NYC garbage trucks spend a very long time parked in front of the same building all night, crushing bags full of plastic coffee cups. Ask anyone who has ever tried to sleep in Manhattan. A completely reasonable solution that doesn't require a wholesale change in the way refuse is collected in that city would be to plug the truck in at the building where it is standing.
Roosevelt Island (which is a part of the Manhattan borough) actually has an underground, pneumatic trash collection system: https://untappedcities.com/2020/04/09/inside-roosevelt-islan... . I think it would be hard to retrofit such a thing onto the already-built-up parts of the city though.
> I think it would be hard to retrofit such a thing onto the already-built-up parts of the city though.
It would be prohibitively expensive, because there's no master record of which pipes/wires/cables/etc. exist in any given location. It's very expensive to dig in Manhattan[0], because you basically have to dig carefully and see what's actually there, rather than having some knowledge of "the gas pipes are in this spot, so we can dig around them". So much of the infrastructure was installed before detailed record-keeping was standard practice.
As far as trash collection in NYC, the main thing that needs to happen is containerized trash collection. Right now, trash bags are just left on the sidewalks 3-5 times per week for 12 or more hours at a time, creating an absolute buffet for rodents.
[0] This actually applies to most of the city, but Manhattan is a combination of the oldest-built and most-densly-built infrastructure, so it's particularly expensive there.
Many cities face the same problem and this is how they fix it: they make a plan to rework every pipe and wire in their city in a finite amount of time. They go block by block and tear it all up at once. They bring a shitload of guys and equipment instead of two idiots with jackhammers, so the whole thing is ripped out and replaced in a week instead of in 5 years.
> never ceases to amaze me that the self styled "Greatest City on Earth" can't come up with a reasonable solution for its garbage
The status quo is sanitary and efficient. All things considered, New York’s garbage problem is on par with its snow problem. Well managed enough to work, but annoying enough around the edges to be fun to bicker about.
If you live in low-density New York, your experience mirrors suburbia; high, and your trash disappears down a building chute. It’s only we who live in the middle density who have to haul garbage to the basement and hear the beeping trucks at night. Even then, it’s clean and works.
Are we talking about the same NYC? Visit Manhattan in mid July/August. Bags of garbage leaking juices and oil out onto the street into a huge greasy spot where the designated collection spot is near the curb. The whole city smells like a toaster oven roasted ballsack.
Then combine that with all the cumulative liters of urine per day from dogs and humans all throughout the city.
Cleaning up after horses (including, often, the horses themselves) is a large part of why and how NYC's municipal waste system evolved to its present state.
What do you think happens to the trash after it "disappears down the chute"?
You might not haul it to the curb yourself but the building as staff still has to unless you're in a building big enough to have a loading dock that can accommodate a truck to haul away a roll-on container. Most high rises don't even fall into that category. I live in a 20 story building with 157 units and the building staff has to drag the piles of trash out of the compactor room to the sidewalk on collection days.
They can sacrifice street parking spots systematically throughout the city for garbage dumpsters, as many others have suggested, but it's politically untenable to do so because americans love their cars, even in NYC.
Another politically untenable solution is to do what Taiwan does and force people to put out their garbage in very tight time windows and otherwise store it privately in their houses and businesses, but that is a unproductive use of human time on net.
The reality is that most other major cities have garbage collection figured out in a better way. For instance in my city, garbage is kept in a dedicated garage area in each apartment building, and on a scheduled day, it's picked up either right in the building or in the alley after the caretaker moves the dumpsters there. The fact that this is considered politically untenable in New York is frankly insane, glad I don't live there.
> NY has a lot of row houses, there's no room for a dedicated garbage area
Most buildings in NYC already have a dedicated garbage area. The issue is that there isn't a dedicated spot for pickup.
That's a solvable problem: put containerized trash receptacles on the street, so the superintendent can put them in the containers, instead of dropping them directly on the sidewalk (which is what they currently do).
People in row houses can't walk to the corner of the street? That's how it works in much of the Netherlands, underground bins spread over suburbia, which is like 90% row house. Works fine. I wish we had it here (still need to put my bin/bags out on the designated day).
The Netherlands has absolutely nowhere approaching the density of NYC. Even Queens has a density twice that of Amsterdam, and Manhattan 7x. If you see NYC on garbage days the streets are lined with mountains of bags. Each corner would have to have a virtual mine shaft to hold 1000s of bags of garbage.
