Very proud of NYC in leading the way to having trash cans, an advance that will surely spread to other less developed cities nationwide.
vladf 11 hours ago [-]
Yes perhaps one day cities like Tokyo will catch up
mc3301 10 hours ago [-]
Most of Tokyo (and Japan) doesn't have an excessive amount of pedestrians' litter. Public garbage cans are rare, though many convenience stores and some train stations have them.
Is there litter? Yes. Is there much less than, say, Vancouver, Bangkok or London? Absolutely.
It's due to a couple things that tourists may not be used to:
-Be prepared to bring your garbage with you until you are home.
-Garbage is sorted differently in each municipality in Japan, and often the garbage bags cost money. Who is going to buy those bags and sort someone else's garbage?
-It's changing, but walking around consuming snacks, food, drinks in Japan is not that common. People do that at specific locations, thus they don't find themselves with empty food wrappers and drink cups while walking around. Thus, they don't see a need for public garbage cans.
-Crows make a quick mess of garbage here. Observing the above points means that (most) of Japan doesn't need stinky, sticky, flies-and-wasps-buzzing-around, crow-magnet garbage cans, which look almost as bad as litter everywhere.
satvikpendem 8 hours ago [-]
Have you seen the litter that piles up late at night in many Japanese cities? People simply leave their trash everywhere but the city cleans it up by morning. Tokyo is one of the most littered cities I've seen at midnight compared to any western city.
ziofill 9 hours ago [-]
Vancouver is pretty clean, have you ever been to Paris or Rome? (I’ve lived in all three)
whimsicalism 9 hours ago [-]
they do just pile up garbage bags on pickup day that i've seen
9 hours ago [-]
cjbgkagh 11 hours ago [-]
Never been to Japan, but AFAIK they used to have trash cans but got rid of them due to a sarin gas terrorist attack in 1995.
catlifeonmars 10 hours ago [-]
Tokyo is significantly cleaner than NYC, or any major US city. I think this is GPs point.
kibwen 10 hours ago [-]
Rat populations mostly aren't sustained by the sorts of trash cans that passersby toss garbage into (or fail to). They're sustained by containers carrying large amounts of residential refuse. (Consider the proportion of garbage you, personally, throw into a public trash can compared to your own trash can, especially food waste.) And I'm not well-versed on the specifics of Japanese waste processing, but I'm fairly confident they have something analogous to dumpsters and residential trash collection, even if they don't have public bins.
sdrothrock 9 hours ago [-]
Many businesses and residences typically bag their trash and leave it on the street curb.
The main exception is when a building has a managed trash facility, which is a room that people leave their bags in instead of on the curb.
sampullman 9 hours ago [-]
I don't know, there's a decent amount of rats where I live, but no outdoor dumpsters and very few public trashcans. Trash is kept indoors and brought out at the daily collection time.
I always assumed sewer access and the occasional rat-stronghold in poorly maintaned buildings was the issue.
vtashkov 9 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
vinay427 8 hours ago [-]
Much of central London could stand to be more developed, by this metric.
buyucu 21 hours ago [-]
Here in İstanbul we don't have a rat problem thanks to the huge numbers of cats in the city.
adonovan 14 hours ago [-]
We have over 200,000 stray cats in Brooklyn alone--as I learned recently when one cute but particularly insistent kitten tried to make its home in ours--yet somehow they are collectively terrible at hunting rats.
trhway 13 hours ago [-]
Interesting. I'd make a guess. In a cat friendly city like Istanbul you'd see cats freely and safely venturing everywhere. Rats would have no chances say in a cafe where a couple cats are sunbathing. Where is in cat unfriendly cities like a typical American city the cats aren't present on the streets, probably because this is where they get caught by Animal Control, etc., and they are more confined to some back alleys, empty lots, etc. And the rats problem for example in NYC is a street problem, i.e. where the trash is. And for example here in Bay Area the several colonies of feral cats that i know about aren't in populated areas where they could have been impactful upon street rat/mice population, instead these colonies are pushed out onto the edges of wildlife areas (where they still do useful things like protecting the birds nests/eggs from rats, etc., yet it woudln't really affect rats in the populated areas)
486sx33 12 hours ago [-]
I think it’s more like NYC rats are bigger than cats. Istanbul maybe the heat keeps them slim.
kamikazeturtles 10 hours ago [-]
Istanbul isn't too hot. I think it has more to do with the fact all the buildings in Istanbul are made of concrete.
The city is like a giant concrete pool. No rotting wood buildings for rats to move within the walls of.
trhway 10 hours ago [-]
>I think it’s more like NYC rats are bigger than cats.
C'mon, man, its a myth. NYC rats are max 2lb. Even the giant rats - those mine sniffing ones in Africa - are 3.3 lb max. A cat is 10lb+ of pure predator muscle and instinct. A rat has no chance against typical street cat (one can see that even from the reaction time perspective - cats with their 20-70ms are among the fastest mammals while rats have only 150ms+. Just watch Youtube cats vs. snakes).
aitchnyu 14 minutes ago [-]
I've seen cats in India choose to hunt only mice shorter than their heads and take their time for the mice to give up all their fight. Cats are risk averse.
chrisco255 10 hours ago [-]
I don't know about Istanbul but the problem is more like, cats are actively controlled in the U.S. in terms of animal control, spaying, neutering, etc. You don't really have a proper predator-prey dynamic play out with the population because the predators are more contained than the prey are.
dmix 12 hours ago [-]
Yeah there’s no way that would happen in the west. In Canada you often hear stories of cats on the edge of properties or just sitting in a field and some lady driving by will stop, pick it up and drop it off at the shelter (which in some cases will only hold them for a few days before giving them away). There’s a huge well organized group of people keeping every animal not fully controlled in check and not keeping them indoors is frowned upon. It’s mostly cultural not just animal control regulation, like most enforcement of municipal rules.
alwa 10 hours ago [-]
I have friends in the countryside in North America, and I can corroborate that: as development has encroached, the new subdivisions have filled with former city-dwellers.
