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Comment by Eric_WVGG | Hacker News Reader

A related article was published in the NYT today — apparently the city is going to take another try at moving to "containerized garbage." (For anyone who hasn't been here, the trash is just piled up literally everywhere. It's incredible.) https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/03/nyregion/garbage-containe...

This will be at the "cost" of 150,000 parking spaces… out of three million. Our car-owning minority will fight tooth and nail for their right to cover our sidewalks in sacks of trash, which of course makes sense given that they don't walk anywhere.

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There's No Such Thing As A Free Lunch, or a government policy that is only upside without some downsides.

Containerized Garbage is something that sounds really good, but there's always unexpected consequences to new policies.

Here's a quick stab at some of them.

1) Less Safe Roads. New Yorkers in many areas have to drive around for half an hour or an hour or more sometimes to find an open parking spot. This already leads to deeply frazzled nerves and unsafe driving as drivers scoot around oblivious to traffic and pedestrians to try and find a spot. I've seen drivers down main streets see a spot open up and immediately try and do a U-Turn into oncoming traffic, or just gun it through an intersection to try and be the first one to grab an open spot. Remove 5% of parking spaces, and this stuff increases. Maybe more people will get hurt in pointless accidents.

2) Fewer Spots lead to more parking tickets. These are of marginal impact on the well-off, but a struggling person who receives an unexpected ticket is completely fucked. The same people who claim to be on the side of the downtrodden and struggling classes truly ignore the actual impacts of their social engineering on those people. And as much as you might not like cars, many people have employment or childcare needs that depends on them.

3) Air Pollution and waste of gas. Garbage on the sidewalk is unsightly and horrible to see, but there's more than one kind of pollution. As mentioned, there are areas in the city where it's routine to drive around 30-60+ minutes to find a parking spot. Now increase all of this by a percentage, and more cars will be spewing exhaust fumes for longer. Is it a real win to tradeoff cleaner sidewalks for dirtier air? Maybe that's the best tradeoff, but I think it's important to recognize that there might be a tradeoff.

Despite all of this, I'm not saying that containerized garbage isn't a good idea. I'm just playing a little devil's advocate here. But just wanting to point out a different perspective that there's always some ignored bad that comes with every good.

All three of those are side effects of underpriced parking, not containerization.

Yes removing a few percent of parking spaces will make the mismatch slightly worse (since less supply means the price should rise a bit more) but that’s not the root cause of the problem

If congestion causes that many issues maybe they need a quota on the number of drivers, and could auction off 12-month driving passes on a rolling monthly basis. I just don't understand why anyone would drive in NYC. Everyone I know either doesn't have a car, or lives way outside the city and only drive to/from a nearby train station and ride into the city.

There are places that require you to have a parking spot for your car before you are allowed to register the car. There are no free parking spots, you park on your property or rent a spot from someone else.

I'm not a fan of externalities, so this makes sense to me, especially in an urban area where public transportation is available.

> There are places that require you to have a parking spot for your car before you are allowed to register the car. There are no free parking spots, you park on your property or rent a spot from someone else.

That's addressed in the article. In the long run, these laws result in overproduction of parking spaces, driving down density, driving up car utilization, and accelerating (sub)urban sprawl.

> I'm not a fan of externalities, so this makes sense to me, especially in an urban area where public transportation is available.

A better approach is to provide public transportation and make car owners actually pay for parking spots (currently, street parking is completely free in NYC).

I think you're halfway talking past the person you replied to. The two of you agree that car owners should actually pay for parking spots.

I think you may be thinking "require developers to build parking spots for planned occupants of (apartment/store/building)" but the person you replied to was advocating not for building more parking spots, but rather limiting the number of car registrations to the number of parking spots.

I would only add that in a place like NYC, many of the cars are registered in a completely different state (NJ, for example) and still driven in Manhattan so I think you'd need a special permit/RFID tag/plate registration to drive through the bridges/tunnels to get to Manhattan.

> I think you're halfway talking past the person you replied to. The two of you agree that car owners should actually pay for parking spots.

From their reply, I think you're mostly right, in that we both agree that parking should not be free for car owners.

> I think you may be thinking "require developers to build parking spots for planned occupants of (apartment/store/building)" but the person you replied to was advocating not for building more parking spots, but rather limiting the number of car registrations to the number of parking spots.

The issue is that, unless parking spots are themselves capped (or extremely costly), this just encourages developers to build more parking spaces. It's not as bad as using public land for it, but it's still bad.

They do this in Japan [0], apparently the entire country. I didn't know that they had a problem with sprawl.

In denser places, like Tokyo, people don't need cars like in most U.S. cities, they live in walkable neighborhoods full of multiuse buildings with transit connecting them to larger commercial areas and the rest of the country.

Tokyo would be quite different if all streets in those walkable neighborhoods had to be widened for parking.

Someone who wants a car can leave room on their city lot to park it, or rent space within walking or transit distance. Visitors would park in nearby pay-for-parking lots. I assume in less dense places in Japan it is not difficult to have a driveway to park in, just like in U.S. suburbs.

