Hacker News Reader

Comment by mabbo | Hacker News Reader

Why are they using garbage trucks to plow snow?

Looks, I get that I'm biased being in Canada, but do they understand that you can buy dedicated vehicles for plowing snow? They're called... snowplows. They're pretty fantastic.

You need garbage trucks every day, all year. Electrify those. You need snowplows on a handful of days per year- and that number is falling thanks to climate change. So buy purpose-built snowplows for those days that use fuels instead of batteries.

But it's silly to decide to have an all-fuel fleet of garbage trucks just because they can't also be used as snowplows a few days per year that you need them.

View on HN

NYC has 30,000 streets and only a handful of days of snow in the year. By having garbage trucks that can deal with a few inches of snow, you avoid the need of buying dozens of dedicated vehicles that will rot 360 days a year.

You're not wrong. I agree with you. I just see that as a better option than continuing to burn fuel in trucks that don't need it 360 days per year.

Better for whom or what? Surely not for the New York City budget, or the folks who pay for it.

Better for those folks and the budget, both of which will feel the full impact of climate change.

(But I don't think a separate fleet is the answer.)

It’s better for the environment to build and maintain a separate fleet of occasionally-used snow plows?

Did you read the second sentence? I mean, I know people don't read entire articles, but two sentences?

> Did you read the second sentence?

You said a separate fleet is better “for the folks and the budget” of New York, and added a parenthetical clarifying that it isn’t the answer. I’m agreeing with the second sentence, that a separate fleet isn’t the answer. I’m also refuting the first point, that it’s better than the status quo.

Not a separate fleet, just electrifying the trucks somehow would be beneficial (depending on how that's done, of course - not with coal-fired charging stations on every block).

I'm just trying to include the factor of climate change, which does and will cost a ton.

Is that just how you feel?

Or can you show the conversion saves resources even when you have to buy and maintain dozens of extra vehicles?

This seems to me like you’re making a negative decision just because you find it emotionally satisfying, without any reasonable basis to believe that it improves things.

Might the better option be a hybrid truck, which runs on electricity 90% of the time but has the capacity to use fossil fuels in situations such as these? (snow is but one example, I can imagine other exceptional circumstances where such a vehicle might need an extra boost).

To balance your suggestion, the environmental cost of constructing, shipping, and maintaining a fleet of single-purpose snow plows is not close to zero.

Along the same line, can we modularize these trucks? Like the specific parts useful for snowplowing, can we take them off the rest of the year (less gas wasted) and add them back on only when needed

  > only a handful of days of snow in the year

I know modern economy has gone full-JIT but I naively wish we could just stop in this case and.. wait.

Then this question of truck fleet would be moot.

First: I don't go out in snow beyond a couple of blocks, things can wait. But that's me.

Second: Just because the snow stops falling doesn't mean the problem goes away. The snow can take a couple of weeks to melt (essentially until the next rain, or a hot enough day), so stopping and waiting for nature to resolve the situation on its own would shut down the city for a month or so every year.

And during that time, it can turn to ice.

I wonder how much it would cost to heat the roads rather than plow them, and how that would compare to the current solution, long-term. NYC already has an extensive underground infrastructure ...

It is essentially impossible to add anything underground in NYC _because_ of the extensive underground infrastructure. It is all but saturated.

> naively wish we could just stop in this case and.. wait

Congratulations, you shut off logistics and emergency services for a population the size of Virginia.

There's a lot to be said that we should rethink logistics and emergency services to use other modes if it's more resilient to severe weather, supply chain shortages (fuel) - or everyday things like traffic and construction

Millions of NYC residents have jobs and schools to go to and grocery shopping to be done. Locking them down for even a few days has huge costs.

You really don’t want that. I mean, if you’re sure things are going to stay below -10°C for the forseeable future, by all means leave the snow on the roads, and I wish more places in Northern Europe would do that. (Winter days become much more tolerable when what little light you have is reflected back by snow.)