Three times in a single month, do-gooder passers-by trespassed past a prominent fence to nab my friends’ dog, who would snooze innocently in the front pasture in the afternoon, and “rescue” him to the county lockup.
The animal control people know him by name now, but they can’t do much to waive the mandatory “re-adoption fee”…
ant6n 3 hours ago [-]
Wait so random people steal this person’s property, hand off to some (presumably) public agency, and the agency is charging a fee to have said property released? Sometimes it seems the US is a strange place. (Maybe the dog is missing dog tags?)
eru 11 hours ago [-]
> There’s a huge well organized group of people keeping every animal not fully controlled in check and not keeping them indoors is frowned upon.
Why does this work for cats but not for rats?
ElevenLathe 10 hours ago [-]
There's no old ladies willing to pick up rats in their car, and no rat shelters to take them to if there were.
SoftTalker 9 hours ago [-]
Nobody is “picking up” a feral cat unless they like bites and deep scratches. If you can approach and pick up a cat, it’s a pet. Leave it be and it will go home when it wants to.
oniony 14 hours ago [-]
I guess you instead have a cat problem.
kamikazeturtles 10 hours ago [-]
That's like saying the Midwest has a squirrel problem
Tiktaalik 8 hours ago [-]
Hmm... Cats are more mousers and they're not actually that good at catching rats, which are much larger. Typically this was the job of small dogs.
(Not to say it can't be done. My own housecat killed a rat)
quakeguy 4 hours ago [-]
Anectodal but my cat brought home at least a dozen full grown rats in her lifetime. Sometimes afterwards she got sick, but only for 1-2 days. I don‘t know how many rats she just devoured before i could throw them in the thrash.
stingrae 13 hours ago [-]
Here in San Francisco we don't have a rat problem due to the coyotes in the city.
I had some come inside due to that last one but I didn't let them last long lol
aetherson 13 hours ago [-]
Also don't have a stray cat problem....
boredatoms 12 hours ago [-]
Ive seens rats running between trash, kearny/washington streets
kamikazeturtles 10 hours ago [-]
But Istanbul does have a stray dog problem. Dogs in this city are either obese and sunbathing or extremely aggressive.
jameslk 13 hours ago [-]
How’s your bird population?
eru 11 hours ago [-]
I saw plenty of birds in Istanbul, and the rest of Turkey.
Balgair 19 hours ago [-]
Bit warmer there though?
Two4 16 hours ago [-]
That's generally better for rats, is it not? Year-round availability of food, with the downside of more endemic disease.
fsckboy 13 hours ago [-]
a city rat mom can have 6 litters a year of 7 rats each, life expectancy < 2 years... so in theory, seasonality of food would have little effect on annual rat population.
in practice, this is born out because NYC is very cold in winter, and it is swarming with rats.
(og ja, nordmenn, dere kan takke meg for at jeg kaller det en byrotte)
itisit 21 hours ago [-]
I guess there aren’t any cats in the Ak Saray.
cute_boi 10 hours ago [-]
too many cats aren't good as they prey on birds and everything.
grubbs 21 hours ago [-]
Living in Baltimore was a mess with rats until the city issued the rat-proof trash bins. Now I rarely ever see them.
portaouflop 10 hours ago [-]
Insane that one of the richest most developed cities in the world just dumped their trash on the street without using cans
boringg 10 hours ago [-]
Theres a long story about noise complaints you should listen too. They had them then got rid of them.
bearjaws 9 hours ago [-]
Yup, if you live below the 20th floor in most buildings, the trash cans thudding at 2am is pretty jarring.
I am sure there is an engineering solve to pad the cans and dump truck, not sure if it was looked into or not.
viraptor 8 hours ago [-]
Well... There's another thing that they could learn from other cities. You can pick up the bins at 6am for example.
Spivak 8 hours ago [-]
I think people underestimate the amount of trash NYC produces. The survey the city paid for that was the impetus for this plan actually advised the city to give up on bins for Manhattan because it would require basically daily pickups. And in defiance of all good sense they're picking up trash 6 days a week. I genuinely commend them on doing the hard expensive thing anyway.
b800h 21 hours ago [-]
Do you not have wheelie-bins in the US?
wan23 21 hours ago [-]
In the US, yes, but in New York we generally just pile up our trash bags on the sidewalk on garbage day. We don't have alleyways between our buildings and most of the street space is taken up by free car storage.
namaria 21 hours ago [-]
NY serves a rat banquet on the regular and pikachu-faces at the amount of rats that attend.
anotherhue 21 hours ago [-]
> most of the street space is taken up by free car storage.
