New York City Is Converting 30,000 Parking Spaces Into Trash Bins And The Results Are Already Remarkable.

New York City has revealed that its ongoing effort to replace garbage bags piled on sidewalks with locked curbside containers will ultimately convert nearly 30,000 street parking spaces across the five boroughs into permanent trash container locations, in what the Department of Sanitation is calling one of the most significant changes to curbside sanitation in the city's history. The city has opened registration for buildings with 10 or more units in Brooklyn Community District 2, the next neighborhood slated for full containerization, with a deadline of July 31st for building owners and managers to sign up. The district includes Downtown Brooklyn, Boerum Hill, Brooklyn Heights, DUMBO, Vinegar Hill, Fort Greene, Clinton Hill, Fulton Ferry, and the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The program uses locked, curbside containers called Empire Bins assigned to larger apartment buildings, accessed by building staff using key cards and emptied automatically by sanitation trucks, replacing the system in which thousands of garbage bags are set directly on sidewalks for collection each day. The rollout marks the second community district to receive the bins after a yearlong pilot in West Harlem that wrapped up this spring.

New York City has long had one of the most visible and persistent street cleanliness problems of any major city in the world, putting out roughly 10,000 tons of garbage in bags on its sidewalks every single day and generating the kind of rat activity that became internationally associated with the city's streets. The containerization program has been in development for years and is designed to address both issues simultaneously, removing the exposed garbage that attracts rodents and clearing the sidewalks of the bags that squeeze pedestrians off the pavement in densely populated neighborhoods. Results from the West Harlem pilot have been described by sanitation officials as encouraging, with measurable reductions in sidewalk obstruction and rat sightings reported in the covered area. The trade-off is parking: a single Empire Bin installation occupies the equivalent of one to two parking spaces, meaning the citywide expansion will permanently remove tens of thousands of spots from a parking supply that residents already consider scarce. City officials have framed the tradeoff as a necessary one, arguing that cleaner, safer, and more walkable sidewalks represent a far greater benefit to the city than the lost parking, and pointing to the public health and quality-of-life case for containerization that comparable European cities demonstrated long ago.

Source:https://patch.com/new-york/new-york-city/nyc-trash-bins-replace-nearly-30-000-parking-spaces