actually has an underground, pneumatic trash collection system: https://untappedcities.com/2020/04/09/inside-roosevelt-islan... . I think it would be hard to retrofit such a thing onto the already-built-up parts of the city though.

> I think it would be hard to retrofit such a thing onto the already-built-up parts of the city though.

It would be prohibitively expensive, because there's no master record of which pipes/wires/cables/etc. exist in any given location. It's very expensive to dig in Manhattan[0], because you basically have to dig carefully and see what's actually there, rather than having some knowledge of "the gas pipes are in this spot, so we can dig around them". So much of the infrastructure was installed before detailed record-keeping was standard practice.

As far as trash collection in NYC, the main thing that needs to happen is containerized trash collection. Right now, trash bags are just left on the sidewalks 3-5 times per week for 12 or more hours at a time, creating an absolute buffet for rodents.

[0] This actually applies to most of the city, but Manhattan is a combination of the oldest-built and most-densly-built infrastructure, so it's particularly expensive there.

Many cities face the same problem and this is how they fix it: they make a plan to rework every pipe and wire in their city in a finite amount of time. They go block by block and tear it all up at once. They bring a shitload of guys and equipment instead of two idiots with jackhammers, so the whole thing is ripped out and replaced in a week instead of in 5 years.

Philadelphia used to have electric street car lines that ran down almost every street[1].

[1] https://i.redd.it/zidqa2mbmav31.png

> I am not sure why we aren't seeing a push for the installation of streetcar power lines, these already exist and are used for busses

They’re ugly eyesores.

They only exist in a handful of cities in the USA to begin with.

They limit your driving speed.

They create additional noise.

They can detach fairly easily, impeding traffic. Much bigger issue if this could potentially happen to every vehicle.

You would need to install power lines on every single street for that to work. Streetcars for transportation can just electrify a few routes.

Would you believe that every house requires power lines to be run to it too?

It only seems like a daunting problem on roads because we don't already do it.

A much bigger problem than the lines are the switches. Switching of trolley buses at intersections is not really all that well solved of a problem as is, and the solutions available right now (up to the most sophisticated based on radio signaling) are a primary failure point, maintenance intensive, and expensive and complex enough that the cost of a four-way intersection set up for four-way electric travel is going to be pretty formidable.

Further, electric lines exist mostly on shared poles. For safety reasons, shared poles require a buffer space between MV and distribution voltage power lines and communications lines. This means that the typically 600 VDC trolley bus power cannot be added at the level of communications lines (well, can be with some work, but in practice it is expensive and complex) without compromising this safety buffer, requiring deenergization when communications utility work is underway. In many cases they cannot be near communications cables even if communications work is prohibited when the system is energized, because of the risk of inadvertent contact putting 600VDC on coaxial or telephone lines which could create fatal situations. Additional expense is required to mitigate this problem.

Trolley lines also have more complex physical loading requirements than power lines because they must cope with the lateral forces of vehicles, so they usually need to be anchored to both sides of the street on crosswires, to poles that were engineered for that use. Most of the time attaching trolley lines to existing poles will not be feasible for these reasons and they will need to either go on dedicated supports, be attached to buildings (the engineering and real estate paperwork for this is complex), or have existing poles replaced with ones engineered to support trolley lines as well.

> Switching of trolley buses at intersections is not really all that well solved of a problem as is

Like the parent comment said, it would be a hybrid able to use battery power when not on the line. With this type of system you could then just run parallel lines instead of criss-crossing lines.

I'm not saying attach the overheads to the light poles, I'm saying we do things of similar scale/difficulty all the time (while we are very far from at-scale battery based transport).

Batteries are fun and all, but they are way harder to deal with vs. anything you described; they're just earlier in the development curve, so the problems seem more solvable.

All this can be mitigated with a small amount of battery in the vehicle. Essentially each streetcar is a BEV with battery only to go a few miles but is essentially recharged while on street power (with software to keep SoC in the 20-90% band).

I agree, what we need is to make them blow the blackest black diesel smoke possible.

This isn't a one dimensional problem where diesel smoke is the only factor at play.

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