'Subsidised' I think is the more correct term here.
mattclarkdotnet 8 hours ago [-]
The thing being subsidised is free on street parking. Free on street parking is not subsidising the already existing street space.
cowsandmilk 14 hours ago [-]
most of it doesn't cost any money. I believe "free" is an accurate description.
anotherhue 14 hours ago [-]
The land is some of the most valuable and costliest to maintain in the world. The absence of a parking meter just means someone else is footing the bill.
eru 11 hours ago [-]
Yes, and I think that was implied already?
fknorangesite 8 hours ago [-]
This is such useless pedantry. We all know what was meant.
cogman10 21 hours ago [-]
How often is garbage day?
Also a bit wild to me that there's not like a communal dumpster.
Some population dense cities also do underground dumpsters, has that been floated?
tetromino_ 21 hours ago [-]
> How often is garbage day?
For general household trash, if you are eligible for DSNY collection, it's two times per week except for some holidays. Recycling and compost are once a week. If you contract to a private garbage collection company, it's whatever you specify in the contract.
> Also a bit wild to me that there's not like a communal dumpster.
Large apartment buildings of course do have trash chutes leading to a dumpster of some sort. But inside or outside smaller buildings, there is no space.
> Some population dense cities also do underground dumpsters, has that been floated?
There is an underground garbage handling system on Roosevelt Island. The idea of underground dumpsters in other parts of the city been floated, but it's impossible because there is too much density of existing underground infrastructure and much of this infrastructure is not mapped, making it impossible to plan an excavation project of such a scale. See e.g. https://dsny.cityofnewyork.us/wp-content/uploads/reports/fut... (pdf). (There are also interesting engineering questions of how underground dumpsters would work after heavy snowfall.)
cogman10 19 hours ago [-]
Interesting. Reading the report it looks like the biggest issue any sort of communal trash system faces is we simply don't have that in the US. NY would need a lot of trash trucks which are only being manufactured outside the US. They'd be one of the only cities doing this as well.
It looks like underground would be an option, but the big deal breaker is potentially needing more frequent pickup and specialized trucks.
eru 11 hours ago [-]
> NY would need a lot of trash trucks which are only being manufactured outside the US.
Put them on a boat? Or are the legal hurdles to importing so high?
bluGill 11 hours ago [-]
Cities like rome that have real archeolorical things going back centuries and they can dig easier than nyc. Quit using that cop out if they can do it you can too.
1-more 14 hours ago [-]
> Large apartment buildings of course do have trash chutes leading to a dumpster of some sort
The bags therein get put out on the street in a big pile, however. Or they did before the new bin situation.
saalweachter 21 hours ago [-]
The volume gets pretty intimidating; for Manhattan, you're talking around 140 cubic yards of garbage per block per week [0.1 yard / person, 1400 people / block], which would be ~4 of the 40-yard dumpsters (the 8 x 8 x 22' ones you'll see outside construction sites, roll-on/off trucks) per block.
That they're able to collect that much garbage anyway means it's not an unsolvable problem, but going from using that much space once a week, in the form of piles of garbage on garbage day [with the remainder of the time it being scattered in smaller piles in buildings' garbage rooms], to 24/7, means you're losing like 12 parking spots per block, or like half a building lot per block, if you're storing them off the street.
Retric 21 hours ago [-]
Noting says you need to wait a full week between collecting garbage.
That’s the thing about changing how things work, you can change multiple things at the same time.
eru 11 hours ago [-]
It's the same amount of trash either way.
By your calculation, they would get 12 parking spots worth of random small pockets of space back per block. In reality, it would be more than that in usable space, because who want to do anything directly next to a distributed pile of garbage?
nilamo 21 hours ago [-]
Oh no, less parking, however will we recover?
tokioyoyo 21 hours ago [-]
I feel like people would sue the city if they had to walk more than a minute to dump out their trash in NYC. I was there for a few months when the trash bins were being tested out, and seeing people complain about it was… interesting?
dfxm12 21 hours ago [-]
Were the bins in the street and not on the sidewalk for this test? These complaint were likely really about taking away a parking spot.
People would rather walk through a maze of garbage bags than make things slightly less convenient while driving. We are way too car-brained.
tokioyoyo 19 hours ago [-]
Yup, those were the exact complaints actually! A bit wild to my stupid brain, but it is what it is.
21 hours ago [-]
the_third_wave 21 hours ago [-]
I suspect the NYC underground is already so crowded with pipes and cables and under-sidewalk storage areas and other things there won't be much space for such dumpsters there.
20 hours ago [-]
jstummbillig 21 hours ago [-]
Where do you store full trash bags in between pickups?
soared 21 hours ago [-]
Still on the sidewalk. NYC is perpetually full of trash bags in comparison to other major cities (or non major cities)
kalaksi 21 hours ago [-]
This sounds so wild. Surely it would be much more efficient, for space and picking up, to have containers for trash.
currymj 12 hours ago [-]
there is a push to use garbage containers, and the requirements have partially rolled out, but it's a very controversial political issue.
snakeyjake 21 hours ago [-]
On the street.
Go to Google Maps, zoom in on New York City, then drop a Streetview pin randomly anywhere in the city.
Chances are very, VERY, good that just by panning, not moving, you'll find a trash bag dumped on the sidewalk.
Yep a trash bin right next to: "trash bag dumped on the sidewalk"
snakeyjake 19 hours ago [-]
It's funnier if you don't explain the joke.
Retric 14 hours ago [-]
That’s assuming it was funny in the first place.
