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Clean Streets: People taking San Francisco’s trash into their own hands
- bbbhahah 5y ago[flagged]
- keville 5y agohttps://missionlocal.org/2021/03/newsoms-experiment-to-get-rid-of-public-trash-bins-in-san-francisco-seems-to-have-failed/ https://missionlocal.org/2021/03/newsoms-experiment-to-get-r... Linked in the article, too. While it's not the only source of the problem, it's still a big reason people get tired of looking around for a can in SF and just toss their litter.
- imglorp 5y agoSame point with public toilets. People will eliminate their waste; it's up to the community to decide where they will put it.
- itisit 5y agoHear me out: trash cleaning robots…
- legerdemain 5y agoSame James Thompson as astronaut.io[*], by the way. Also designed much of the UX in Palantir's products. [*] http://astronaut.io/ http://astronaut.io/
- another_story 5y agoIn Taiwan the locals, usually the elderly, sweep and clean near their own houses or the parks where they congregate. Some do it as part of a neighborhood group, while others clean parks and areas near temples for religious reasons. Good way to build community. On another note, let people read without pop-ups please.
- OJFord 5y agoIn Canada they clear the snow/ice from the pavement in front of their own house. I've since heard it's (in at least some areas?) required though, which ruined the image a bit. (And sort of odd isn't it? Instead of taxing you and providing you with this service, we'll require you to do it? Seems inefficient.)
- exhilaration 5y agoThis is true in most of the U.S. as well. If you've got a sidewalk in front of your house, you'll get a fine if you don't clear the snow 24-36 hours after the end of a snowstorm. A workaround is to buy your home in a neighborhood without sidewalks.
- dragonwriter 5y ago> A workaround is to buy your home in a neighborhood without sidewalks. ...or where it doesn't snow.
- spoonjim 5y agoThat’s a terrible workaround, now your neighborhood is non walkable.
- jeromegv 5y agoIt’s highly dependant on cities. It’s not happening at all in Quebec for example. Toronto is probably the poster child of that idea but it is actually going away. The city decided they will plow the sidewalks themselves starting this year. While you were “required” to do it, tons of people wouldn’t do it and enforcement wouldn’t be consistent. This would leave you with dangerous sidewalks where the people who need it the most (disabled, elderly) would be stuck walking in the street because the roads for car would be perfectly plowed.
- ikt 5y agowhy does the local council not employ people to clean the streets?
- gnopgnip 5y agoThey do a pretty good job in the areas where there are tourists and businesses in all but the busiest times. No so much in residential areas.
- macinjosh 5y agoThey do. The government is just ineffective at its job.
- ikt 5y agoIt's very odd, here in Australia they're very effective at it, very rarely do I walk past garbage piles. I guess people in San Francisco just don't care enough to really push the council to solve the problem?
- OJFord 5y agoIsn't it that they're also saying 'it's too expensive to live here, keep taxes low' or 'it's too expensive to live here, I won't, I'll consume things and leave rubbish and them go home [and pay tax] elsewhere'?
- starwind 5y agoThat's what happens when people just vote for their party for local government—politicians don't have good ideas or successful policies cause they don't have to to stay in office
- wolverine876 5y agoHow do local SF elections work? Are they partisan? If so, aren't the primaries where the real action is, often with plenty of choices?
- jijji 5y agoIts sad that 1) so many people just throw trash on the steet, 2) there is no law enforcement preventing this behavior, 3) the city isnt paying any people (in my area the prisoners do it from the jail) and then 4) that it has come down to the residents to come up with their own pool of money to pay for this... every week you read stories of the human feces on sidewalks, public urination, needles left on sidewalks, public drug use, all this is without law enforcement action to stop it. Its up to the leadership of elected officials to allocate money and make decisions to stop this type of behavior, but from most of what I have read about the subject it seems that the elected officials want to condone and even encourage this type of plague going on in san francisco. Its up to the voters to vote for the right people to make these changes, but I would never want to live like that or in that type of environment personally. I think thats why you see an exodus of families leaving san francisco. (I lived/worked there for a year)
- qweqwweqwe-90i 5y agoThis is a also a city with a multibillion dollar budget and some of the highest in the country.
