NYC Subway Rat Detector | Hacker News Reader

NYC Subway Rat Detector

transitapp.com

85 pointsagomez31462 comments

I live in Manhattan and I see rats pretty often on the streets and in the subway. But to be honest, they have never caused me any problems. They'd obviously be a big problem if they got into people's homes or businesses frequently, but that actually seems very rare. It makes me wonder, other than people thinking they are gross, what is the primary problem caused by rats in NYC? They have a reputation for spreading disease, but what pathogens are actually spread to people from rats these days?

One metric that comes to mind is the # of restaurants that have a health code inspection that detected presence of rats or mice. This out-of-date post I found seems to have disturbingly high % of restaurants with evidence of infestation, which certainly seems like a problem. https://firstwefeast.com/eat/2014/02/rat-map-shows-where-rat...

I made that map, funny to see it here a decade later.

In the end, I had kind of came to the same conclusion as gp. Rodents are all around in NYC and other big cities, and it’s good we take steps like inspections and trapping to keep them in check, but we’ve probably all eaten in restaurants (and homes) with rodents without getting sick.

NYC has many more rats per capita than other large cities, and comparatively does not keep them in check. They may not spread a lot of disease (which is unconfirmed, by the way, we really have no idea how much healthier the city would be without them), but they do steal stuff, break things, and cause other problems.

Example: https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/nyc-chipotle-besieged-...

You could say that this metric puts under question their impact though?

Obviously a little different but we got pet rats recently and they’re lovely little creatures. Super inquisitive and you have to have a steady stream of ways to hide their food as a form of enrichment so they don’t get bored.

Apparently you can’t readily keep them on their own because they become depressed with the solitude.

10/10 pet, would recommend.

Hello fellow rat owner. I've had 13 rats through the years! :)

One other great thing about rats, you can train them like their little dogs:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AV9z0c1hjnA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKLVm6rxaJA

(and yes, can't keep a rat alone, they get very depressed)

That’s a lot of rats, but I can see why!

I was totally naive and unprepared going into it. As a result, we got ours from people who had done a terrible job with them. The cage was just wire levels with nothing for them to explore. They’re not well socialised and were slowly working to build their trust. I should have known that people who would name a pet “fridge” wouldn’t be prize keepers.

Anyway, we’re giving them a much better life and I’m glad we got them out of there.

Apple sauce, whipped cream or watered down peanut butter on the finger, you'll be best friends in no time. ;)

Not trying to be facetious, the wikipedia page seems like a good starting point https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rats_in_New_York_City

At a glance, rats are definitely ridden with fleas and disease, but there doesn't seem to be good data on transmissions. I'd still prefer not to have 10,000 tiny little catalysts for a new wave of the plague scuttling under my feet.

« The pathogens they carry include bacteria such as Clostridium difficile (C. diff), Salmonella, E. coli, and Leptospira. »

Well, humans definitely carry at least three of those as well...

« it is unclear how infectious the rats are to residents. »

And yeah, that's the crux of it. We don't actually know if it's a problem!

I think you can see how big the actual problem is when looking at how solved the problem is. Since the problem isn't solved and life goes on, it's probably not a huge deal. (Bed bugs are probably similar. They really freak people out, but they don't spread disease and many people don't even know that they're being bitten, so they're everywhere. People being freaked out doesn't justify a more expensive response. That said, mosquitos do spread disease and aren't exactly eradicated, so maybe my heuristic is wrong.)

The heuristic is off. Urban rats are a vector for Leptospirosis.

The only thing those three (rats, bedbugs, mosquitos) have in common is that they reproduce faster than we can kill them and they hide well.

According to this there are less than 200 cases of Leptospirosis a year in the US and most of them are in Hawaii.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9629868/

That's because people have learned to keep their food where rats can't pee on it. Doesn't mean they are not disease carrying.

did you ever see that house episode with mos def

To be fair, bedbugs have been shown to cause mental health issues in victims as well has major issues with housing security. I can't think of any such extreme problems with rats! At least in the last couple centuries.

Rats are the reboot mammals just in case there's another meteor.

