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.
(But I don't think a separate fleet is the answer.)
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.
I'm just trying to include the factor of climate change, which does and will cost a ton.
To balance your suggestion, the environmental cost of constructing, shipping, and maintaining a fleet of single-purpose snow plows is not close to zero.
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.
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
> only a handful of days of snow in the year
Then this question of truck fleet would be moot.
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.
Congratulations, you shut off logistics and emergency services for a population the size of Virginia.
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).
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.
No garbage-truck/plow is going to fix that, whether it be powered by EV, ICE, or unicorn farts.
Alternatively, the large fleet could be appropriately specced and the small fleet can be “mothballed” the rest of the year, thus preserving its longevity.
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...