I live just the right/wrong distance away from a McDonalds, at the point where people have finished their food and are ready to... throw it out of their cars. It's such a scourge on an otherwise...
I live just the right/wrong distance away from a McDonalds, at the point where people have finished their food and are ready to... throw it out of their cars. It's such a scourge on an otherwise lovely and untouched area.
I'm of two minds about this. This is great. We should be able to catch and punish litterers, as they're a blight on society. This is missing the point. If we had proper networks of public...
I'm of two minds about this.
This is great. We should be able to catch and punish litterers, as they're a blight on society.
This is missing the point. If we had proper networks of public wastebins so that people could dispose of their rubbish, there wouldn't be so much litter. As we try to solve infrastructure problems with high-tech solutions, we're missing the core issue of cities being often poorly designed to actually support the people living in them.
If they’re printing the car’s details on the bags I’m assuming it’ll be a drive through rather than a city centre branch where most people are on foot, so to me that implies people are just...
If they’re printing the car’s details on the bags I’m assuming it’ll be a drive through rather than a city centre branch where most people are on foot, so to me that implies people are just dumping them out of the window (which seems doubly shitty because it’s exactly as much effort as just leaving it in the footwell and throwing it out when you next park at home). I can quite believe that a shortage of bins is an issue in some places, but I don’t think there’s much you could do in terms of infrastructure if things are just being thrown out of vehicles?
A trash bin in the median or other place where a driver could pull up and throw out trash without exiting the vehicle is easy enough. If it's at a crosswalk it serves double purpose. No solution...
A trash bin in the median or other place where a driver could pull up and throw out trash without exiting the vehicle is easy enough. If it's at a crosswalk it serves double purpose. No solution will catch everyone who merely wants their garbage to go away without any effort to themselves, but there are options to make proper waste disposal easier and thus more likelier to occur.
I guess it'd be an interesting experiment to see if it made a difference, but it seems like the effort of leaving something on the passenger seat or in the footwell is already so incredibly low...
I guess it'd be an interesting experiment to see if it made a difference, but it seems like the effort of leaving something on the passenger seat or in the footwell is already so incredibly low that accommodating those people further is unlikely to change things. I totally get the need for city planning that meets the realities of people's behaviour, but I've always found bins in UK cities to be reasonably plentiful and litter to be fairly minimal.
My hypothesis here is that the psychological nudge of "we know who threw that" will do more to make the specific subset of people who would otherwise throw things out of a car window hesitate than bins on the medians would. It looks like a behaviour driven by thoughtlessness, rather than lack of other options as might be the case when they've walked a few minutes inconveniently holding something, so making them think is the way to fix it (even if the thought is "this might have consequences for me" rather than "I'm inconveniencing others").
There is a reason why we don't have a proper network of public wastebins, kinda. Councils removed a lot of them because the IRA were planting explosives in them as part of their terrorism campaign...
There is a reason why we don't have a proper network of public wastebins, kinda.
Councils removed a lot of them because the IRA were planting explosives in them as part of their terrorism campaign against the UK.
Oof. Did removal of the wastebins stop the bombings? I know that after 9/11 a lot of public restrooms were closed "for security reasons", and they've mysteriously never reopened regardless of how...
Oof. Did removal of the wastebins stop the bombings? I know that after 9/11 a lot of public restrooms were closed "for security reasons", and they've mysteriously never reopened regardless of how much anyone is or is not concerned about potential bombings.
Not really. From an attacker's POV, bins aren't really a good place to hide explosives if you want to maximise damage and fatalities because most people don't really loiter around them and will...
Not really. From an attacker's POV, bins aren't really a good place to hide explosives if you want to maximise damage and fatalities because most people don't really loiter around them and will just walk over, deposit trash and leave. At best you'll injure or kill one, maybe two people. I think it was done as an excuse to cut public spending.
The IRA's main targets were places with lots of people, like railway stations, pubs and nightclubs. Some of their targets were also political in nature. They made several attempts to assassinate MPs (some of which were successful), and even made attempts on Margaret Thatcher's and John Major's lives.
I think what ultimately wound down the attacks was the Good Friday Agreement.
Rare events attract opportunists like this like honey-glazed shit attracts flies. 9/11, Covid, the war in Ukraine; all of it has had its share of absurdities. People who will use the event to...
I know that after 9/11 a lot of public restrooms were closed "for security reasons"
Rare events attract opportunists like this like honey-glazed shit attracts flies. 9/11, Covid, the war in Ukraine; all of it has had its share of absurdities. People who will use the event to shift blame, because why the fuck not.
Strong guess that wastebins were removed because the people paying for them could justify it, and those same people didn't have to pay for the damage caused by the bins being absent.
In Belgium (as in many places), mayors used Covid to ban their pet peeves using their newfound power. One in Brussels used the pandemic to push a prostitution ban (since repealed).
