Trash, Rats, and Parking: Why NYC and Boston Make Garbage Choices

TL;DR;

• NYC and Boston pile trash bags on sidewalks, literally feeding rats, even as Amsterdam-style containers show you can have no “garbage day” at all.¹
• New York’s own data admits “trash mountains” on curbs fuel the rodent problem, and Boston’s rat complaints keep rising despite traditional extermination efforts.²³
• Both Manhattan and Beacon Hill dedicate far more curb space to free or underpriced parking than would be needed for rat-proof dumpsters or underground containers.⁴⁵
• Containerization pilots in Manhattan have already cut rat sightings dramatically, proving the concept works on the exact same streets now buried in trash bags.⁶⁷
• The real obstacle isn’t engineering, it’s psychology: we treat car storage as sacred and garbage as inevitable, instead of seeing curb space as flexible city infrastructure.

“It seems trivial, but it’s so nice never having to worry about when to take out the garbage.”
— Not Just Bikes, We Have No Garbage Day in Amsterdam¹

If you live in Manhattan or Boston’s Beacon Hill, you know the ritual: one or two nights a week the sidewalks disappear under a pile of gross trash bags. In Europe many neighborhoods use sidewalk bins above large underground containers, with collections scheduled by the city.⁸⁹ Companies like Sidcon have installed compacting underground containers in Amsterdam specifically to save space and improve street livability.¹⁰ Meanwhile, cities like New York and Boston still rely on the 19th-century idea that you should drag bags of food waste onto a narrow sidewalk.

How NYC and Boston accidentally feed rats

New York City’s own sanitation plan admits the problem clearly: when bags of trash are left on the curb the night before pickup, they create “trash mountains” that attract rats and cause “a public nuisance” of overflowing waste.² The Adams administration’s “Trash Revolution” is explicitly framed as a move to “rat-resistant, closed containers” instead of loose bags.¹¹

The data backs up that framing. In residential Manhattan zones where New York rolled out large shared “Empire Bins,” the sanitation department reported up to a 60% drop in rat sightings compared with neighboring areas that still set out bags.⁶⁷ A 2025 update bragged about nine consecutive months of fewer rat sightings citywide as containerization expanded.¹²

Boston is fighting the same enemy with the same handicap. Rat complaints have surged across the city, including in Beacon Hill.³ Boston’s own rodent report, produced with well-known rat expert Bobby Corrigan, highlights food waste and “improperly stored trash” as the central driver of infestations.¹³³ Local coverage of Beacon Hill’s situation makes the problem explicit: thin plastic garbage bags are typically left out overnight on the sidewalk, giving rats hours of uninterrupted feeding time.¹⁴

City officials respond with more bait boxes, more poison, more enforcement — but the food is still right there on the curb.

So if the trash causes rats, and containers fix trash, why aren’t NYC and Boston blanketing their neighborhoods with rat-proof bins?

Because the space that should hold those containers is already spoken for: it belongs to parked cars.

Curb Space: Free Car Storage vs. Rat-Proof Trash

Most people experience streets from the middle of the lane — driving, biking, or sitting on a bus — so the curb lane fades into the background. But in dense cities, the curb is some of the most valuable real estate there is.

In New York, advocates estimate around three million on-street parking spaces, and roughly 97% of them are free.⁴ NYC DOT’s own curb management plans note that at least a quarter of curb space is currently dedicated to parking.⁵¹⁵ Transportation Alternatives’ NYC 25×25 project shows how repurposing even 25% of that parking and driving space could create miles of bus lanes, bike lanes, and other public uses.¹⁵

Boston doesn’t publish a single neat number, but Beacon Hill’s streets tell the story: rows of cars squeezed along both sides of narrow, historic streets, with pedestrians forced into the gaps between bumpers and stoops. On trash night, those same sidewalks and bits of curb transform into a second layer of car-sized objects — garbage bags.

The absurdity is that one standard car parking space (roughly 2×6 meters) is more than enough room for several households’ worth of rat-proof trash storage. A cluster of shared steel dumpsters, semi-underground containers, or a city-standard “Empire Bin” takes about the footprint of a single large SUV.¹⁰⁶

But because we’ve silently decided that storing private vehicles on public streets is normal, we treat the lack of space for decent trash infrastructure as some immutable fact of life.

Comparing systems: Amsterdam vs. Manhattan vs. Beacon Hill

Here’s a rough comparison of how three neighborhoods use their curb space for trash and parking:

The point isn’t that Amsterdam is perfect and New York/Boston are hopeless. It’s that Amsterdam already solved a design problem that Manhattan and Beacon Hill still pretend is impossible — using the same resource those neighborhoods currently dedicate to stationary cars.