But if they are not and especially if they are going back and forth, then you’re getting slush, half-frozen slush, frozen slush packed into ice, or half-frozen slush on top of frozen slush packed into ice, and not only do you not want to drive on that, it’s also a pain to remove even from pedestrian paths, because you need power tools to break it up and then you have a crapton of inch-thick sheets of ice you have to transport and dump to melt somewhere. They take a couple of weeks to melt naturally on the road, or a couple of months under the spring sun if you pile them up on the side of the road (which also happens to look hideous).

You're talking about a city of 10+ million people.

With that luxury, sure. Emergencies happen. The garbage needs to be picked up.

Total the costs of icy sidewalk slip and falls, lost economic activity, and excess deaths (QALY) over 10 years. Spend 1/4 of that on a series of underground passageways (un)like MIT.

...the costs of icy sidewalk slip and falls...

No garbage-truck/plow is going to fix that, whether it be powered by EV, ICE, or unicorn farts.

What you are describing is overspeccing (thus over paying upfront and for maintenance) of the large fleet in order to avoid having a small fleet.

Alternatively, the large fleet could be appropriately specced and the small fleet can be “mothballed” the rest of the year, thus preserving its longevity.

> large fleet I order to avoid having a small fleet

The large fleet is “2,230 general collection trucks, 275 specialized collection trucks, 450 street sweepers, 365 snowplows, 298 front end loaders, and 2,360 support vehicles” [1]. Those general collection trucks, together with the plows, constitute a circa 2,300-plow snow fleet [2].

Dedicated fleet means buying 2,000 more snowplows. There is no small fleet option.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Department_of_...

[2] https://nypost.com/2020/12/05/nyc-spent-12m-per-inch-of-snow...

I was gonna suggest that they could simply share the snow plow vehicles for the rest of the year with other countries (like how we share firefighters with Australia) but then I realized the part of the world that would most likely need them when NYC doesn't is the opposite hemisphere and those vehicles are not easy to ship lol

I don't think it snows enough in big Australian cities :D And there aren't (yet) electric super-jumbo cargo planes to ship these mechanical monstrosities.

Australia isn't the only landmass in the southern hemisphere :P

But yeah fair point. There's pretty few places in the southern hemisphere that are in the mid to high latitudes. I wonder why that is

> Why are they using garbage trucks to plow snow?

You are sort of answering your own question here.

> snowplows a few days per year that you need them

NYC has 6,300 miles miles of streets. Maintaining an entirely separate fleet of plow vehicles large enough to clear the streets quickly would have its own additional costs.

Why do they even have their own fleet of garbage trucks, though? I'm pretty sure the garbage trucks where I live are all privately owned.

Because NYC is entirely different than where you live, most likely. City gov subsidizes trash pick up instead of allowing private companies to bid, because any private company would lose money. And if no city subsidized trash pick up, New York will be New Delhi.

I don't understand how NYC couldn't make money for a private trash company. The trash company I use makes money, and our population density isn't anywhere near what it is in NYC. I have to imagine the largest cost is fuel, and it stands to reason that it takes much more fuel to get all of the trash where I live.

I don't understand what you're saying, I guess. I don't understand how a city being large can just automatically lead to a loss for trash companies.

NYC already has private trash pickup and it's a bit of a S#1Tshow - https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/15/nyregion/nyc-garbage.html

There are complicating factors in NYC, as well as the fact that the average resident doesn’t pay what it actually costs for trash pickup, so moving to a private model would cost significantly more for each household. (Obviously TINSTAAFL, and this cost is just hidden in other ways. Eg taxes)

Why default to privately owned?

Public services can be cheaper, more reliable, and you have more control than if you pay someone else to maximize their profit. NYC government has tons of experience and expertise in managing something like this.

NYC also has a ton of fraud perpetrated by gov employees.

https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/seventeen-new-york-city...

https://www.reuters.com/legal/bribery-fraud-charges-are-dism...