The war has allowed businesses to increase prices while sneakily blaming a variety of shortages, even when they weren't affected.
The recent economic downturn has allowed many large companies to trigger massive layoffs that they probably wanted to do for a long time, but be able to shift the blame on "the economy" instead of whatever the real cause is.
The IRA using rubbish bins to hide their bombs was unfortunately not that rare, at least in the 90s. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombings_of_Paddington_and_Victoria_stations...
The IRA using rubbish bins to hide their bombs was unfortunately not that rare, at least in the 90s. See:
And those are just the major instances know of that actually detonated and killed/injured multiple people, so were deemed worthy of having their own Wikipedia page. But many many more thankfully detonated harmlessly (ctrl-f "bin "), or were disarmed. E.g. The one disarmed in 1994 on Regent Street.
So if you're looking for an example of government overreach, mismanagement, or whatever, you might want to reconsider using the trash bins being removed in the UK as that example. Should they have been reinstalled sooner (since they've only recently starting to reappear in many places)? Sure. But they were originally removed for pretty legitimate public safety reasons, IMO.
Yeah I am aware of the history, but for more recent removals I absolutely do not believe this to be the case. Especially if the removals are longer term. In brussels, for example, we lock up bins...
Yeah I am aware of the history, but for more recent removals I absolutely do not believe this to be the case. Especially if the removals are longer term.
In brussels, for example, we lock up bins when POTUS swings by. We unlock them as soon as he’s gone.
https://www.specialevents.com/content/secrets-out-working-secret-service Also mentioned in the book In the President's Secret Service. ("Search inside" for "manhole" and "trash cans")...
The Secret Service has scores of rules to help ensure the safety of the dignitary, and removal of garbage cans (bombs could be hidden inside) is just one of them. Manhole covers along the parade route must be welded shut, and rooftop access is severely restricted. Air traffic near the event site usually must be diverted — especially if the president is attending. The Secret Service uses local bomb squads to check out sewers and do sweeps of the event site. Since 9/11, the use of bomb-sniffing dogs to comb the event site has become de rigueur.
Yes, I'm sure. They do also lock up manholes. But still, the point is we unlock all this the moment the President is gone. And I maintain that we do so because the financial incentives align...
Yes, I'm sure. They do also lock up manholes. But still, the point is we unlock all this the moment the President is gone. And I maintain that we do so because the financial incentives align correctly: Bruxelles-Propreté manages trashbins, collection, and litter pickup; so it's in their best interest to minimize litter pickup.
I agree that education and public awareness are part of the solution, but I think it's very reductive to say that's the whole answer. Public cleanliness in Japan is one tiny facet of behaviour...
I agree that education and public awareness are part of the solution, but I think it's very reductive to say that's the whole answer. Public cleanliness in Japan is one tiny facet of behaviour that comes from a much, much larger set of norms and attitudes that are baked into everything from the the history to the social structure to the very language of the country.
If we can convince people to adopt some of the positive subset of those behaviours that's great, but it's not a given when they're just one thread in a whole complex tapestry.
I really, really like this idea. Perhaps all to-go packaging should be printed with customer info, so litterbugs can be found and reprimanded. (And we should do whatever the Japanese do and have...
I really, really like this idea. Perhaps all to-go packaging should be printed with customer info, so litterbugs can be found and reprimanded.
(And we should do whatever the Japanese do and have schoolchildren clean their own classrooms and develop the habit of stewardship in future generations.)
Everywhere I look in the SF Bay Area, there is litter. In-n-Out and McDonalds wrappers billow along the roadways and across yards and parks. It really pains me to see that we've taken such a beautiful area and covered it in asphalt, suburban sprawl, and litter.
Um... I like the intention, but they need to think this through. For example, someone tearing off the part with their vehicle ID on it, then throwing away the rest. Or overwriting it with a...
Um... I like the intention, but they need to think this through.
For example, someone tearing off the part with their vehicle ID on it, then throwing away the rest. Or overwriting it with a Sharpie marker. Or, if the fine levied is high enough, it might be weaponized by fraudulently changing it to someone else's ID, perhaps in multiplicate.
How much will the system and machinery cost -- especially if it's built in ways that can to reduce the chances and impact of malicious or fraudulent actions (e.g. print it in large characters, all over the wrapper, in ways that would be difficult to counterfeit)? How would the reporting system work? Would only municipal personnel do it, or could ordinary citizens also report? Would they be able to take a phone pic, and then submit at a website, or would they have to physically bring in the discarded articles to some location(s)? Would reporters get anything, like a small cash award? If reported digitally, fraud and weaponization would be even easier.