Also contrary to movies, Manhattan has almost no alley ways either. There's no space for anything. Even when it snows in many areas they have to take the snow and dump it in the East River.
> If you see NYC on garbage days the streets are lined with mountains of bags. Each corner would have to have a virtual mine shaft to hold 1000s of bags of garbage.
Or, you know, a commercial-sized dumpster.
The trash is already taking up space on the sidewalk. Putting a dumpster to contain it would save space, by keeping it contained.
That's 4-5 stories of ~4 apartments per floor, times however many of those buildings fit in the 900ft/247m length of a block. There's nowhere near enough space on the corner (here's the corner: https://goo.gl/maps/aszPHqrQVGftcqTCA) to collect that much garbage, much less to do it three times a week.
Yes they could build big underground containers. Yes they could reduce the amount of garbage generated. But both are massive projects far beyond "why can't they just".
This is also how they do it in Zürich. You walk your garbage down to the corner. Recycling is the same way. The only thing that gets picked up from houses is paper and cardboard.
In NYC, in very dense areas like of Manhattan, I would expect it would make sense to put a container in the bottom of every building, but in rowhouse areas it is reasonable to expect the occupants to walk down to the corner.
The main thing is like so many other aspects of American life we have no domestic examples of best practices. You have to visit foreign cities and pay attention, or invite their experts to come teach your city.
And neither of those things happen in the USA. We kicked England out like 250 years ago, and our general belief is that Europe hasn’t had a good idea since they chose to colonize the Americas. Reasonable people think this is stupid, but we have a lot of unreasonable people here.
If I'm to believe what I read online, especially here on HN, Europe has everything figured out and is so much better than the US. So yes, we do have a lot of unreasonable people here (on HN).
Infrastructure wise, central Europe + Scandinavia has things "figured out", which is what the topic is about.
Transport infrastructure in dense areas is "solved" by reducing individual means of transport and increasing shared means of transport. This doesn't align with hyper-individualistic people seeing car transport as their right.
A "fat government" helps building out shared infrastructure, America doesn't have that.
Some people like sharing and cooperating, some people like living under the false impression that they're independent of society.
In certain states there are still laws around water rights that cause unnecessary shortages that could be solved by cooperation, but the laws are there and the big consumers upstream lobby to keep them that way.
Not saying the US isn't great, you've been the economic powerhouse of the world for awhile now, you have accomplished many great things (research topping my list). I just think somewhere you forgot to invest back into shared infrastructure, and that "ours" is better (with exceptions both ways).
There's a bit of my reasoning, which if you wildly disagree with makes us both unreasonable to eachother, whoever is right is up to the future to decide independent of us two.
As someone from a dense city with generally smaller roads than NYC (Philly), I think that's untrue. If NYC wanted to do it, it could be done. In Philly, trucks make it down alleys where the roadway is half the size of the truck. Or they wheel the dumpsters down the alley to the corner. That doesn't mean every alley is suitable, but you can put the dumpster on the main road where you put the trash, or do as our European friends suggest.
Personally I have no idea what you're talking about...have visited the city many many times for work from bronx to manhattan, and come from a much "dirtier" city.
If you think there's garbage everywhere in NYC, I advise you to never visit most European capitals, and especially not the asian subcontinent. Which is not to shame these places, but more so to say that NYC is doing OK.
> It's not the parking spots - residents have zero interest in walking to the end of their block with garbage.
Nobody would have to do that. They'd have to walk an extra 10 ft from the front of their building to the curb. Unless they live in a multifamily building (which is most of the city), in which case the building superintendent would do that.
> Have you been in NY? There's garbage everywhere.
> They'd have to walk an extra 10 ft from the front of their building to the curb.
I mentioned in another post it's mostly row houses, sometimes with the 1st and 2nd floor separate living areas. Not huge apartments - you can't put a dumpster in front of every house.
The dumpster would go at the end of the block, no one will support walking that far with their garbage. Not when they are used to a different way.
> I mentioned in another post it's mostly row houses
This is incorrect. That does not describe the majority of housing units in NYC.
> The dumpster would go at the end of the block, no one will support walking that far with their garbage. Not when they are used to a different way.