MisterTea 21 hours ago [-]
In trash rooms, hallways or alleyways if one exists (common outside of Manhattan).
rightbyte 4 hours ago [-]
For real? I thought that was a movie thing. Then again I though steam release manholes was a movie thing too...
datavirtue 12 hours ago [-]
Depositing trash bags on the street is legal?
SOLAR_FIELDS 21 hours ago [-]
As sibling implied basically every other major city in the US uses bins or dumpsters. Except NYC.
cwmma 20 hours ago [-]
New York was weirdly built without alleys so there is a legitimate issue of where do you put the bins when it's not trash day that almost every other city doesn't have
eru 11 hours ago [-]
Well, they find the space to store their trash right now. So they definitely have enough space. The amount of trash would presumably roughly be the same before and after this change.
Eg they could sacrifice some street parking spots for the bins.
They could even charge the bins the same amount of money they charge for street parking (and fold these costs into the costs for trash disposal they charge trash producers).
BtM909 21 hours ago [-]
I once saw a rat trying to open a wheelie-bin and when it looked up to me, I could see it think: shit, I'm busted; they know we are smart.
cafard 20 hours ago [-]
Washington, DC, has had "supercans" for about forty years. But it still has rats, though I suppose many fewer than it might.
asdff 14 hours ago [-]
Even that doesn't solve it because the truck is too powerful for the bin. Over time the lid breaks apart from the grabbing and flicking motion. Plus some trash inevitably slips proper placement. And animals are smart.
People are trying to sterilize rats or give them birth control now vs kill them. If you kill a rat, you still have the environment that could support a rat and one is liable to more in from the populations nearby you didn't kill. If you sterilize the rat and release it however, it keeps other new rats from moving in potentially in the maintenance of its territory and it could be doing this job for you for years while you try and sterilize the rest of the area. And eventually these rats will die, and if the great bulk has been sterilized in some way then you may actually eliminate or push back sterile rat populations out of certain areas.
gambiting 13 hours ago [-]
>>Even that doesn't solve it because the truck is too powerful for the bin. Over time the lid breaks apart from the grabbing and flicking motion.
I feel like you and I live on a different planet. Here in the UK we have those wheelie bins, they get collected using an automated dumpster truck that tips them inside itself, and I'm yet to hear about one of these braking - they are made out of proper thick plastic. Unless by "over time" you mean like 20+ years?
Australian checking in. Our wheelie bin lids cark it every decade or two, but I'd attribute that to sun exposure degrading them. The mechanical impact is just what finishes the job.
ianburrell 12 hours ago [-]
Same here in Oregon. My bins are old (at least 16 years) and same as when I moved in.
I would think that is the truck was too strong, that could be adjusted. Or if city bought weak bins, they could be replaced by proper ones.
yostrovs 21 hours ago [-]
In New York City, the trash workers union prevents dumpsters from being used, which would kill jobs.
Remember: trash is not a problem to deal with. It's a solution to unemployment.
BeFlatXIII 14 minutes ago [-]
That's a sign the city has useless excess population.
bliteben 21 hours ago [-]
I moved back to the south after living out west for 20 years and it is insane the amount of trash dropped by trash workers while they are dumping bins. Part of it is cultural in that trash is literally piled at the street in bins of varying condition vs out west where you know if it doesn't fit in your 90 gal bin it ain't getting picked up by the robot arm.
nwatson 11 hours ago [-]
I don't see much of that in North Carolina.
orwin 20 hours ago [-]
I've heard that it was that it was because it would remove parking space.
But if what you are saying is true, that's what you get for not allowing multi-concern unions. Our union branch that take care of trash collection workers is also responsible for municipal cleaning workers, as well as dump workers: making the job worse for cleaning and dump workers is just not something the union would push for.
eru 11 hours ago [-]
Or alternatively, it's what you get for allowing unions. (At least unions that have special extra rights compared to any old club that people can form.)
macintux 21 hours ago [-]
Where would the dumpsters go? Serious question, the impression I get is that there is no room in many places in the city.
bobbylarrybobby 21 hours ago [-]
Parking spots that currently house individuals’s cars could be used for dumpsters instead.
DonHopkins 10 hours ago [-]
What if all cars were required to haul trash?
bombcar 21 hours ago [-]
Room would have to be found.
At this point, even massive dumpsters on the sidewalk would be an improvement.
kevin_thibedeau 21 hours ago [-]
They had plenty of room for on street restaurant expansions in many parts of the city.
yostrovs 20 hours ago [-]
Dumpsters would go where trash goes now. Instead of trash sitting on the street, the same trash will sit inside dumpsters.
20 hours ago [-]
petee 21 hours ago [-]
That is at odds with the fact the article says they are using bins and picking them up 6 days a week, I don't see any union complaint here?
eru 11 hours ago [-]
> It's a solution to unemployment.
No, it's not. Just because a union opposes something doesn't mean it would cause unemployment.
martimarkov 21 hours ago [-]
It absolutely is a problem to be dealt with. I understand what you are implying but it actually is a problem
andrewla 21 hours ago [-]
Is there a source on this? This is the second of two conspiracy theories I've heard, the other being that Reagan is somehow responsible for getting rid of the communal dumpsters that are claimed to have once existed.
anovikov 21 hours ago [-]
I thought the problem with it was the lack of space.
eru 11 hours ago [-]
Well, the trash on the pavement is taking up space, too.
Proper bins could pile the trash higher, so they would take up less floor space than the random distributed piles.
