Clean up the city and rats will disappear by themselves. At the moment you can't walk through NYC without running into large piles of garbage on every sidewalk. No shit there's a rodent problem.
The garbage situation in Manhattan is ridiculous. Mountains of garbage appear every night. It’s not surprising that they have a rat problem. Plenty of other cities have addressed this problem directly. As far as I can tell, NYC simply does not have the political will.
It’s frankly an embarrassment. We advertise to the world the idea that NYC is one of America’s best cities, and the first thing that people see upon arriving is mountains of trash.
Yes, having thin plastic bags of food waste out on the street for hours every single night is quite clearly the fundamental issue. To me, there's an obvious path forward in removing a few free parking spaces on each block and replacing them with rat-proof containers, and reorganizing the sanitation department support collecting from bins rather than bags on the sidewalk.
The political will is key here, since to effectively fix the issue someone will need to stand up to the sanitation union, who will be concerned that this new paradigm will require fewer workers, as well as to the thousands of seething car owners who will fight tooth and nail to keep their free parking spaces. So far, nobody has wanted to take on this challenge, and so the residents live with filth as the rats continue to feast!
> seething car owners who will fight tooth and nail to keep their free parking spaces
I was going to say that despite the objections from car owners, we did get Citibike... but if I use that word, I know they'll just replace the bike stations with trash containers. "Cleaner city and no parking spaces lost," they'll say.
> To me, there's an obvious path forward in removing a few free parking spaces on each block and replacing them with rat-proof containers
Putting garbage in containers is the kind of thing that sounds like a great idea at first glance. And maybe that's for the "greater good". But what's this comment about losing parking? The devil is in a lot of very specific details, but I'd have some concerns about the side-effects of losing parking spots being significant to some people.
For instance, in many areas of NYC, reducing the number of legal parking spots means more people having to drive around for 30-60+ minutes trying to find a legal spot, which certainly has an impact on the city's cleanliness, not to mention the safety of the roads (increasingly agitated people wheeling around trying to find one of the increasingly vanishing legal spots). And not to mention the impact on people in stressed economic situations. Does a low income earner who needs his car for work now have to choose between spending time and money driving around for an hour plus trying to park legally, or does he risk a ticket that he can't afford now?
I can see some creative solutions that might kill multiple birds with one stone, but I'd just like to point out that reducing parking has a real world impact on people and isn't something to be undertaken lightly.
> Putting garbage in containers is the kind of thing that sounds like a great idea at first glance
Also at second glance, and a third if you go look at other cities in the USA and around the world. It works great! It solves this problem! NYC should just do it.
Yes, it solves this specific problem, but what about the problems it potentially creates?
The comment I responded to mentioned losing parking on every block as part of the proposed solution. That's a hell of a large negative for quality of life in New York. There's a lot of details here that are being completely hand waved away.
Now, maybe it's still worth it, and maybe there's good rebuttals and counterpoints to the points I brought up, but the negatives aren't even being brought up and weighed. That's not how you fully evaluate some idea. There's no solution to a problem that doesn't have some unintended cost.
You forgot the guy in the $2M one bedroom apartment who now has a supposedly rat proof dumpster parked in front of his window. He’ll be thrilled.
Also, Inevitability, homeless people will figure out how to pop the sealed rat proof door open, throw the trash on the sidewalk, and setup shop inside. The NYPD will laugh, and some judge will grant an injunction forbidding eviction of the resident pending a hearing.
Lack of political will and corruption are NYC (and by extension NYS') biggest problems. It's incredible how little progress is made here, how expensive projects are, and how long it takes compared to even other union-heavy areas like France. In this case, it would likely require significant investment to create central trash receptacles on each block and require taking parking spaces. Both of which NYC politicans are too pathetic to push for.
They've recently hired McKinsey to conduct a 20 week study on the viability of containerization on the varying street sizes of Manhattan, and what that might look like [0]. My guess: they settle upon some aesthetically loud behemoth of a trash container that's neither well-functioning nor beautifying, and approve an attendant increase in the sanitation department's budget to deal with the new responsibility. But at least it will be better than the status quo ex ante.