I don't follow your connection as to how eliminating free parking leads to sprawl. To the contrary it seems like taxpayer subsidies in the U.S. for cars, which include free street parking, led to a lot of sprawl.

[0] https://www.micklay.com/faq/parking-certificates/

> They do this in Japan [0], apparently the entire country. I didn't know that they had a problem with sprawl.

This is a common fallacy: "X happens in Y, and Y has greater Z. Therefore, X increases (or does not decrease) Z". At its core, it's an issue of confounding variables: even if what you're saying is true (I don't know, because I don't know about Japanese parking policy), you can't use differences in macro results as a way to draw conclusions about the effects of micro policies. There's too much else that gets bundled up in that measurement and which isn't controlled for.

> I don't follow your connection as to how eliminating free parking leads to sprawl.

I didn't say eliminating free parking leads to sprawl. I said that requiring (or encouraging) the creation of parking spots without any external cap or limit on parking would lead to sprawl.

> I just don't understand why anyone would drive in NYC. Everyone I know either doesn't have a car, or lives way outside the city and only drive to/from a nearby train station and ride into the city.

I did not have a car for the first 4 years I lived in NYC. I have one now. Let me try to explain some reasons why someone may want a car in the city:

* public transportation doesn't go where you need to go, or if it does, it takes unreasonably long. Example 1: you live in an outer borough, your job or family or love interest is in a different outer borough. Example 2: you are in a transit desert (e.g. certain parts of Queens). Example 3: you are an outdoor enthusiast and head out to the Gunks, Catskills, Hudson Valley, or the Delaware Water Gap every weekend. Example 4: you got your kid into an out of district elementary school because the nearby school is terrible, and the subway doesn't go there.

* you regularly need to carry heavy or bulky objects. Example 1: you work in the trades. Example 2: you own a place and are renovating it DIY. Example 3: you operate a small brick and mortar business and regularly need to get supplies from Restaurant Depot etc. Example 4: you have a back yard and want to do some gardening.

* you or someone in your household can't easily use public transportation. Example 1: injury, illness, or disability. Example 2: you have a baby in a stroller; buses require you to fold the stroller, many subway stations lack elevators.

Your examples are all BS.

If public transit isn't good enough, the answer isn't for people to drive cars, it's for the city to build more and better public transit. Complain to your elected officials, or vote for better ones.

If you have a back yard and buy gardening stuff, you can pay to have it delivered. Any city with excellent public transit has no problem delivering cargo by van on surface streets.

You don't need a car if you're disabled. Subway stations should have elevators, or you can use a taxi (subsidized by the local government) or disabled transit van. Any good city has this stuff. Stollers can be used on subways, and stations all have elevators in good cities. Here in Tokyo, parents use strollers on the subways all the time.

It sounds like you live in some corrupt, backwards nation that can't build decent infrastructure.

These are all negative externalities of cars, not containerized garbage. All the more reason to accelerate the social engineering of society towards safer, less polluting forms of transportation like e-bikes and transit.

Are you familiar with the concept of induced demand?

The premise of all of your points seems to be that car-owners are a privileged, temperamental class whose interests and fragility require sacrifices from everyone else.

I mean yeah... they kind of are.

They're privileged because roads and parking are paid for by all whether they use a car or not. The gas tax does not cover the infrastructure spend needed to handle the volume of car traffic US roads experience.

From what I know, cyclists don't exhibit the level of road rage toward other cyclists that people in cars engage in with each other.

The sacrifices that everyone else makes are in tax dollars, air quality, lack of alternative transportation options and arguably health care spending.

I don't mean to make this out to make it seem like car-owners are the cause of all this, because certainly not all of them are. But by continuing to model our transportation infrastructure almost entirely around them does have negatives for others as well as car-owners themselves.

I've heard of cyclists having road rage towards car drivers (who tried to kill them), but never towards other cyclists.

I don't disagree that every policy has some downsides.

For 1 and 3, though, People driving around for a long time to find a parking space is a sure sign that parking is too cheap. The ideal parking price, according to Donald Shoup, is one that leads to there being an average of 1 empty space per block. That does mean that pricing has to adjust according to time of day/day of week, and probably be higher during special events.

And that does have the downside that, well, parking is more expensive. But I think the benefits far outweigh the costs, as driving has a ton of bad externalities, especially in cities.

All of these reasons can be seen as justifications for reducing reliance on cars altogether. Public transportation is a viable alternative and introducing friction for drivers, while not the primary intention, can directly correlate to _reduced_ emissions and congestion [0]. If a driver is going to violate traffic laws and put others at risk because of their impatience, I'd argue that keeping these individuals off our roads is far more important than pandering to them. Socioeconomic status does not dictate one's ability to park legally.

[0] https://www.intelligenttransport.com/transport-news/143883/l...

The number of cars isn’t fixed - this is the flaw in your analysis.

please travel to Vienna Austria where this is already implemented, none of the problems you listed are of major concern there in my experience. It's made that city a much cleaner and organized situation.

Lots of us here have experience in "containerizing garbage" :)

When you start thinking of street parking as publicly funded storage space for private property, it really makes you question why such a large percentage of urban space (and money) is dedicated to it.

I'm still baffled that a city like NY can't make the switch.

