Bay Ridge, NY – New Yorkers angry about trash on their sidewalks tend to propose the obvious solutions: more litter baskets at more corners, more frequent collection, harsher fines for violators.
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But in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, the neighborhood has come up with a novel – and counterintuitive – tactic. It is to get rid of the litter baskets.
On three busy commercial intersections along Fourth Avenue, the city’s Department of Sanitation, heeding the pleas of the local community board, has removed 14 wire-mesh baskets from all four corners.
Community leaders were tired of households using corner trash baskets meant for candy wrappers and soda cans to dump plastic bags full of smelly leftovers and other personal discards. It is illegal to dump household garbage in corner litter baskets, and violators can be fined $100 fines, though stopping scofflaws is not easy.
No one seems to have complained much about such violations until two years ago, when litter collection in Bay Ridge was effectively reduced from twice a day to something closer to twice a week because garbage trucks were diverted to dirtier parts of the city, said Josephine Beckmann, district manager of the local community board.
As a result, bags of household garbage overflowed the baskets and wound up piled on the sidewalk. “Residents say they are embarrassed to have relatives visit them because of the garbage at the corners,” Ms. Beckmann said.
The Sanitation Department first tried doubling the number of litter baskets, but, perhaps predictably, that seemed only to double the mounds of accumulating household garbage.
So the agency finally bowed to a neighborhood brainchild – remove the baskets.
It did so at three intersections along Fourth Avenue, at Bay Ridge Avenue (also known as 69th Street), 68th Street and Ovington Avenue, which are near entrances to the Bay Ridge Avenue station of the R line and bus stops.
The department has been testing the idea out for a month, and the unconventional experiment has become the talk of the neighborhood, with some residents complaining that it has made their streets look unkempt.
Read more in NY Times
Here’s an idea! Create lids that can only be opened with special keys that the sanitation dep’t has. Those lids will have very small openings that will never allow household garbage bags to fit through, just wrappers and cans.
Makes perfect sense! Such a yiddishe cup!
That’s why they call me secheyoshor!
Soon you will see mattresses being dumped on street corners due to the $100.00 fine imposed by NYC for discarding a mattress that isn’t sealed in plastic – presumably to prevent the spread of Bed Bugs. Like that has anything to do with it spreading! Nonsense!
Trash collection has become an problem throughout the city. In the heimeshe neighborhoods, it is especially bad with many families putting out bags of garbage on those days when no collection is scheduled. The streets look terrible and the trash production is getting even larger. The real solution is more recycling and less garbage being generated.
litter baskets? this isnt london. its new york. its a garbage can
Why do people shlep their trash out to corner if they can leave it in front of their house? I’m missing something here…
To #1 You have the same problem on 18th Avenue near the walkup Apt buildings. People just put their garbage into the mesh cans or metal cans and leave it there. When you try to walk by, it is overflowing, and I mean overflowing………..The sanitation department does nothing!! Our politicians do nothing!! ALL of them!!
There used to be a tv ad which showed Frank Parker (who was a sidekick of Arthur Godfrey), urging New Yorkers to use the trash bins. Frank Parker would sing :
“Oh, we’ve got to get together, as sure as my name is O’Rourke, and use those fine litter baskets on the sidewalks of New York”.