And as other commenters point out, you could sacrifice some parking spots.
bobbylarrybobby 21 hours ago [-]
There is plenty of space, but most of it is taken up by individuals’ cars.
20 hours ago [-]
potato3732842 13 hours ago [-]
I live in a city that most of HN would look down their nose at.
We have "wheelie bins".
hansvm 11 hours ago [-]
Most of HN has seen San Francisco. I doubt they'd look down too much.
gnkyfrg 21 hours ago [-]
[dead]
greenavocado 21 hours ago [-]
New York can hardly be called "the US" culturally
Loudergood 21 hours ago [-]
Nowhere in the US can be really. It's not as diverse culturally as "Europe" but it's more diverse than most countries by a lot.
snovymgodym 21 hours ago [-]
This just in: huge country has a pluralistic cultural identity
kcb 13 hours ago [-]
Why?
namaria 21 hours ago [-]
Yeah how American is hip hop anyway?
busterarm 21 hours ago [-]
Hip Hop has shifted as much as America has. The only big 2020s hip hop artist from NY is Cardi B. Then you have to realize she's mostly a pop act -- a majority of hip hop heads don't listen to female artists.
namaria 20 hours ago [-]
Yeah Cardi B is pop music.
And whoever heard of Lauryn Hill, Salt-n-Peppa, Erykah Badu, Eve, Lil Kim, Queen Latifah, Missy Elliot?
busterarm 19 hours ago [-]
You're talking about basically 30 years ago.
That's an entire previous generation. Not speaking disrespectfully but none of who you mentioned have mainstream cultural relevance in _today's hip hop_. Kim and Missy come closest.
If your argument is going to be that New York is the cultural center of hip hop, who from New York is representing today's hip hop? Who is selling the albums?
namaria 15 hours ago [-]
My argument was that one of the most American things ever (hip hop) is actually rooted in NY.
The rest is a response to 'hip hop heads don't listen to female artists' so I mentioned a bunch of heavyweights. This can degenerate into 'no real scotsman' so whatever.
There is today a whole lot of pop artists that use hip hop aesthetics, but as usual the real stuff is very much underground.
tialaramex 13 hours ago [-]
The fallacy is actually named "No True Scotsman" for whatever that's worth.
namaria 4 hours ago [-]
C'mon really? In the Book of Fallacies they used the other word? Talk about pedantism.
busterarm 21 hours ago [-]
Native New Yorker now living in the real America vouching for the accuracy of this comment.
The majority of the US shops at WalMart. New York City doesn't even have one.
MathMonkeyMan 13 hours ago [-]
But we have many Target. The K-Mart closed :(
busterarm 9 hours ago [-]
The rest of America finds Target too expensive and also kind of overrated.
debeloo 12 hours ago [-]
What would happen if we managed to get rid of every single rat on the planet. The great rat extinction.
Would other species take it's place? Mice?
Or would the planet just be a better place?
chrisco255 10 hours ago [-]
Seeing as shrew-like animals are the oldest species of mammals and date all the way back to Triassic era, if you killed off one rodent species another would necessarily take its place. They also managed to survive several great extinctions in the last 250 million years and gave rise to our own species. Given the importance of them in the food chain, the world would most certainly be worse off without them.
eru 11 hours ago [-]
Well, if you have food scraps lying around, something will eat it. (Even if it's mold.)
I'm not quite sure why you would want to do genocide on rats. Some people even keep them as pets, you know?
tombert 11 hours ago [-]
Man I had a rat infestation in my house recently, and after that I think I could get behind a rat genocide.
Those fuckers got into my pantry and started knocking jars over, they poop on everything, they make a lot of noise, they get into the air conditioning ducts, they will chew through pretty much anything that isn't thick metal or plastic, and they reproduce like crazy.
We were able to get it under control and we hired someone to find and seal up the spots they were getting in from, but I gotta say that it wasn't an experience I want to go through ever again.
The only "good" thing about rats vs mice is that they're decidedly not subtle, so it's a lot more clear that you actually got them all. Mice are smaller and sneakier and when we had an issue with them a few years ago it took quite awhile to know before we knew they were gone.
Julien_r2 13 hours ago [-]
Reminded me of this job offer from the city [0], 2 years ago! Seems it paid off then!
Searching for this post, I ended up scrolling through the HN result of "new York rats" [1]. It paints quite a story! Couldn't imagine it was such an intense topic (running for more than a decade!)
Steel cans provided by the resident are the best option for cost and sustainability. “Metal recycles forever”.
Residents should be forced to provide their own metal cans with tightly fitting or latching lids. Garbage collection should not be provided 6 days a week to Harlem that’s wasteful. Once a week at most is more reasonable.
smelendez 11 hours ago [-]
Every resident/household in NYC having their own metal trash can would mean the streets and sidewalks near dense apartment buildings would just be covered in cans.
I’m not sure what the optimal pickup rate is but it should be more than once a week, especially in the summer. NYC apartment dwellers don’t have room to store full trash bags inside, and are generally discouraged from doing so to avoid attracting vermin, and you don’t want trash putrifying in the summer heat on the street for a week.
eru 11 hours ago [-]
Why does the frequency even need to be centrally decided?
LanceH 11 hours ago [-]
> Steel cans provided by the resident are the best option for cost and sustainability. “Metal recycles forever”.
Those two sentences together means buying the trash cans over and over again.
Spooky23 12 hours ago [-]
The collection thing is tough as there’s no alleys or anywhere to keep it.