I agree with you. I like them, and I think they get a bad rap. I think specieism is the next frontier after racism. The same things we used to say about fellow humans that are no longer accepted will be just as not OK to say about rats 50 years from now, and their lives and experiences will be considered important.

Rats, mice, and other creatures, get a lot of blame for things they couldn't possibly be doing, just because of how prevalent they are everywhere. They are just an easy target that cannot speak for themselves and often do not have anyone to defend them. For example, the Black Plague theory which was accepted as fact for decades, if not centuries, was recently put under question: https://www.google.com/search?q=black+plague+rats

"I think specieism is the next frontier after racism"

The logical conclusion to this is that we should not keep pets as slaves and should instead build habitat for wild animals to live as they choose.

I have rats walking in my sealing. It's an old house with many gaps and many people living close with similar gappy homes. It smells, I cannot sleep and just in general makes me feel uneasy at home. Damn right I'm killing these intruders.

Gees I sure hope humanity doesn’t sink to this level where we sacrifice out quality of live for the sake of pests. Humanity already has enough problems to deal with.

Go to South America or work near trash. When rats start falling through the ceiling when you’re trying to sleep your opinions will quickly change.

Brown rats are an invasive species in North America and interfere with the natural ecosystem. Some places have gone to great lengths to eliminate them

https://www.alberta.ca/history-of-rat-control-in-alberta

Rats (and pigeons) are arguably the natural ecosystem in NYC, though.

That’s seems very rare” you obviously do not live in the regular part of the city.

Same. They are rarely an active nuisance although they certainly can be. I don't recall seeing all that many recently and it actually jibes with their results. The stations I frequent ranked near the bottom.

During pandemic I would see "herds" of rats going from trash pile to trash pile at night. But even then, I didn't hear about any material harm done to anyone. Other than being freaked out by a crowd of 15 rats at once!

Rats are everywhere, everywhere in the world, if you think you're more than a few metres from a rat right now you're probably either on the ISS or in denial.

It's no fun when rats run towards you straight into your foot or get on your shoe. Especially the former happens almost daily to me in LIC.

They rip into trash, they spread food bits around, they chew holes through things to get access to food.

(I live in Brooklyn)

The Black Death may not have been spread by rats after all:

https://www.gavi.org/vaccineswork/black-death-may-not-have-b...

Papers: https://www.pnas.org/doi/pdf/10.1073/pnas.2209816119 and https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1715640115

My bet is rats were a vector, but not the only significant vector. Its extremely hard to trace all vectors for a disease with pinpoint levels of accuracy to say definitively that any one thing was the major cause.

At least, this is what I've learned studying public health and how diseases spread thus far, anyway

Here's the data on a map, since for some reason the article didn't include one:

https://felt.com/map/NYC-Rat-Observations-Oct-2023-via-Trans...

(You can toggle the layers to switch between no/some/many rat data. Sorry about the colors, best I could find. More purple = higher frequency of rat observations.)

Nice job with Felt

I attended a talk recently about LoRaWAN, because I was interested in equipping my (kinda off-grid) house with temperature sensors for the winter. To my surprise LoRaWAN mousetraps seem to be a quite popular application. Eyeballing from the map I'd say it was right after street light luminance sensors. At the talk they also had a wide range of sensors on display, including the mouse traps, which was quite interesting to see. Unfortunately they were no live traps, only the traditional design, just with a wireless network connection.

This is so funny. Some time ago (2015 I think) I picked up my first Beaglebone Black board and the only application I could think of was a mousetrap activated detector. Some of my mousetraps were up on floor joists in the basement so it was hard to see if a mouse was caught or not. Add a makeshift switch (a push pin on the mousetrap and some wire) and after writing my first basic Android app, I could make a BLE connection to the beaglebone to check the mouse caught status.

I think at one point I expanded it to serving a web page since I had an Ethernet jack nearby.

It's not really a rat detector, just a crowd-sourced rat map from in-app popup surveys.

What are humans if not rat detectors?

Involuntary rat feeders?

Brilliant!

Side comment -- on first blush, I just really like how friendly the design is here.

Never used transit -- but may check it out next time I'm in NYC.

