Corollary: don't hire a contracting company that primarily does government contracts. They'll be experts at billing you while failing to make progress. I know this from personal experience.
It's sad to see yet another way in which the SF city government wastes taxpayer money. I'm astonished that there hasn't been political motivation to form some kind of broad audit for the city's spending. But since I don't live in SF, I guess I can happily ignore these issues and be content with my own city's relatively modest decisions.
A tangent from your local product development engineer: never pay attention to the cost of prototypes. It's just not related to final product costs. It's a little like software: the first one's very expensive and the following ones are very cheap. In this case, it's because the prototypes are built by hand, often using the time of skilled engineers at hundreds of dollars an hour, with no factory tooling or anything. So of course they're going to be expensive.
That says nothing about the rest of this article, though.
> never pay attention to the cost of prototypes. It's just not related to final product costs. It's a little like software: the first one's very expensive and the following ones are very cheap.
Well, except the first question presented in the article is "why are we paying for any prototypes in the first place, instead of just using cans that already exist?"
Prototype costs seem pretty relevant to that question.
These trash cans will most likely be on the street for decades to come. For better or worse they'll be part of the city's image.
I can totally understand why a larger city like SF wants to spend some resources on this rather than just pick the next best off-the shelf solution without much thought.
"Part of the city's image"? I'd argue the city's image is dominated by homelessness, poop on the streets, lackluster enforcement of the law, corruption in city hall.
They could come up with the best possible trash can ever invented and it wouldn't move the need on resident's quality of life.
> "Part of the city's image"? I'd argue the city's image is dominated by homelessness, poop on the streets, lackluster enforcement of the law, corruption in city hall.
I mean I've only been to San Francisco a few times, but apart from the Tenderloin I thought it was a very beautiful city. Yeah, homelessness and public defecation are a problem, but do these have to be brought up in ANY discussion regarding SF? Groups of people can deal with multiple issues at once.
SF is a unique city in a beautiful location with a ton of organization problems. And yes, people love to exaggerate the problems, but I live outside the Tenderloin and still see poop on the street (though rarely) so these aren't limited to certain areas.
As a tax payer, I've noted that San Francisco has actually been removing trash cans, that worked perfectly well, because people just dump trash beside them for the city to pick up. No trash can, no dumping? No, they dump anyways.
So the solution isn't to use the old design which seemed to work "ok". Or even talk to other cities to see if they have better options SF could just buy. It was to completely redesign a trash can. Insane. I'm waiting for SF to hire an outside firm to resign the tires on their city vehicles.
So yes, you can solve multiple problems at once, but there are also only so many hours in the day and so many tax dollars to work with and spending any time/money on new trash cans is less time solving actual quality of life problems.
It seems at least tangentially relevant to the discussion more so than most, doesn't it?
Memories of human waste in the streets is the first thing I thought about after reading this article. I usually see at least one pile when I go into SF and walk around. I've also seen people actively relieving themselves and worse, and I've only wandered around SF maybe a dozen times.
Designing custom trash cans to optimize for esthetics in this context seems analogous to polishing a turd. It sounds like the bigger issue, ignoring potential corruption, is that they expect telemetry and sliding mechanisms in what notionally should just be some bent sheet metal, and assumed the stuff on the market was overpriced.
I lived in SF for a decade and saw poop on the street maybe once a year. I saw a needle maybe twice total.
You're a tourist and you go to tourist places and most of those areas suck. They also tend to have more homeless people than average because tourists give more money to them than locals.
Tourist areas in most cities are also where most crime and homelessness live.
> I lived in SF for a decade and saw poop on the street maybe once a year.
I lived in San Francisco for less than one year and saw people in the act of defecating in public more often than that. This was strictly a matter of walking between my apartment and my job.
Honestly, I think juxtaposing the world's most finely engineered trash can with members of a crime-ridden, homeless underclass that shit in the middle of the street is a perfect representation of the image that San Francisco projects globally.
San Francisco has an image in China of a place in the US where you can live without needing to speak English.
Unrelatedly, I find it interesting that, despite the fact that the Chinese name of the city is 旧金山, San Francisco insists on using a different name for itself in its official Chinese communications.
You don't want poop on the streets? Let people use a restroom. People aren't shitting in the streets because they like to. They're doing it because no business will let homeless people use the restroom, and there's no public restrooms.
Want to end homelessness? Give people homes. We can't do that, though, because public housing is "socialism".