I agree 100% on the metal cans. Metal cans are cheap and effective.
9 hours ago [-]
wackget 21 hours ago [-]
The year is 2025. New York takes the bold, unprecedented step of storing their waste in receptacles which cannot be easily chewed through by pests. Will this wild experiment yield results? Scientists remain skeptical.
PedroBatista 21 hours ago [-]
While the design of NYC - plus economic pressures - never accounted for domestic waste storage ( in a global and universal way for all buildings/tenants ). The truth is no one ( with actual power ) did anything meaningful to stop this.
It became some type of "culture" or "it always has been this way" type of situation. With a city budget in the billions and a VERY active and "enforce/fine" happy public sector there is no excuse of "people don't just follow basic sanitation rules", it's in the culture and I hope this finally starts to go away as there is no reason to be this way.
pkulak 21 hours ago [-]
Considering that, according to polling, most residents would rather live with rats than lose the parking spot per block required for proper bins, I’d say this is a huge accomplishment in the fight against rats… and car brain.
eru 11 hours ago [-]
I hope the recent congestion charge can slowly change the culture towards market pricing for parking spots, too.
And I hope they make the congestion charge more dynamic. Here in Singapore where we had congestion charging even long before London, we have some electric gizmos that measure congestion and adjust the charge dynamically. Basically, if traffic slows down, they hike the charge. If traffic flows smoothly enough, they lower the charge.
DonHopkins 10 hours ago [-]
If only they could train rats to steal cars, pack them full of trash, and drive them out to the suburbs.
petee 19 hours ago [-]
I guess I'm confused about the article now because Brooklyn has trash cans everywhere, and I even recall seeing them 2-3 years ago. If I pick random street views every street has lidded bins
xethos 19 hours ago [-]
You're likely underestimating what rats can and will chew through to get a bite to eat.
petee 19 hours ago [-]
No, I'm very familiar with rats, but I can say for a fact that my friend's heavy duty plastic wheeled bins (the common ones) have been on the street 24/7 in NY and haven't been chewed into in the past 4 years. Probably how smooth that plastic is.
Fwiw the pilot program isn't using metal cans either, and apparently is working.
Edit: fun side note, I've seen a squirrel eat a hole through a 2" oak door to escape a basement, so Im not discounting a motivated rat :)
asdff 14 hours ago [-]
Rats live where there are bins too.
tantalor 21 hours ago [-]
When will the woke nonsense stop. /s
newsclues 21 hours ago [-]
I guess there are no homeless or unemployed people in NYC who could be mobilized to work on the problem.
Humans struggle in urban environments to resolve problems because “someone else should”.
petee 19 hours ago [-]
> someone else should
Isn't that kinda what you're suggesting here? Most piles of trash aren't caused by homeless, its residents, so why should they need to be responsible? Residents could just buy their own cans as its their own problem
gnkyfrg 16 hours ago [-]
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eru 11 hours ago [-]
The homeless aren't exactly the best workforce. For many, there's a reason they are homeless despite plenty of support systems that helps people become more 'homeful'.
Similar, but generally less so, for some of the unemployed.
If you want to 'mobilize' people, just advertise jobs normally and use a normal hiring process. One that should, of course, be open to currently homeless or unemployed.
I have never really felt the allure of living in a big city. Higher cost of living, smaller living spaces, noisy neighbors, rats apparently...
echelon 12 hours ago [-]
More restaurants, more music, more entertainment, more culture, "scenes", more romantic partners, more job opportunities, high energy, hustle, fashion, always something to do, etc.
Cities are great when you're young.
tombert 11 hours ago [-]
They are, but man the appeal does wear off, at least it did for me.
I moved here when I was 24, and I loved it for the first 8 years. Almost overnight, when I was 32, I realized that I actually don't enjoy living in the city anymore. It's loud, expensive, I don't really do "indie" restaurants, I don't like most art, and I'm married so I don't really need more romantic partners.
I still live in NYC, purely because my current job won't let me move, but I have been looking for an escape.
eru 11 hours ago [-]
They are also good for business.
8 hours ago [-]
notepad0x90 21 hours ago [-]
deploy remotely controlled small rat-like robots, where the public can sign up like a game to pilot those bots and kill rats to score points and make a small amount of profit.
Loudergood 21 hours ago [-]
This inevitably ends in someone breeding more rats.
notepad0x90 19 hours ago [-]
if it costs $0.50 to raise one rat, then the fee for killing one can be $0.05. storing them somewhere, feeding them,etc.. surely costs some amount. if people are just throwing stuff rats can eat, then nothing is new, that's what's happening today.
staplung 14 hours ago [-]
At $0.05 per rat, you'd have to kill 330 rats per hour to make minimum wage (in NYC it's $16.50/hr).
notepad0x90 9 hours ago [-]
just supplementary income or something kids can do to earn a bit. soda/beer can recycling costs about as much and people collect and recycle them just fine.
dullcrisp 13 hours ago [-]
Deploy larger independent autonomous rat-hunting creatures. The public can volunteer to feed them treats and rub their bellies.
dyauspitr 21 hours ago [-]
The public would kill people.
notepad0x90 19 hours ago [-]
only if the bots use poison. impact-based methods at worst would harm the feet of pedestrians, but the public would need to create accounts, receive payment,etc.. so tracking them down and arresting them would be trivial.