In other cities, mountains of garbage pile up in alleyways or other just-off-the-street venues. Since there basically are no alleyways in Manhattan, the garbage goes in the street instead. I'm not sure the rats care very much either way.
In other cities they provide trash bins and dumpsters. Only in NYC do you just put a bag of trash on the side of the road. My city doesn't even take anything that isn't in a bin that you haven't specifically ordered pickup for (like a big couch)
Wait what are you on about? Are you serious that you just stick bin bags on the street full? Where are the bins? What?
I'm not from NYC or even the US, why wouldn't you just use bins that the bags go in? I don't understand, please help me understand this. I'm thoroughly confused.
The sidewalks aren’t wide enough for the kinds of bins needed for the amount of trash generated (NYC is dense) and nobody wants to give up free parking spaces to put the bins in the street as of yet.
This is actually just a building code issue. In other cities, ordinances mandate trash rooms or trash chutes for mulitfamily buildings to avoid these issues. One could argue "but nyc grew before sane building codes," but so did boston, or chicago, and plenty of other denser cities that don't have this issue because they have sensible ordinances in place regarding waste management.
I'm willing to bet landlords don't want to make these investments to their properties in nyc, and have more of a voice in local government than their tenants, who are probably mostly indifferent about the issue at this point anyhow.
I love Boston and will vouch for the general idea that MA is better than NY, but I’m pretty sure Boston just gets by using the advantage of a smaller population and less density in this case. Although maybe the rats have as much trouble navigating as every other visitor…
Buildings have trash chutes and rooms for collecting trash; the trash is held there and put out on the street before midnight and picked up the following morning 3x per week. They get fined for leaving trash out any other time.
The issue is the collection point, not the storage prior.
Many cities have a regular bin-sized contraption where you throw you stuff in and it gets compacted into a big underground container that is part of the sidewalk. They then either get lifted and emptied of sucked empty by a garbage truck.
The sidewalks are plenty wide for that, nyc doesn't even come close to how narrow some european cities without such problems are.
Are you referring to some sort of underground hatch that doesn’t take up any space on the sidewalk at all? That’d be very cool, just probably difficult to retrofit the whole city with.
You live in an apartment building that's 47 stories tall and has 350 units. Do you expect all of the residents individually to take bins out to the front of the building?
Buildings here have chutes and compactors. There aren't any alleys in Manhattan and the sidewalks are mostly quite narrow. The solution would be to eliminate some parking to hold bins that can be emptied by trucks but it hasn't been politically feasible.
If you have chutes and trash rooms already, then there's no point to bringing the stuff out to the street for holding. In my building the trash would be taken from the trash room directly to the truck. The chute would just drop into a dumpster that workers would wheel out and the truck would flip it into the bed. Seems like it takes less labor than having workers bring bags to the road and then have the trash workers spend time putting the bags in the truck by hand versus with a hydraulic arm.
> Seems like it takes less labor than having workers bring bags to the road and then have the trash workers spend time putting the bags in the truck by hand versus with a hydraulic arm.
You're getting to the heart of the problem. That would mean fewer workers and the sanitation union has a long and ironically sordid past of ensuring that less workers are never needed.
Well there are no alleys remember, so nowhere to pull up a truck other that on the street in front of the building. It’s also worth noting that the sanitation workers union fiercely opposes any mechanization in trash collection, the workers toss bags by hand. It’s absolutely ridiculous to see in person.
> And then New Yorkers have the gall to constantly make fun of Staten Island
Well to be fair, Staten Island used to be the literal garbage dump for NYC, and being incorporated as the fifth borough was actually the reason this stopped (because it's illegal to dump trash within the city limits).
Right, but you kind of lose the right to make fun of it when the garbage dump moved from SI to right in front of your door step, and everyone else's. One fond memory back when I lived in Manhattan is being at a small, classy, cocktail bar that served nice drinks with an excellent street view of garbage bags being piled up right in front that ruined it all.
I did live there and on a single family block in queens. Typically there was two pickups a week with people using metal cans in those days. There were plenty of rats.
Where people go, rats follow. If you think that your town/city/building doesn’t have rats, you are wrong.
HN commenters don’t have all of the answers. Garbage bags on the street are a nuisance, but not the problem.
