They’re starting to roll out trash containers in the city, should have been done years ago. There’s a bunch of interconnected factors: all residential buildings in NYC get municipal trash pickup (most other cities require private trash service for large apartment buildings), Manhattan doesn’t have many alleys so trash has to go out front, on-street parking blocks larger curbside bins and using exclusively wheeled cans would crowd the sidewalks. They finally decided to remove some parking spaces to allow for large curbside bins.

Ok that's clever. I suspect if would be difficult in many places to find enough pavement slots without re-routing a lot of cables and pipes. And yet, the Dutch must have introduced this solution relatively recently - I guess they already run all their cables and pipes below the road, not the pavement? I know that while in my street the gas, water, and drains run under the road, the electricity supply is under the pavement.

You know what crowds the sidewalks worse than wheel bins? Having that same volume of trash bagged and leaking all over the place sustaining local rat populations. Honestly everything you mentioned as a potential con sounds like an improvement to the existing state of affairs.

Isn’t it because they don’t have alleys?

You don’t need an alley for trash you just need to be slightly less greedy and plan for it in your building plans over more leasable space. This is somehow only an intractable issue for nyc.

Lack of space. A trash pile that is gone in 24 to 48 hours isn't permanent - whereas a dumpster is. Not to mention, access to that dumpster by a truck would be difficult.

Hypothetical, but when you have a single block of 10 buildings, each housing 500 people - the trash generated is a lot and if each were to have their own dumpster parked outside, where would cars or delivery trucks park? If parking is allowed between the dumpsters, how would the trucks access those dumpsters? There's no room to park them off-street because the buildings typically abut next to each other without alleys in between.

That's without even mentioning that even if multiple buildings share a dumpster - then you run into the question of how do you deal with illegal dumping? How do you bill each building for trash removal? See: "The Absurd Problem of New York City Trash" by NY Times (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/03/02/upshot/nyc-tr...)

No paywall version: https://archive.ph/XFAFg

Discussion on that article: https://www.reddit.com/r/urbanplanning/comments/1b5i1xk/the_...

A study: https://manhattan.institute/article/innovative-waste-managem...

What I'm trying to get at is that the trash problem in NYC, and any proposed solution, raises a lot more questions than anything else.

I for one, would love to see Amsterdam inspired under-sidewalk bins (https://www.core77.com/posts/102208/Amsterdams-Smart-System-...)

Its permanent if the pile is renewed daily by business owners who refuse to contract sufficient trash service. Somehow big cities around the world have solved dumpsters and not having trash for the rats to go through on the street. No clue why theres always excuses for this issue for nyc.