- jijji 5y agoI'll be honest in my area I'm out in a suburban part a Florida about 50 miles outside of Tampa and people who are not from the area who are caught doing drugs and homeless people and all this kind of stuff what happens is the cops they tell them I don't want to see you in this county anymore and then what they do is they bring them to a road called county line road and then they drop them off there and if they come back they get arrested... so you just don't see homeless people and all that kind of stuff out where I live because I'm being serious that's how the cops are out here
- wolverine876 5y ago> people who are not from the area who are caught doing drugs and homeless people and all this kind of stuff what happens is the cops they tell them I don't want to see you in this county anymore and then what they do is they bring them to a road called county line road and then they drop them off there and if they come back they get arrested... so you just don't see homeless people and all that kind of stuff out where I live because I'm being serious that's how the cops are out here This is pretty well-known in a lot of places. Around major cities, the police will send the persons into the city. Then the suburban people say there must be something wrong with the city, with all these problems. Personally, I'd rather be the community that takes care of the people that need it. > doing drugs and homeless people I don't equate the two. Even doing drugs is just a vice and now frequently legalized, and I'm sure the locals do plenty (without needing to know the locality). But to the extent that the drugs are illegal, being homeless certainly is not. There is nothing wrong with it or illegal about it. Some homeless people do bad things, and so do some people of every other group, including HN readers, rural locals, and wealthy people in big houses (and measured by total cost to society, there's no doubt which group does more).
- blunte 5y agoI just don't understand why throwing trash on the ground is tolerated. There is virtually no argument for why someone should need or be allowed to throw or leave their trash on the ground. Most of us manage to get clothes on before we leave the house each day, and that's a lot more complicated than just putting trash into a bin (or god forbid, carrying it until you reach a destination which has a trash bin). So there is no excuse for littering. I would impose very strict penalties for littering - namely forcing the one who is caught littering to spend two hours every day for a week, or even a month, walking the streets (and beaches or riverbanks or parks) and collecting trash. If an alternative punishment must be provided, they could instead sit on the spot where they littered for a day, holding a sign which says "I'm a poorly trained human, and I throw my trash on the ground."
- DantesKite 5y agoSingapore generally has very clean streets, but the price is very high fines. I like the idea of a $1000 fine or community service spent cleaning up trash.
- blunte 5y agoI'm not convinced that a fine is going to change someone's behavior. It may put them in a regretful financial bind, but it's really a short-term pain. Spending a week cleaning trash is definitely something they will remember! (and for sure they will complain to friends and family who will then maybe be less likely to litter themselves)
- bugzz 5y agoI feel like a $1000 fee would be something most people would remember and complain about to friends and family...
- refurb 5y agoSingapore has plenty of people littering. They also have a massive army that is constantly cleaning. Yes, if caught (unlikely) you will be severely punished. But that’s not the reason Singapore is so clean.
- tcollier 5y agoI was a Patreon supporter of Clean Streets and was pleased with having cleaner streets in my neighborhood. Unfortunately, these guys just closed shop. Here is the email I received on Oct 23: > Alas, Clean Streets is closing up shop. > You may have noticed the falloff in times and quality the past couple weeks. [Redacted name] lost his main cleaner and has not been able to adequately replace him.
- pwthornton 5y agoOne of the things that causes littering is a lack of trash cans or a lack of non-filled trash cans. Not all littering (or throwing recycling in the trash) is done out of pure malice. If you make it easy for people to throw trash out, they generally will. If you make it hard to throw trash out, many will litter. Stronger fines and other enforcement would help, but the first thing is to make sure that you actually have accurate places to throw stuff out (or have the culture where people bring stuff with them and throw out at home, like some non-American countries). This article mentions how the streets got really bad during the pandemic when the city stopped doing certain things. SF, NYC, and other cities with trash problems could significantly solve this just by having more trash and recycling cans and by changing them more often. You'll notice how much cleaner DC and its surrounding urban areas are than SF and NYC and that's because they have a bigger commitment to making it easy to not litter and they do more cleaning.
- disneygibson 5y agoTokyo has very few trash cans yet not much litter. It’s a cultural problem, not an engineering or city planning one.