Imagine kids on their switches hunting for rats using robots!
olelele 14 hours ago [-]
I have a feeling the robots would lose...
marcosdumay 10 hours ago [-]
I mean... if you make a robot capable enough to move in a non-plane sidewalk, cross streets, climb into guts, and etc, it will still lose to rats.
I'm not confident I could win in a fight against a pair of rats, even if I have bats or guns or whatever.
eclipseo76 7 hours ago [-]
Mayor is still there though.
jrflowers 6 hours ago [-]
The fact that they say it has reduced rodent sightings just makes it seem like the rats are in the bins now
m3kw9 10 hours ago [-]
Never seen a rat any city I’ve been even NY. Serious
LeafItAlone 10 hours ago [-]
That’s quite the accomplishment. I saw three separate ones just on my way home today out of the corner of my eye.
snapcaster 21 hours ago [-]
This is great, i'm always so turned off by how disgusting NYC is and struggle to get past it to enjoy the other parts
gnkyfrg 21 hours ago [-]
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Rendered at 12:36:06 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Is there litter? Yes. Is there much less than, say, Vancouver, Bangkok or London? Absolutely.
It's due to a couple things that tourists may not be used to: -Be prepared to bring your garbage with you until you are home.
-Garbage is sorted differently in each municipality in Japan, and often the garbage bags cost money. Who is going to buy those bags and sort someone else's garbage?
-It's changing, but walking around consuming snacks, food, drinks in Japan is not that common. People do that at specific locations, thus they don't find themselves with empty food wrappers and drink cups while walking around. Thus, they don't see a need for public garbage cans.
-Crows make a quick mess of garbage here. Observing the above points means that (most) of Japan doesn't need stinky, sticky, flies-and-wasps-buzzing-around, crow-magnet garbage cans, which look almost as bad as litter everywhere.
The main exception is when a building has a managed trash facility, which is a room that people leave their bags in instead of on the curb.
I always assumed sewer access and the occasional rat-stronghold in poorly maintaned buildings was the issue.
The city is like a giant concrete pool. No rotting wood buildings for rats to move within the walls of.
C'mon, man, its a myth. NYC rats are max 2lb. Even the giant rats - those mine sniffing ones in Africa - are 3.3 lb max. A cat is 10lb+ of pure predator muscle and instinct. A rat has no chance against typical street cat (one can see that even from the reaction time perspective - cats with their 20-70ms are among the fastest mammals while rats have only 150ms+. Just watch Youtube cats vs. snakes).
Three times in a single month, do-gooder passers-by trespassed past a prominent fence to nab my friends’ dog, who would snooze innocently in the front pasture in the afternoon, and “rescue” him to the county lockup.
The animal control people know him by name now, but they can’t do much to waive the mandatory “re-adoption fee”…
Why does this work for cats but not for rats?
(Not to say it can't be done. My own housecat killed a rat)
- https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/north-beach-rats-may-...
- https://hoodline.com/2015/10/rise-in-rat-sightings-reported-...
- https://old.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/j2n2ch/absent...
I had some come inside due to that last one but I didn't let them last long lol
in practice, this is born out because NYC is very cold in winter, and it is swarming with rats.
(og ja, nordmenn, dere kan takke meg for at jeg kaller det en byrotte)
I am sure there is an engineering solve to pad the cans and dump truck, not sure if it was looked into or not.
'Subsidised' I think is the more correct term here.
Also a bit wild to me that there's not like a communal dumpster.
Some population dense cities also do underground dumpsters, has that been floated?
For general household trash, if you are eligible for DSNY collection, it's two times per week except for some holidays. Recycling and compost are once a week. If you contract to a private garbage collection company, it's whatever you specify in the contract.
> Also a bit wild to me that there's not like a communal dumpster.
Large apartment buildings of course do have trash chutes leading to a dumpster of some sort. But inside or outside smaller buildings, there is no space.
> Some population dense cities also do underground dumpsters, has that been floated?
There is an underground garbage handling system on Roosevelt Island. The idea of underground dumpsters in other parts of the city been floated, but it's impossible because there is too much density of existing underground infrastructure and much of this infrastructure is not mapped, making it impossible to plan an excavation project of such a scale. See e.g. https://dsny.cityofnewyork.us/wp-content/uploads/reports/fut... (pdf). (There are also interesting engineering questions of how underground dumpsters would work after heavy snowfall.)
It looks like underground would be an option, but the big deal breaker is potentially needing more frequent pickup and specialized trucks.
Put them on a boat? Or are the legal hurdles to importing so high?
The bags therein get put out on the street in a big pile, however. Or they did before the new bin situation.
That they're able to collect that much garbage anyway means it's not an unsolvable problem, but going from using that much space once a week, in the form of piles of garbage on garbage day [with the remainder of the time it being scattered in smaller piles in buildings' garbage rooms], to 24/7, means you're losing like 12 parking spots per block, or like half a building lot per block, if you're storing them off the street.
That’s the thing about changing how things work, you can change multiple things at the same time.
By your calculation, they would get 12 parking spots worth of random small pockets of space back per block. In reality, it would be more than that in usable space, because who want to do anything directly next to a distributed pile of garbage?
People would rather walk through a maze of garbage bags than make things slightly less convenient while driving. We are way too car-brained.
Go to Google Maps, zoom in on New York City, then drop a Streetview pin randomly anywhere in the city.
Chances are very, VERY, good that just by panning, not moving, you'll find a trash bag dumped on the sidewalk.