Containerization Works in New York — Just Not Everywhere Yet

Critics of New York’s “Empire Bins” like to complain that they’re ugly, that they take away parking, or that they look like UFOs plopped onto historic blocks.¹⁶¹⁷ Those critiques are often backed by photos of one single space where a car used to sit, now occupied by a gray metal trash pod.

But step back for a second: if you hate looking at the bins, do you love looking at mountains of ripped plastic bags swarming with rats?

Early results from containerization pilots are hard to argue with. In Hamilton Heights and other parts of Upper Manhattan, the city reports rat sightings dropping sharply — up to 60% — after blocks switched from loose bags to shared curbside containers.⁶⁷ A 2025 mayoral update described nine straight months of declining rat complaints as containerization expanded into West Harlem and beyond.¹²

Put another way: in the exact neighborhoods where New York City has been willing to sacrifice a handful of parking spots, the “trash crisis” became much less of a crisis.

So why stop at pilots?

Beacon Hill: Historic Streets, Modern Trash

Beacon Hill might have some of the most photogenic streets in Boston, but on trash night it looks like anywhere else — or worse. The Beacon Hill Times bluntly argued that the neighborhood “won’t be able to ever solve its rat problem” until the city stops leaving garbage out overnight in thin plastic bags.¹⁴

At a 2023 Boston City Council hearing on rats, local officials noted that overnight bagged trash on Beacon Hill’s sidewalks simply isn’t compatible with long-term rat control.¹⁴ Boston’s broader rat mitigation program uses data and cross-departmental teams, but the city still routinely sees “waves” of bagged trash on sidewalk pickup days, especially in dense neighborhoods.³

There’s a better option hiding in plain sight:

• Map curbside parking: Count how many spaces exist on each block, especially where sidewalks are narrow and trash bags currently choke the pedestrian path.
• Trade a fraction of those spaces for containers: Even giving up one or two spots per block face would be enough to site shared dumpsters or semi-underground containers.
• Pick a historic-friendly design: Containers can be painted, clad, or partially buried to match the brick and stone context, just as Amsterdam uses low-profile street furniture in older areas.⁸⁹
• Shift pickup from the sidewalk to the street: Trucks service containers from the curb lane, not from the pedestrian realm, keeping sidewalks clear and rats out of easy reach of food.

None of this requires inventing new technology. It requires the political will to say “three fewer car spaces per block” is worth “far fewer rats, cleaner sidewalks, and less disgusting trash day.”

Why We Defend Parking and Revel in Garbage

If the engineering case for containerization is so straightforward, why do New Yorkers and Bostonians keep fighting over it?

A few human-behavior reasons:

1. Status-quo bias. Because loose bags and parked cars are what we grew up with, they feel “normal.” Anything new — especially large containers — feels like an imposition, even if it objectively improves conditions.
2. Windshield perspective. Many decision-makers experience the city from behind a steering wheel. They instinctively see curb space as a driver’s amenity first and only secondarily as infrastructure for trash, loading, cycling, or transit.⁵
3. Invisible success. When containerization works, nothing dramatic happens. You just stop thinking about trash. That quiet success is harder to photograph than a giant UFO-bin plopped next to a brownstone, so media coverage skews negative.¹⁶¹⁷
4. Fragmented responsibility. Trash touches sanitation, public works, public health, housing, and transportation. Parking touches DOT and local politics. Unless someone looks at the curb holistically, cars always win by default.

Amsterdam’s underground containers are a useful myth-busting example. They show that once containers are normalized as standard street furniture, people stop noticing them — just like they stop noticing parked cars now.¹⁸

A Simple, Slightly Radical Proposal

The problem isn’t that Manhattan and Beacon Hill don’t have space for public dumpsters. The problem is that we’re already using that space for free private car storage.

If you:

• Reclaim even 10–15% of curbside parking spaces in dense neighborhoods,
• Standardize shared, locked, rat-proof containers (above-ground or underground), and
• Design the streets so trash never touches the sidewalk,

…then you can basically delete “garbage day” as New Yorkers and Bostonians know it.

Residents can take out trash when it’s convenient. Rats lose their buffet. Sidewalks stay walkable. And sanitation workers service a smaller number of predictable curbside containers instead of playing Pacman with random bag piles.

New York has already proven this works on some blocks. Amsterdam has proven it can work across whole cities. Beacon Hill’s pretty brick sidewalks are crying out to be next.

Conclusion: Stop Making Garbage Choices

In the end, there’s nothing mysterious about the trash and rat problem in NYC and Boston: we choose to pile bags of food on the sidewalk while reserving prime curb space for car storage. Containerization and shared, rat-proof dumpsters would fit easily into the same space we already give away for parking. Until we’re willing to trade even a sliver of that curb for cleaner, safer streets, we’ll keep living with the consequences of our own garbage choices.

Footnotes