The only reason this is a problem is because the city refuses to use containerized trash collection (such as dumpsters). Turns out, dumping trash bags on the street for 12 hours 3-6 times a week is basically a free buffet for rats.
The reason the city doesn't implement containerized trash collection is because that would mean giving up a few free parking spots every block.
It got worse during COVID-19 because the city temporarily suspended collection/extermination, which caused the rodent population to explode, and it's never recovered from that. But eliminating the regular meals for rats would be an easy, no-brainer way to fix it.
An anecdote: My NYC neighborhood has seen a building boom over the past decade. As far as I can tell, every new building puts its trash out on the street.
Some particularly memorable examples include a 75 story residential tower with absolutely record-breaking trash piles, and a ~25 story residential tower with a trash collection point on the onramp to the Williamsburg bridge. Garbage trucks have to stop in the road to collect trash, manually, bag-by-bag, at every stop.
This is the policy for trash in NYC, and rats will remain a problem as long as it stays that way.
Go look at the absolutely massive piles of trash bags outside 20 Exchange Place in the financial district (huge office tower retrofitted to rental apartments) for an example of this. There's nowhere to put dumpsters and obviously no alleyway...
The only reason this is a problem is because the city refuses to use containerized trash collection (such as dumpsters). Turns out, dumping trash bags on the street for 12 hours 3-6 times a week is basically a free buffet for rats.
The US confuses the hell out of me sometimes.
How do you get to the moon and invent the internet, but can't figure out how to collect refuse in arguably your most prominent city?
> The only solution are distributed dumpsters/large containers, which are not popular because nobody wants a dumpster in from of their building
That's not been the sticking point, empirically. The issue is that the politicians who can implement this don't want to give up the free parking spots.
It's the loss of free parking that's the motivator, not the dumpster itself.
Some cities in Europe use underground containers. (An arm on the collection truck can lift them right out of the ground. It's pretty neat.) I wonder if that is feasible for NYC.
This would be prohibitively expensive due to the number of underground utilities. In Manhattan, there isn't even a map of all pipes/etc. under a given street or sidewalk, because they were laid so long ago - every time digging is done, they need to carefully dig it up and see what's even there and document it.
So there's no way to even figure out how this could be done without doing all the digging, etc., and at that point the expense is prohibitive.
Not to mention that building that system would require giving up parking spots for the construction, which would cause the same political pushback from the same opponents, so at that point you might as well just do above-ground collection for a fraction of the price, since you'll be fighting the same political battles either way.
I once stayed at a flat in Berlin and there were rats living in the building trash container. They would literally be scurrying on the top of the pile when I opened it up to throw trash bags away. Hands down my worst experience with rats, even coming from NYC.
This was in Kreuzberg and there seemed to be a lot of rats there because of some abandoned buildings and construction + fields of dirt for them to burrow in
They could adopt Taiwan's musical garbage trucks with zero investment in new garbage containers or loss of parking. Garbage bags go directly from properties into the truck, spending no time festering on the sidewalk.
Great, then removing parking will also reduce the homicide rate, in addition to starving the rats, speeding up the bus service, and keeping everyone from getting cancer and dementia. Really, is there anything that banning cars doesn't solve?
I take it you're talking about removing street parking altogether? If they just remove a few parking spots on each block for dumpsters, I can only see that leading to more tension and disputes over the even scarcer parking spaces. Why anyone would want to drive in Manhattan is beyond me.
I was watching a Disney+ documentary on the making of Disney World and was impressed that all the garage cans use pneumatic tubes to empty in a central dump not visible to guests. Is such a solution not possible at NYC scale?
> I was watching a Disney+ documentary on the making of Disney World and was impressed that all the garage cans use pneumatic tubes to empty in a central dump not visible to guests. Is such a solution not possible at NYC scale?
There is one portion of Manhattan where that is done, yes.
That would be cost-prohibitive in most of the city due to the amount of digging required, and the expense of digging in NYC (an old city which has extensive underground piping and infrastructure that was laid before these things were regularly documented, so there's no way to know which water/electricity/etc lines are in an area before you actually dig there).
The reason the city doesn't implement containerized trash collection is because that would mean giving up a few free parking spots every block.
It got worse during COVID-19 because the city temporarily suspended collection/extermination, which caused the rodent population to explode, and it's never recovered from that. But eliminating the regular meals for rats would be an easy, no-brainer way to fix it.