Over the past couple of years the MTA's real-time data has gotten much, much better. Most stations have screens showing when the next train(s) are arriving, including signs outside the station near entrances. (now are they always working, that's a different question).

I live in Brooklyn and my local train (C) is one of the worst for reliability. It comes every 6-15 minutes during commutes, so it's important to know exactly when the next train is coming so you can hurry (or chill, if you have already missed the train!). https://mta.info is the "horse's mouth" and, while it's not a great UX, I much prefer it to going to any third-party repackager's app or site.

Just for finding your way around the city, no need to look further than Google Maps on mobile, which gives clear and reliable subway directions, including scheduled service interruptions. The only asterisk on that is that temporary service interruptions are not always taken into account for finding directions, but mta.info will always set you straight.

I've got a love/hate relationship with Transit.

The data is very accurate. I think they take the data that the transit agencies publish then layer on their own algorithms. Whatever they do, the predictions of when the bus will show up are really, really good.

The UI changed a while back and I really, really hate the UI. It feels like it would be more at home on Android, but I'm not an Android user so it just feels 'wrong'.

I really hate the Transit Royale thing, but only because my city decided that paying $75k[0] to make transit information more accessible to everyone wasn't worth it. They did, however, spend $70k[1] to do a podcast series about zoning. To be clear, the folks behind Transit deserve to get paid, this is a dumb decision on the part of the City.

[0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/third-party-transit-...

[1] https://edmontonjournal.com/news/local-news/edmonton-paid-70...

You can use Transit App in many cities around the world other than New York! It's a great piece of software, I rely on it heavily when navigating unfamiliar transit systems while traveling.

https://transitapp.com/region#all-regions

We have the same issue in DC (even in government buildings) and desperately need a solution. I keep wondering if we can just go old school/Istanbulian and have more community cats, which I think would be enjoyable anyways but may end up producing some different problems.

NYC already has this. Its called a "bodega kitty". As in the cat that the owners of the local bodega (corner store) keep on premise for exactly this purpose.

Fix the food supply and the rats will go away.

Picture of trash bags on the streets in NYC. Not sure if this is the primary food source, but it certainly can't help. I've never been in a city that routinely piles as much trash on public sidewalks as NYC. (The picture below is common to see, sadly it's not a journalist picking the worst image they can find)

https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2022/03/22/trash-city-new-york-i...

It is specific to new York. They don't have back alleys with dumpsters. Everything is left out on the curb in bags for pickup daily.

I heard that they don't have trash containers like other cities because it would take away parking space. Is there truth to this claim?

The trash would take up less space if it was in a container, so I don't think that argument makes sense. Container is probably cheaper as well since it is less work to empty.

Just looked at New York in street view and I see trash bags lying on the streets taking up parking spots, a small container would take up less space.

The first part yes, the second part mostly no. It would be an immensely complicated project, well into the 10s of billions, to do this in New York, and most New Yorkers actually don't mind living in filth.

As a project, it will take a mix of parking, road space, sidewalk space, and bike lanes.

Cats don’t work against big urban rats

Clearly the time has come to introduce a large number of rat-eating snakes to the underground urban ecosystem

The solution then is obviously bigger cats

Obligatory Simpsons reference on how to get rid of pigeons with lizards.

Skinner: Well, I was wrong; the lizards are a godsend.

Lisa: But isn't that a bit short-sighted? What happens when we're overrun by lizards?

Skinner: No problem. We simply release wave after wave of Chinese needle snakes. They'll wipe out the lizards.

Lisa: But aren't the snakes even worse?

Skinner: Yes, but we're prepared for that. We've lined up a fabulous type of gorilla that thrives on snake meat.

Lisa: But then we're stuck with gorillas!

Skinner: No, that's the beautiful part. When wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death.

Or tastier rats

It’s not a lack of interest. They’re just hard to catch and fairly dangerous.

Take data from the rat subway detector, overlay it with the # of restaurants/grocery stores in a given area, and i'd bet you'd find a pretty good correlation. Follow the (thrown away) food.

I think maybe the developer shared this a month ago as a Show HN: ?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37742481

I think rats are cute. But cockroaches, yuck...

There are rats everywhere under your feet in NYC. You can't see 99.9% of them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com