- ryan_lane 5y agoTokyo used to have a lot of trash cans and removed them after a terrorist attack. I think everyone would prefer to have the trash cans. It absolutely sucks to carry around your trash for hours, and not everyone does it. People do litter here, but there's an army of old people that clean the streets... like this article is suggesting.
- tafda 5y agoWorse than that, SF has tried removing trash cans on a theory they’re and attractive nuisance. An absence of trash cans works in Tokyo, not so much in North America: https://missionlocal.org/2021/03/newsoms-experiment-to-get-rid-of-public-trash-bins-in-san-francisco-seems-to-have-failed/ https://missionlocal.org/2021/03/newsoms-experiment-to-get-r...
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- baybal2 5y agoI advice HN readers to go, and to participate. Besides actually cleaning the streets, it brings very big spotlight to the problem. And in some rare cases, if activity like this may go viral, some people in charge of public sanitation might remember of the shame enough to do their work.
- kjksf 5y agoWhen the city and the state stops taking 50%+ of my money, I'll start cleaning the streets (or, more likely, will pay for someone to clean them). San Francisco 2020 budget is ~$13 billion (https://londonbreed.medium.com/san-franciscos-budget-how-it-works-and-what-you-need-to-know-cf45df1f8ec https://londonbreed.medium.com/san-franciscos-budget-how-it-...) This is the money that is supposed to pay for cleaning the streets and many more things. For comparison, Austin budget is $4.5 billion (https://www.kvue.com/article/money/economy/austin-city-council-approves-budget/269-aeef289d-3821-439c-8205-70c686177bf6 https://www.kvue.com/article/money/economy/austin-city-counc...) What you see is unbelievable corruption and incompetence of city government, not the lack of money for cleaning the streets.
- nbardy 5y agoThere are bureaucrats making 6 figures sitting around and doing nothing for 40 years now. I don’t think shame is going to get them into action. Shame would be what they feel looking around their city. They must be used to it at this point.
- Zababa 5y agoI don't understand. I often hear about people making $200k, $300k a year in that city. I know that it's not everyone, but I think there are lots of people like that. Why is this problem not solved by the market? That may make a good YCombinator project, go to San Francisco-based tech companies, ask them (or the people in them) to give you money to clean the streets. Is this because there is no cheap labour in San Francisco?
- saulpw 5y agoGreat question. Maybe markets aren't a functional solution to problems of public commons? I can't think of a community problem where a market-based solution even helped, let alone solved the problem.
- wolverine876 5y ago> I can't think of a community problem where a market-based solution even helped, let alone solved the problem. While I agree that the market isn't the panacea and God it's portrayed to be, I didn't understand the GP that way. Your point goes much too far the other way. Most of most community problems are solved by 'free' markets, including food (most food is bought and sold in the market), much of transportation (cars, planes), shelter (most homes are owned by private parties), etc. I think the interesting question is, where is the market good at, and what are other tools good at?
- shlurpy 5y agoFood and shelter clearly aren't solved by the free market, or malnutrition and homelessness wouldn't be so prevelant. It just moves the problem to someone or somewhere else, and has to be augmented by public funds to keep the problems from exploding. And transportation isn't even close to a free market... when is the last time you traveled somewhere entirely on private unsubsidized infrastructure? You can't even leave your driveway.
- wolverine876 5y ago
- rkk3 5y agoThis isn't new, in SOMA and other neighborhoods they have had different associations you pay into for years for someone to go around and clean the sidewalks and ask some of the homeless people to move at 7-9am.
- bbbhahah 5y agoFuck San Francisco. Fuck California. Most of the SF city politicians should be executed for their covid war crimes (amongst all the others). SF Mayor London Breed's boyfriend was arrested by the FBI for drum beat bribery WRT to ... wait for it.... FUCKING CLEANING UP TRASH: https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2020/01/31/san-franciscos-mr-clean-arrested-by-fbi-for-alleged-porta-potty-scandal-as-human-waste-piles-up/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2020/01/31/san...
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Proven 5y agoGreat. But they still must pay others (city government) to do it for them.
- mbrodersen 5y agoIt constantly blows my mind how dysfunctional SF is. Having lived in clean, safe, well run cities around the world, the amount of WTF generated by SF is unbelievable.
- horns4lyfe 5y agoGreat, can they get a discount for the time they’re giving out if the taxes that supposedly go to things like this? Nah