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It never ceases to amaze me that the self styled "Greatest City on Earth" can't come up with a reasonable solution for its garbage.
by chitowneats 4y ago
It never ceases to amaze me that the self styled "Greatest City on Earth" can't come up with a reasonable solution for its garbage.
- jeffbee 4y agoThey also call it "the city that never sleeps" but they misleadingly omit the reason.
- chitowneats 4y agoThat reason being what? Cocaine? Edit: oh, you must mean noisy garbage trucks
- angry_octet 4y agoExcept 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.
- jen20 4y agoHave the bars stopped closing at 4am?
- nickpp 4y agoGarbage is a difficult issue everywhere. Part of the entropy problem of the universe…
- jaywalk 4y agoI can't think of another major city where there are piles of garbage bags on the sidewalks everywhere.
- noselasd 4y agoTokyo ? Business there place their garbage bags out on the sidewalk in the evenings, garbage trucks scoop them up early in the morning.
- jonny_eh 4y ago> I can't think of another major city where there are piles of garbage bags on the sidewalks everywhere. Other cities have alleyways.
- some_random 4y agoGarbage 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.
- wolverine876 4y agoDo you live there? It seems pretty effective IME.
- jrockway 4y agoHN'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.
- wolverine876 4y agoI 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.
- edgyquant 4y agoWe also should write off real criticism as a “GOP” campaign. I live in one of their favorite cities to attack (not NYC) and they’re close to spot on
- wolverine876 4y agoSo there's no GOP campaign? We should pretend it doesn't exist? All criticism is "real"?
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago> 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.
- walrus01 4y ago> The status quo is sanitary and efficient. 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.
- dredmorbius 4y agoIt could be worse, and was once: <https://99percentinvisible.org/article/cities-paved-dung-urban-design-great-horse-manure-crisis-1894/ https://99percentinvisible.org/article/cities-paved-dung-urb...> 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.
- vinaypai 4y agoWhat 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.
- burkaman 4y agoDoesn't basically every city call itself the greatest city on earth?
- chitowneats 4y agoNot like NYC. Not even close. At least, I've never visited or lived in one that rivaled it.
- SketchySeaBeast 4y agoI've never heard Red Deer, Alberta make that claim.
- chitowneats 4y agoYou don't even hear people from LA or SF boast the way they do in New Yawk.
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago> 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. [1] https://www.nyc.gov/site/planning/planning-level/nyc-population/current-future-populations.page https://www.nyc.gov/site/planning/planning-level/nyc-populat... [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_population https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities...
- chitowneats 4y agoThis 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.
- novok 4y agoThey 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.
- echlebek 4y agoThe 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.
- ars 4y ago> in a dedicated garage area in each apartment building NY has a lot of row houses, there's no room for a dedicated garbage area. And the alleys are not wide enough for a garbage truck. Before criticizing a place, at least understand it first.
- brnt 4y agoPeople 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).
- jeffbee 4y agoThis 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.
- hericium 4y agoIt was always handled efficiently by the mafia guys in movies.
- MrMan 4y agoWhat are you talking about