NYC government is huge; is that really a "ton"? Private business also has fraud.

Government Officials defrauding their constituents is another level higher than private business fraud. Just my opinion though YOMV.

What do you base that on?

>Public services can be cheaper

No they can be subsidized with tax money. That doesn’t mean cheaper

Just like private services need to generate shareholder profits. that doesn't mean cheaper either.

Would I rather pay garbage through taxes and fees or would I rather pay garbage and private profits through fees? In general, public services treat employees better, are more accountable to elected officials (good and bad) and aren't obligated to skim an extra little bit off the top to pay someone else. There are countless examples of privatization making services less efficient in the long run, it's not an automatic win.

Public services can be as efficient as private services. And without the overhead of dividends they are cheaper.

I wouldn't take the extreme position either way. Public and private are different tools for different jobs.

You pay for something; that's not a subsidy.

No, they can be cheaper.

Sod off with this, I've seen someone literally hospitalised because of an army of private sector contractors we've had to deal with finding ingenious efficiency savings, powered by ideologues like you. Now our costs have tripled.

Oh, and guess f*king what; now several other suppliers are bankrupt, taking their already mostly-worthless support contracts with them, because they never invested a cent in resilience, and, get this, are blaming us for giving them that power. The same power they were so adamant, just like you, that they were so good at wielding. Their only efficiency ever was stripping all resilience, not inefficency - deliberate resilience.

The private sector is made of goddamn children at times,

> Why do they even have their own fleet of garbage trucks, though?

We have both: “New York City Department of Sanitation (DSNY)…serves residential buildings, government agencies, and many nonprofit facilities. The private system is regulated by the City’s Business Integrity Commission (BIC) and consists of more than 250 waste hauling firms licensed to remove non-construction and non-industrial waste. The private haulers serve businesses ranging from small pizza parlors to large office buildings” [1]. The public system guarantees minimum service to the population.

[1] https://cbcny.org/research/12-things-new-yorkers-should-know...

Waste hauling in NYC used to be run by the mob. It still may be to some extent, but that history has yet to be un-f*cked.

They don't even use dumpsters, they just pile bags of trash on the sidewalk. And then wonder why they have a huge rat problem.

Most of NYC does not have the physical space for dumpsters or the roadway access for dumpster lifting garbage trucks.

There are some large buildings where it would be practical, but much of the residential housing consists of buildings with <10 apartments and no alleyways (let alone driveways).

The mob ran waste hauling for businesses who did (and still do) have to contract with private companies to take away their waste- the big trial that is supposed to have got rid of most of the mob control of this business was in the mid-90s.

Residential trash in NYC is hauled away by city employees at the Department of Sanitation, and has been since the late 19th century.

Both, though, expect trash (whether from a business or from an apartment building) to be simply piled up in bags on the sidewalk.

First of all we have both. Second of all we are a democracy, and I have never once in my entire life living here heard for anyone call for privatizing the Department of Sanitation. If anything I've heard for calls to take over private sanitation because it way more dangerous to pedestrians and workers

> Why are they using garbage trucks to plow snow?

Perhaps because it's easy to add a connector plate and a bit of hydraulic in front of a truck and they already have them for garbage, they regularly run the on roads and their driver knowing where garbage containers are avoid some classic (at least here in UE) where the snowplowers push/launch snow everywhere not caring about anything else then keep the road clear... In a city handling snow it's even harder than in the countryside...

> But it's silly to decide to have an all-fuel fleet of garbage trucks just because they can't also be used as snowplows a few days per year that you need them.

Keeping up two fleet is not that cheap either: trucks/wheeled vehicles need to run regularly to keep their wheel well round and balanced, ICEs need to run regularly to keep the engine well lubed, starter and service batteries need to be kept charged, vehicles need to be parked somewhere (two fleets, twice the place), for ICEs you need to keep the fuel infra ready, and the amount of fuel it's not so little and so on.