It's a political issue. As the article states, parking is the "3rd rail" of local NYC politics.

I thought nobody in NYC had a car.

8 million people, 3 million parking spaces. compared to most places, that is "nobody"

Nobody drives in NYC, there's too much traffic

But realistically, plenty of folks have cars in NYC. With a metro area of over 20M people, enough people commute into the city, or aren't close enough to LIRR/MNR/NJT, or prefer driving to visit, or just are needed for commercial/industrial/institutional uses to clog the city's roads.

Double parking is infamous in NYC, as are aggressive drivers and terrible roads and parking situations.

> Nobody drives in NYC, there's too much traffic

That joke doesn't work because the people who drive in NYC are by and large not NYC residents.

> But realistically, plenty of folks have cars in NYC.

Depends on your definition of "plenty". NYC is the only city in the country where the majority of residents do not own a car.

Because there’s nowhere to park.

There’s roughly 1 parking spot per 7 people. So, cars really are rare comparatively.

I think you could say that car ownership is unusual. But when every street is packed with cars, it's silly to say that cars are rare.

The portion who have cars is relatively low, but they heavily skew towards the wealthier part of the population, so they have a disproportionately large amount of political power.

I dont think you’ve ever been to an outer borough, have you?

> I dont think you’ve ever been to an outer borough, have you?

While car ownership rates are higher in the outer boroughs, OP is objectively correct that car ownership in NYC skews towards the wealthy.

This is a common talking point among people who oppose congestion pricing by incorrectly claiming that it is a regressive tax. In reality, car ownership rates are positively correlated with income, public transit usage is negatively correlated with income.

https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2007/11/02/fact-check-congestion...

https://citylimits.org/2017/09/07/debate-fact-check-is-conge...

> I thought nobody in NYC had a car.

Car ownership is relatively rare in NYC, with NYC being the only city in which the majority of residents do not have a car.

However, car ownership in NYC is strongly positively correlated with income[0], which means that local politicians and their key supporters are more likely to own cars, drive cars, and listen to the complaints of car-driving non-residents (e.g. the police, the majority of whom live outside the city, mostly in Long Island).

That means that politicians are reluctant to back any measure that makes driving or car ownership more inconvenient, not because their constituents don't support it, but because it inconveniences them personally. Anytime it comes up, they make a big effort to back the car-owning minority, making it seem like they're standing up for the "working class", when in reality they're very clearly just taking the stance that their wealthiest donors/supporters are pushing for.

[0] https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2007/11/02/fact-check-congestion...

But not surprised. It's not unusual for NYC to lag behind on issues like this.

Can't access the article, is that "containerised garbage" in the sense of hard-plastic bins, or in the sense of underground waste containers you throw bags into?

Bins.

(you can view NYT articles by turning off javascript and refreshing, incidentally)

> Bins.

Shame, that's not great in cities, having a hard bin in your yard is cool, having one inside your flat is awful (and in-building storage of hard bins has ended up with rot every time I've seen in). Especially since they often come with tracking these days, which encourages only getting the bins out when they're full, which is not great for clean bins.

Though it does talk about collective containers for appartment buildings, so there's things to be optimistic about.

Reading the linked article: above ground waste containers.

Reading https://dsny.cityofnewyork.us/wp-content/uploads/reports/fut..., a combination of individual waste bins for some houses and large shared containers above ground. A reason for making that choice is that underground containers require “substantial space to build underground and a comprehensive underground map that does not exist in New York City”

That makes me wonder how they build anything there.

There is a much better solution but it requires investment. [1]

This is what we have in Switzerland in the city's where there is zero room for garbage.

The cost here is around 50k to 150k depending on size and if there is a compactor also built in. No smell and no mess.

[1] https://youtu.be/xhbhvdvTWUg

> There is a much better solution but it requires investment. This is what we have in Switzerland in the city's where there is zero room for garbage.

This would be a nonstarter in NYC, because large parts of the city are unmapped underground (because they were built in an era when records weren't kept methodically). Digging is expensive because you don't actually have a centralized record of where gas lines, water mains, cables, etc. all are - you have to uncover it carefully, see what's there, and then work around it.

> The cost here is around 50k to 150k depending on size and if there is a compactor also built in. No smell and no mess.

Everything costs much more in NYC, even before you factor in the aforementioned issues.

> This would be a nonstarter in NYC, because large parts of the city are unmapped underground (because they were built in an era when records weren't kept methodically). Digging is expensive because you don't actually have a centralized record of where gas lines, water mains, cables, etc. all are - you have to uncover it carefully, see what's there, and then work around it.

So just give up? Maybe there should be an effort to correctly map all lines and improve the general infrastructure.

> So just give up?

Not unless you think there's no other option between "do something that's ill-suited for the local problem" and "do nothing".

> Maybe there should be an effort to correctly map all lines and improve the general infrastructure.

Sit down and think about both the logistics of this and the cost, and map out what you think a reasonable timeline for that would be, and you'll hopefully understand why that's a nonstarter for a sanitation problem that requires an imminent solution.

I’m sympathetic to the argument but the us vs them mentality here seems counter productive.

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