>If you think that your town/city/building doesn’t have rats, you are wrong.
I've never even seen a feral rat in real life. Might make for an interesting Ask HN poll. Estimate how frequently you see rats.
- Haven't yet
- Once per decade
- Once a year
- Once a month
- Once a week
- Daily
Squirrels, yup, lots of them around. And I've seen plenty of mice in my life, and I'm assuming that's what the owls are eating. Beavers? Check. But no rats in 40+ years. YMMV.
They tend to avoid people from a visibility standpoint and thrive in denser areas. Outside of big old cities you typically find them around restaurants and shopping areas.
These places spend alot to control them. Google for “rat bait station”. You’ve seen those at any Walmart, grocery store or in the shrubbery on the side of retail buildings.
I’ve been to and lived in plenty of big cities. NYC is unique in it’s rat problem for sure. Other cities obviously have rats, but they’re nowhere near as common (or big!)
It’s 100% due to the garbage bags on the street. If you walk by one of the huge piles in Manhattan (e.g . outside the NYU dorms), try throwing something at it, you’ll see dozens of rats scatter.
My point was not that SI is a shining example of a garbage free paradise, more so that them making fun of it considering their own problems is hypocritical at best.
NYC is mainly a halfway house for immigrants passing through. It pretty much always has been. A lot of my extended family started out there (it’s got the largest Bangladeshi population in the country) but fled to Long Island or Texas or California once they got their feet under them.
When I got to NYC from Chicago for an internship I spent the first few weeks just marveling and taking pictures of the trash piles and sending them back to my then-girlfriend. “Honey, this one is even taller than the last one!”
Delivery logistics have advanced dramatically and is trending towards near-realtime. For everything that is delivered, some non-trivial percentage of that needs to be taken away as trash. But there is no incentive to improve trash pickup logistics.
Perhaps we could pass laws that require anyone delivering something (hi Amazon) to also take away some proportional amount of trash, removing the externality they currently enjoy. I am sure they would eventually be a lot more efficient at it than the current system.
"Clean up the city" in this case means to change the behavior of 9 million people and every single visitor. It would be easier to train the rats operate the subway system.
As someone who lives in NYC, we have a serious trash problem.
Like, being young and naive once I thought "that's just how cities are!" but having traveled the world, most cities are NOT like New York.
In my neighborhood there is trash pick up 3 days a week. Some houses on my block (2-3 family buildings) will throw out something like 6-20 bags of trash a week. YES seriously.
Very few cities dump their trash bags directly on the side walk for pickup. I can't think of anywhere besides NYC that isn't capable of using a trash bin/dumpster. Pretty sure if the city provided containers people would use them.
There are tons of rats in the subways, and until the MTA puts up a platform wall or something like that, they're not going away because they live off the food people throw on the tracks.
Rats can find food anywhere in many forms, so instead of poisoning them (which just removes competition for food from the rest of them), addict them to a substance you can control, distribute it everywhere freely and accessibly for a while - and then once a large enough population of them are addicted, you create scarcity in the substance, and they will starve themselves and fight each other and breed less frequently in pursuit of it. If the population starts rising again, release more of the drug to get more of them addicted to it and repeat the cycle.
Spray the sewers and garbage bins with nicotine or seized cocaine or some addictive equivalent. Killing them just kills off the weak ones and polarizes the population, whereas a method like this using managed addiction will keep their numbers down and actively managed.
There are three elements to reducing rat populations:
Removing access to food, destruction of their warrens, and killing the rats themselves.
New York City can not hope to begin on this while garbage disposal involves piling bags of trash on the sidewalk.
Other cities address this by improving their dumpsters and garbage cans, and while that doesn't eliminate rats, it drastically reduces their population, and limits their ability to spread as quickly.
After that it becomes possible to populations further by filling warrens and killing the actual rats.
You basically need to clean the city. I've been there in the summer - the place stinks to high heaven from uncollected rotting food, I don't know how the locals handle it.
You'll never be able to trap or kill your way out of this, rats are too smart, and breed too quickly.
That reminds me of the old movie Mimic, in which supposedly sterile insects are released to prey on other insects transmitting a disease to children. The infertility part didn't work and it got messy.