IMVHO as an EV owner I doubt ALL trucks can be electric so far, simply range, charge time, battery weight are still below a practical usability levels...

They should buy and maintain a separate fleet of trucks for those few days per year? This is NYC; that's going to be a lot of trucks. Even parking them - for 3xx days per year - would be a problem.

They already have a fleet; it seems like a creative, effective solution - the kind of creativity that cynics say government lacks - to repurpose them for snow removal.

Because it's brilliant.

They need to do both:

Drive a big truck around the city streets pushing a plow to clear them of snow and ice

And

Drive a big truck around to collect garbage

It's much more efficient to do both at the same time, use the same trucks and skilled labor to run them.

It's a classic two birds one stone situation

Actually hold on, we can also put people on these trucks. They can also serve as busses! And wait, attach a trailer and they can also replace semi trucks! Just use one truck to do all city related things, how neat is that? /s

You can just go on, making it less and less efficient each step.

Thankfully the physical requirements to turn a garbage trunk into a snow plow are minimal. And it's more inefficient to have an idle fleet for huge parts of the year than to use slightly awkward plows.

You literally just described a pickup truck, the highest selling car/truck in America. They're used as busses, all kinds of repair trucks, they can go in railroad tracks, etc.

Point is, a truck that plows snow and a truck that is a trash truck are mostly the same thing. You take a diesel cab truck chassis, and add either a plow or a trash compactor to it. It's also easy to add both.

It's not as if the trash trucks in cities that don't use them to plow are some highly specialized thing. They're the same trucks as new york has, just no plow. A plow bolts on.

Nit: They don't do both at the same time. The trucks are either plowing snow or they're picking up trash. That's why the trash piles up until the snow is cleared. After big storms you can end up with pretty epic piles of garbage collecting on sidewalks.

Thanks, true.

Still get the economy of not having to buy twice as many big trucks

We have plow trucks but we don't have a lot of room to store a huge dedicated fleet.

Also, this being hacker news I'd expect praise for efficient use of available equipment.

Agree, but I would argue that 'climate change' is not making it fall necessary across the board for all use cases; what I notice here in Colorado is that we might get fewer snow days, but when we do get snow now, wow, it's crazy how much dumps.

Another way of looking at this is, I used to get by with a ~$250 dollar electric snowblower; that thing died just last week when I asked too much of it trying to rid 10+ inches of very heavy, wet snow off our long driveway.

I'll be replacing it with nice Toro gas powered snow blower (~$1000-1500) because I expect the same / worse going forward. Fewer snow days, but when it does snow, it's a lot more than we used to get.

Why have garbage trucks at all when you can have a series of tubes to transport garbage?

NYC technically already has this in Roosevelt Island.

Just context for international readers: Roosevelt Island has 11,000 residents, or 0.1% of NYC's population. The point stands, just providing context.

More details: https://youtu.be/nfM4cjDoo6o

Yeah NYC really needs to get rid of the garbage trucks. Or figure out something. Garbage is becoming a problem for the city.

What is a garbage truck fleet if not a series of tubes?

We already have the internet.

Well for one the tubes are not something you just dump something on, and if you don't understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your garbage in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.

"that number is falling thanks to climate change"

The weirdness of climate change is that warm air holds more water. So you'll get stronger storms, but some areas will see drought as the atmosphere holds more water and is less likely to give it up as rain/snow.

So, less days on average, but more "once in an X" storms.

> Why are they using garbage trucks to plow snow?

Fewer vehicles to acquire, maintain, store, etc. That seems self evident.

Further, the scheme works fine. The issue isn't whether plowing snow and collecting garbage with the same vehicle is a workable idea. The issue is that there isn't an electric replacement available yet.

We found that they could not plow the snow effectively – they basically conked out after four hours. We need them to go 12 hours.

Are there any non-garbage truck BEVs with snowplows that can do that?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com