So, yeah: they need to think this through before implementing, and then, after implementing, need to assess (i.e. prove) whether it really worked, and be ready to dismantle the system if it proves to be ineffective and/or cost more than the original problem.
Very much with you on the need to assess whether it actually has an impact, but I'd make a reasonably strong bet that the efficacy would be based on it acting as a psychological nudge rather than...
Very much with you on the need to assess whether it actually has an impact, but I'd make a reasonably strong bet that the efficacy would be based on it acting as a psychological nudge rather than on any actual enforcement beyond a token amount. Obviously I'm speculating here, but if that's the case it renders the other potential weaknesses more or less moot.
I also agree with the intention, but I wonder how enforceable this would be. Simply finding a big mac wrapper on the ground with someone's license plate on it doesn't mean the purchasing customer...
I also agree with the intention, but I wonder how enforceable this would be. Simply finding a big mac wrapper on the ground with someone's license plate on it doesn't mean the purchasing customer put it there. They may have dutifully put it in a proper rubbish bin and then a raccoon came along and dug it out. Or worse, kids could see it as a prank to remove tagged wrappers from the bin and litter them around to get the original burger joint patron in trouble. (The article is behind a paywall for me so I haven't read it; so it's possible the author covered this risk.)
I live just the right/wrong distance away from a McDonalds, at the point where people have finished their food and are ready to... throw it out of their cars. It's such a scourge on an otherwise lovely and untouched area.
You are what you
eatthrow out of your car.I'm of two minds about this.
This is great. We should be able to catch and punish litterers, as they're a blight on society.
This is missing the point. If we had proper networks of public wastebins so that people could dispose of their rubbish, there wouldn't be so much litter. As we try to solve infrastructure problems with high-tech solutions, we're missing the core issue of cities being often poorly designed to actually support the people living in them.
If they’re printing the car’s details on the bags I’m assuming it’ll be a drive through rather than a city centre branch where most people are on foot, so to me that implies people are just dumping them out of the window (which seems doubly shitty because it’s exactly as much effort as just leaving it in the footwell and throwing it out when you next park at home). I can quite believe that a shortage of bins is an issue in some places, but I don’t think there’s much you could do in terms of infrastructure if things are just being thrown out of vehicles?
A trash bin in the median or other place where a driver could pull up and throw out trash without exiting the vehicle is easy enough. If it's at a crosswalk it serves double purpose. No solution will catch everyone who merely wants their garbage to go away without any effort to themselves, but there are options to make proper waste disposal easier and thus more likelier to occur.
I guess it'd be an interesting experiment to see if it made a difference, but it seems like the effort of leaving something on the passenger seat or in the footwell is already so incredibly low that accommodating those people further is unlikely to change things. I totally get the need for city planning that meets the realities of people's behaviour, but I've always found bins in UK cities to be reasonably plentiful and litter to be fairly minimal.
My hypothesis here is that the psychological nudge of "we know who threw that" will do more to make the specific subset of people who would otherwise throw things out of a car window hesitate than bins on the medians would. It looks like a behaviour driven by thoughtlessness, rather than lack of other options as might be the case when they've walked a few minutes inconveniently holding something, so making them think is the way to fix it (even if the thought is "this might have consequences for me" rather than "I'm inconveniencing others").
Fair enough. A bit of the stick to go with the carrot is absolutely helpful, even if I don't really like it.
There is a reason why we don't have a proper network of public wastebins, kinda.
Councils removed a lot of them because the IRA were planting explosives in them as part of their terrorism campaign against the UK.
Oof. Did removal of the wastebins stop the bombings? I know that after 9/11 a lot of public restrooms were closed "for security reasons", and they've mysteriously never reopened regardless of how much anyone is or is not concerned about potential bombings.
Not really. From an attacker's POV, bins aren't really a good place to hide explosives if you want to maximise damage and fatalities because most people don't really loiter around them and will just walk over, deposit trash and leave. At best you'll injure or kill one, maybe two people. I think it was done as an excuse to cut public spending.
The IRA's main targets were places with lots of people, like railway stations, pubs and nightclubs. Some of their targets were also political in nature. They made several attempts to assassinate MPs (some of which were successful), and even made attempts on Margaret Thatcher's and John Major's lives.
I think what ultimately wound down the attacks was the Good Friday Agreement.
The IRA didn't want to maximise fatalities, which is why they often called in warnings and didn't bomb eg football stadiums.
Rare events attract opportunists like this like honey-glazed shit attracts flies. 9/11, Covid, the war in Ukraine; all of it has had its share of absurdities. People who will use the event to shift blame, because why the fuck not.
Tobias says it best: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCtfoqhMqhk
Strong guess that wastebins were removed because the people paying for them could justify it, and those same people didn't have to pay for the damage caused by the bins being absent.