I don't know why you're so confidently making this claim, because that's not what's being proposed or being done. There already is a pilot program for containerized trash collection, and - surprise - there's not just one container per block.
Except that it does sleep, and deeply... The bars close really early, cabs get very hard to find shortly after, the streets of Manhattan are deserted. The only thing that’s 24H is some rent a cop telling you not to sit on some park bench.
Garbage is absolutely not as big of a problem as it is in NYC though. You don't get to blame the fact garbage collection is awful on entropy when other cities very visibly do not have the same issues.
> Do you live there? It seems pretty effective IME.
I live in NYC, and I'll go on the record stating that NYC's trash collection system is an absolute disaster, because the city has long-refused to use containerized trash collection (the way every other city in the developed world does), and instead tells people to dump trash bags on the sidewalk 3-5 times per week, where they sit for 12 hours at a time before being picked up.
This is not an effective system at all. It exists only because elected officials have not wanted to give up a few free parking spaces every block in order to allow for containerized trash receptacles.
Thankfully, there's a pilot program on one block in midtown Manhattan to "trial" containerized trash collection. It began a few weeks ago, and is scheduled to last one year. Hopefully that will be followed by a wider rollout.
HN's take on NYC is very confusing. Everyone has "obvious" answers to problems that residents don't even consider problematic, and oh by the way, they've never left their town of 600 people.
I remember a debate here where people were claiming how lawless NYC was for allowing people and services to double-park to load/unload. They should park in a loading zone!
You must recognize the general GOP-led campaign that democratic-run places like NYC and CA are nightmares. It was Trump's theme for the 2020 GOP convention, but was overshadowed by Coronavirus. I think it spreads here too. NYC (and CA) need to take it on and remind people what makes them so fantastic.
For what it's worth, NYC has been designating some parking spots on city blocks in largely residential areas for local deliveries, so UPS/Amazon/FedEx trucks don't have to double park and hold up traffic. I'm sure it was due to the pandemic, where online ordering became a lifeline for many.
> don't even hear people from LA or SF boast the way they do in New Yawk
Every borough except Staten Island is larger than San Francisco [1][2]. Manhattan together with Queens or Brooklyn is bigger than LA, the second-largest city in America. (Staten Island is about the size of Raleigh or Atlanta.)
New York solves problems at a scale no other American city comes close to imagining.
This is exactly what I mean. You guys have no idea how silly you sound everywhere else.
I also noticed your sleight of hand. "Greatest city in the world" includes Tokyo, Paris, Seoul. All far superior to NYC in almost every way, with similar issues of scale.
The LA municipal boundary is a small sliver of what people broadly call "Los Angeles. Here's Manhattan projected over the LA metro: https://i.imgur.com/ff7Vs1k.jpeg
What does the size of the city have to do with it? When thinking about "greatest city", I don't think "solving problems at scale" is one of my criteria.
I love visiting Manhattan and Brooklyn, but frankly have a hard time imagining living there. And I live in SF, which is far from being an ideal city.
Staten Island isn't as big as Raleigh or Atlanta. Its much smaller population and area-wise, focusing on just their metro areas. Denser for sure, but not larger.
> Staten Island isn't as big as Raleigh or Atlanta
Staten Island (~475k) has the same population as Raleigh (~470k) and is a hair smaller than Atlanta (~500k). This isn’t a density argument. It’s an illustration of New York City’s scale. The forgotten borough is larger than most of our cities.
I’ve never heard New Yorkers call New York the greatest city on earth in earnest. It’s a great city in a way no other city in America truly is. In a league with Tokyo, Delhi, Shanghai, Paris or London. Density and cosmopolitanism bring a unique combination of economic and cultural gifts that set these cities apart, and have for similar cities across history. New Yorkers also tend to be well travelled to those cities, because that’s how cosmopolitan culture works.
> I’ve never heard New Yorkers call New York the greatest city on earth in earnest.
My Uber driver said that to me within the first ride of my landing, and I heard it again and again, from millenials, Gen X, Boomers, basically every type of person I met and from every walk of life, during the many years I lived there.
You guys play this game where you don't say what you mean, and you don't mean what you say, in any context where it's marginally convenient/inconvenient to do so. It's eat or be eaten in NYC. I would hope longtime residents like yourself are just BS'ing the HN community, and not actually delusional about the waters you swim in.
That said, a wholesale change is what they need.