Eg they could sacrifice some street parking spots for the bins.
They could even charge the bins the same amount of money they charge for street parking (and fold these costs into the costs for trash disposal they charge trash producers).
People are trying to sterilize rats or give them birth control now vs kill them. If you kill a rat, you still have the environment that could support a rat and one is liable to more in from the populations nearby you didn't kill. If you sterilize the rat and release it however, it keeps other new rats from moving in potentially in the maintenance of its territory and it could be doing this job for you for years while you try and sterilize the rest of the area. And eventually these rats will die, and if the great bulk has been sterilized in some way then you may actually eliminate or push back sterile rat populations out of certain areas.
I feel like you and I live on a different planet. Here in the UK we have those wheelie bins, they get collected using an automated dumpster truck that tips them inside itself, and I'm yet to hear about one of these braking - they are made out of proper thick plastic. Unless by "over time" you mean like 20+ years?
https://www.wheeliebins.co.uk/blogs/news/everything-you-want...
I would think that is the truck was too strong, that could be adjusted. Or if city bought weak bins, they could be replaced by proper ones.
But if what you are saying is true, that's what you get for not allowing multi-concern unions. Our union branch that take care of trash collection workers is also responsible for municipal cleaning workers, as well as dump workers: making the job worse for cleaning and dump workers is just not something the union would push for.
At this point, even massive dumpsters on the sidewalk would be an improvement.
No, it's not. Just because a union opposes something doesn't mean it would cause unemployment.
Proper bins could pile the trash higher, so they would take up less floor space than the random distributed piles.
And as other commenters point out, you could sacrifice some parking spots.
We have "wheelie bins".
And whoever heard of Lauryn Hill, Salt-n-Peppa, Erykah Badu, Eve, Lil Kim, Queen Latifah, Missy Elliot?
That's an entire previous generation. Not speaking disrespectfully but none of who you mentioned have mainstream cultural relevance in _today's hip hop_. Kim and Missy come closest.
If your argument is going to be that New York is the cultural center of hip hop, who from New York is representing today's hip hop? Who is selling the albums?
The rest is a response to 'hip hop heads don't listen to female artists' so I mentioned a bunch of heavyweights. This can degenerate into 'no real scotsman' so whatever.
There is today a whole lot of pop artists that use hip hop aesthetics, but as usual the real stuff is very much underground.
The majority of the US shops at WalMart. New York City doesn't even have one.
Would other species take it's place? Mice?
Or would the planet just be a better place?
I'm not quite sure why you would want to do genocide on rats. Some people even keep them as pets, you know?
Those fuckers got into my pantry and started knocking jars over, they poop on everything, they make a lot of noise, they get into the air conditioning ducts, they will chew through pretty much anything that isn't thick metal or plastic, and they reproduce like crazy.
We were able to get it under control and we hired someone to find and seal up the spots they were getting in from, but I gotta say that it wasn't an experience I want to go through ever again.
The only "good" thing about rats vs mice is that they're decidedly not subtle, so it's a lot more clear that you actually got them all. Mice are smaller and sneakier and when we had an issue with them a few years ago it took quite awhile to know before we knew they were gone.
Searching for this post, I ended up scrolling through the HN result of "new York rats" [1]. It paints quite a story! Couldn't imagine it was such an intense topic (running for more than a decade!)
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33819860
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?q=new+York+rats
I’m not sure what the optimal pickup rate is but it should be more than once a week, especially in the summer. NYC apartment dwellers don’t have room to store full trash bags inside, and are generally discouraged from doing so to avoid attracting vermin, and you don’t want trash putrifying in the summer heat on the street for a week.
Those two sentences together means buying the trash cans over and over again.
I agree 100% on the metal cans. Metal cans are cheap and effective.
It became some type of "culture" or "it always has been this way" type of situation. With a city budget in the billions and a VERY active and "enforce/fine" happy public sector there is no excuse of "people don't just follow basic sanitation rules", it's in the culture and I hope this finally starts to go away as there is no reason to be this way.
And I hope they make the congestion charge more dynamic. Here in Singapore where we had congestion charging even long before London, we have some electric gizmos that measure congestion and adjust the charge dynamically. Basically, if traffic slows down, they hike the charge. If traffic flows smoothly enough, they lower the charge.
Fwiw the pilot program isn't using metal cans either, and apparently is working.
Edit: fun side note, I've seen a squirrel eat a hole through a 2" oak door to escape a basement, so Im not discounting a motivated rat :)
Humans struggle in urban environments to resolve problems because “someone else should”.
Isn't that kinda what you're suggesting here? Most piles of trash aren't caused by homeless, its residents, so why should they need to be responsible? Residents could just buy their own cans as its their own problem
Similar, but generally less so, for some of the unemployed.
If you want to 'mobilize' people, just advertise jobs normally and use a normal hiring process. One that should, of course, be open to currently homeless or unemployed.
For your proposal, compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_100,000
Cities are great when you're young.
I moved here when I was 24, and I loved it for the first 8 years. Almost overnight, when I was 32, I realized that I actually don't enjoy living in the city anymore. It's loud, expensive, I don't really do "indie" restaurants, I don't like most art, and I'm married so I don't really need more romantic partners.
I still live in NYC, purely because my current job won't let me move, but I have been looking for an escape.
Imagine kids on their switches hunting for rats using robots!
I'm not confident I could win in a fight against a pair of rats, even if I have bats or guns or whatever.