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.
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.
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.
<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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
Obviously. (What else?) Why would that be a massive project?
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.
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.
It is always fun to see people resort to completely illogical arguments to defend the current habits and rat-feeding status quo.
We were talking about the row houses, right?
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).
Most apartment buildings in NYC don't have garages.
If they tried it people would just leave their garbage on the street. Have you been in NY? There's garbage everywhere.
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.
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
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.
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.
Edit: oh, you must mean noisy garbage trucks
Other cities have alleyways.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
I'm forced to consider the likelihood that you are a typically provincial New Yorker with no real perspective on global megacities.
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.
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...