New York City has a garbage problem. Not because we produce a lot of garbage, but because of our physical configuration. Manhattan, and nearly all of the area of the other boroughs, was laid out without back alleys. The street layout you see is the street layout you get. Worse, because of long-held habit of building the full width of lots, we don’t have places to put side alleys between buildings.[1] As a result, garbage has traditionally been left at the curb in front of buildings for collection.[2] This is bad. It looks bad, smells bad, and has traditionally fed rats which are not pets to be fed.
After a number of proposed solutions over, I don’t know, the last century, the city has one that seems workable. A building’s garbage will be put, not on the sidewalk in plastic bags and plastic pr steel bins, but in the first street lane (the parking lane) in large identical containers that can be emptied by hydraulic lifts on a side-loading truck. The containers are, in theory, impervious to rodents; the use of the lifts gets rid of the back-breaking labor of lifting bag after bag, bin after bin, from the sidewalk to the street.
There was a political time-bomb in the previous paragraph. Each container removes a parking space from vehicular use. I’m fine with that…but I don’t own a car or even drive. Here’s discussion of the parking-spot issue from a couple of weeks ago: NYC plans to replace nearly 30K parking spaces with trash bins, report shows. and here’s some more specific discussion from yesterday: Parts of Manhattan to sacrifice 10% of street parking as NYC installs new trash bins. The second article states that the Upper East Side and Upper West Side will each lose about 1500 parking spots, or about ten percent of each neighborhood’s total. That’s because of the density of those two neighborhoods: many large apartment houses means many new containers. But let’s look at what that actually means. Fewer than one third of households in those two neighborhoods have cars, in part because of the amount of subway service. Here’s the neighborhood map of Manhattan from that last linked report, with purple showing the Upper West Side and blue showing the Upper East Side:
Or, as I saw it expressed yesterday:
- Given my habit of posting drawings from comic books and comparing them to actual locations, I should point out that my two most-heavily used sources, Batman and Daredevil, enormously exaggerate the prevalence of alleys here.↩︎
- I am not going to get into the long history of garbage collection itself. ↩︎
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