Similar systems have been tried in other places for rodents. You end up getting breeding farms and then when the project is inevitably canceled, all the farmed rodents are set free as the rodent producing factories are abandoned.
It's been tried many times, the results are effectively the same and the programs end up getting canceled (such as Chicago's 1977 program)
Almost like marketplaces of individualistic privatized incentives are a really terrible bad fit for collective societal problems.
This won't stop people from doing it though. If you've got municipal authority and don't know this history, you're probably the type that considers themselves brilliant for coming up with such a creative market-driven solution and don't anticipate the eventual consequences which have repeated themselves quite a number of times.
now you're incentivizing crime vigilantism without specific people involved. These have long histories of fraud and people abusing them for personal grievances along with all the issues related to human trafficking. That's why bounties are for specific people or relating to specific crimes as opposed to some thing where you can just, say, capture supposed prostitutes and turn them in for rewards.
Not that this isn't tried constantly. Heck, we did it in the war on terror and it basically just resulted in kidnapping and human smuggling.
It's not that these market approaches for social problems are impossible - they just usually need markets on top of markets on top of markets to fix incentives and distribute money around in a complicated way with a bunch of administrative overhead. At the end you get at best mediocre results at exorbitantly high cost and enormous complexity. For example, the american health care system...
The real problem is, especially in the USA, some people just totally lose their marbles and become frothing lunatics if anything even looks like it has a remote resemblance to anything socialisty so cost effective reasonable proven solutions that have worked many other places for decades are off the table and we get these 7-layer wedding cake Rube Goldberg machines because we want to show how ideologically pure we are in our demonstration of market efficiency
I'm just joshing around. You make good points, and I appreciate your sincerity.
>we get these 7-layer wedding cake Rube Goldberg machines because we want to show how ideologically pure we are in our demonstration of market efficiency
This simply doesn't connect for me in this case, given that the the New York and Chicago rat problems stem from trash collection issues under the purview of public agencies.
hah, the problem is, and now I'm getting into neoclassical economics, at scale farming is easier than foraging. As in, the cost of rat reproduction < cost of (rat discovery + capture + disease risk) so there's no place to set a bounty since it's always more efficient and reliable to produce rats than to competitively find them.
Incentive programs works for say cans, because the cost of pulling them out of the waste stream is less then the cost of building a factory to produce them. But for hearty robust animals that eat garbage and have lots of offspring, probably not.
As far as a working system, we should look to Alberta (https://alberta.ca/albertas-rat-control-program.aspx) - lots of free resources and budget is set aside for rat proofing and removal - as in calling in exterminators and DIY rat killing things (such as poison) are free.
Call that socialism if you want, it's worked for decades.
Do we then track the confirmed kills with a blackchain? Perhaps we can have some kind of an exchange for pelts. Maybe even have a pelt token. I'll see myself out.
rat coin, ticker symbol RAT. backed by real world artisan rat pelts. each coin is actually an NFT representing the actual rat, in a goofy outfit of course. too bad blow guns are powered by the carbon dioxide emissions of people's lungs or we would have had the greatest stable coin the world has ever known
You start by taking recordings of their ultra sonic squeaks, in particular the mating calls. Then you play these recordings back over loud speaker. As the conga line of horny rats waltzes in, BAM! Guillotine.
Reimaging a system generally eliminates any remote access tools, but if the ACPI Windows Platform Binary Table (an executable that lives in PC firmware by design that recent versions of Windows loads and runs automatically without ability to disable) has been compromised through a malicious firmware update to automatically install a RAT on power on, you may need to go so far as to manually flash the chip holding the firmware to a known non-compromised version. This is a highly technical operation and not for everyone.
Not using ACPI-based Windows-intended hardware, which will unfortunately consist of most of the PC-based motherboards you can purchase on the market today, can help avoid this situation in the first place.
After retiring from the FBI, Neville Flynn (Samuel L. Jackson) takes a job as a motorman on an NYC subway. Meanwhile, the city hires the top rat exterminator in the country (Christopher Walken) who uses the unconventional technique of releasing thousands of vipers into the city’s sewers.