In Belgium (as in many places), mayors used Covid to ban their pet peeves using their newfound power. One in Brussels used the pandemic to push a prostitution ban (since repealed).
The war has allowed businesses to increase prices while sneakily blaming a variety of shortages, even when they weren't affected.
The recent economic downturn has allowed many large companies to trigger massive layoffs that they probably wanted to do for a long time, but be able to shift the blame on "the economy" instead of whatever the real cause is.
The IRA using rubbish bins to hide their bombs was unfortunately not that rare, at least in the 90s. See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombings_of_Paddington_and_Victoria_stations
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrington_bombings
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_Camden_Town_bombing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_Harrods_bombing
And those are just the major instances know of that actually detonated and killed/injured multiple people, so were deemed worthy of having their own Wikipedia page. But many many more thankfully detonated harmlessly (ctrl-f "bin "), or were disarmed. E.g. The one disarmed in 1994 on Regent Street.
So if you're looking for an example of government overreach, mismanagement, or whatever, you might want to reconsider using the trash bins being removed in the UK as that example. Should they have been reinstalled sooner (since they've only recently starting to reappear in many places)? Sure. But they were originally removed for pretty legitimate public safety reasons, IMO.
Yeah I am aware of the history, but for more recent removals I absolutely do not believe this to be the case. Especially if the removals are longer term.
In brussels, for example, we lock up bins when POTUS swings by. We unlock them as soon as he’s gone.
https://www.specialevents.com/content/secrets-out-working-secret-service
Also mentioned in the book In the President's Secret Service. ("Search inside" for "manhole" and "trash cans")
https://books.google.ca/books?id=Q2fhPjTJutgC
So that looks to be a Secret Service requirement.
Yes, I'm sure. They do also lock up manholes. But still, the point is we unlock all this the moment the President is gone. And I maintain that we do so because the financial incentives align correctly: Bruxelles-Propreté manages trashbins, collection, and litter pickup; so it's in their best interest to minimize litter pickup.
Tokyo doesn't have public trash cans except in certain places, and it's one of the cleanest cities ever.
True, but also dependent on some pretty major cultural differences that go a lot deeper than just where you throw your rubbish.
Which suggests that it's not a problem of having enough trash receptacles, rather a problem of citizen education.
I agree that education and public awareness are part of the solution, but I think it's very reductive to say that's the whole answer. Public cleanliness in Japan is one tiny facet of behaviour that comes from a much, much larger set of norms and attitudes that are baked into everything from the the history to the social structure to the very language of the country.
If we can convince people to adopt some of the positive subset of those behaviours that's great, but it's not a given when they're just one thread in a whole complex tapestry.
I really, really like this idea. Perhaps all to-go packaging should be printed with customer info, so litterbugs can be found and reprimanded.
(And we should do whatever the Japanese do and have schoolchildren clean their own classrooms and develop the habit of stewardship in future generations.)
Everywhere I look in the SF Bay Area, there is litter. In-n-Out and McDonalds wrappers billow along the roadways and across yards and parks. It really pains me to see that we've taken such a beautiful area and covered it in asphalt, suburban sprawl, and litter.
Um... I like the intention, but they need to think this through.
For example, someone tearing off the part with their vehicle ID on it, then throwing away the rest. Or overwriting it with a Sharpie marker. Or, if the fine levied is high enough, it might be weaponized by fraudulently changing it to someone else's ID, perhaps in multiplicate.
How much will the system and machinery cost -- especially if it's built in ways that can to reduce the chances and impact of malicious or fraudulent actions (e.g. print it in large characters, all over the wrapper, in ways that would be difficult to counterfeit)? How would the reporting system work? Would only municipal personnel do it, or could ordinary citizens also report? Would they be able to take a phone pic, and then submit at a website, or would they have to physically bring in the discarded articles to some location(s)? Would reporters get anything, like a small cash award? If reported digitally, fraud and weaponization would be even easier.
So, yeah: they need to think this through before implementing, and then, after implementing, need to assess (i.e. prove) whether it really worked, and be ready to dismantle the system if it proves to be ineffective and/or cost more than the original problem.
Very much with you on the need to assess whether it actually has an impact, but I'd make a reasonably strong bet that the efficacy would be based on it acting as a psychological nudge rather than on any actual enforcement beyond a token amount. Obviously I'm speculating here, but if that's the case it renders the other potential weaknesses more or less moot.
I also agree with the intention, but I wonder how enforceable this would be. Simply finding a big mac wrapper on the ground with someone's license plate on it doesn't mean the purchasing customer put it there. They may have dutifully put it in a proper rubbish bin and then a raccoon came along and dug it out. Or worse, kids could see it as a prank to remove tagged wrappers from the bin and litter them around to get the original burger joint patron in trouble. (The article is behind a paywall for me so I haven't read it; so it's possible the author covered this risk.)