Want less crime? Make sure people can afford to live and you'll see less crime. Enforcement of the law isn't the problem here, especially since crime levels are generally at some of the lowest levels in decades.
Corruption is a strawman. You can point at basically anything and complain about "corruption" and people will agree with you. This isn't adding anything to the conversation unless you're talking about wanting to fix specific corruption.
This take seems based on fantasy. SF is the most left-wing city in the US, and proudly labels itself socialist. The public housing in SF is a crime-ridden dump.
The crime is often due to organized criminal gangs, at least the car break-ins and shoplifting, the most visible and quality of life impacting crimes. Nobody is stealing clothing from malls because they are poor.
And no, corruption is not a strawman. When the city says "we just need more money", saying "stop wasting money on redesigned garbage cans that enrich your donors" is an perfectly reasonable response.
It's excuses like yours that detract from actually fixing the problems.
Maybe a gussied-up trash can is an excellent metaphor for 2021’s San Francisco? A city that can engage in world-class bike-shedding, but can’t deal with the entrenched interests and perverse incentives that make life miserable for so many of its inhabitants?
You're questioning whether this is a good thing to be doing at all. That's a very good question!
I'm saying that, if you're going to go down this path, costs in this ballpark are to be expected. That is, I don't think SF appears to be overpaying for their quixotic custom trashcans. (Again, at the ballpark/order of magnitude level.)
They explain this in the article, the specs they wanted (particularly around the sensor for intelligent emptying and durability) only existed in one existing product, and it was claimed to be too expensive as well as ugly. Having checked the website, I agree on the latter. Another model that only met some of the criteria cost even more than that.
So this seems like a standard buy/build decision being turned into a political drama.
And the prototype cost is still irrelevant, we should only care about the total cost of ownership.
As an aside, hey San Franciscans, consider supporting Mission Local. The work they are doing covering this kind of bureaucratic stuff is invaluable - this years reporting on the Dept. Building Inspection has been particularly good
I can already hear people sarcastically saying, "tax dollars at work."
What's the solution, though? Obviously part of this is staggering corruption, but I wouldn't be surprised if a large part of the problem here is also just fundamental incompetence on the part of these middle-managers. This is exactly what I would expect to come out of the worst design-by-committee no-initiative meetings. Spiraling costs, no understanding or acceptance of tradeoffs, and zero shame about the failures of the process. This has incompetent management written all over it, but no one will be held accountable for these failures. How can that change? Should we keep a public record of the projects that city councillors are involved in/advocate for?
Or does it really need to change? It's kind of an issue of dueling narratives. There are some public projects that are massive, embarassing failures, and some that go ahead on time, under budget, and quietly. We only really hear about the first, and there does seem to be a group that benefits from pushing the idea that large government projects always and inevitably fail. I don't know how common it really is, and it's hard to trust any source as definitive on the matter anymore given the incentives involved. Although from what I understand, Cost Disease is a thing - the prices of public infrastructure has gone up an order of magnitude over the last few decades.
I'm sympathetic to the idea that there's a large amount of waste in government spending - I've worked for large companies in the past, and it's not a stretch to imagine government as just a larger, even less tightly fiscally managed enterprise - but I don't think "smaller government" is the panacea that some propose. Especially because I don't believe anyone ever actually tries to shrink the government; a solution that no one would actually implement is not a good solution. Are there any practical proposals to increase accountability and effectiveness of government entities?
SF has less than a million people. Its budget is 12 billion (10 without the airport). You know how if you leave your cat food out, you get a fat cat? We left the cat food out and now he is ever ravenous, never satiated.
Bikeshedding, also known as Parkinson’s law of triviality, describes our tendency to devote a disproportionate amount of our time to menial and trivial matters while leaving important matters unattended.
I would add that the aspect that makes bikeshedding so dangerous is not that those working on it suddenly spend a lot of time on the colour of the shed — the aspect that makes it dangerous is that everybody thinks they can/should weigh in and develope strong opinions about shed colours.
The people working on the shed probably are the ones who most likely just want to get on with it.
California's Proposition 13 actually shrank the size of local governments by cutting off funding. That was a blunt instrument which probably needs some reform, but without that limiting factor San Francisco's city government would be even larger and more wasteful than it is today.
As for garbage cans, they could just order existing inexpensive products from any of the many suppliers out there.
Along the lines of unique receptacles, I ran across some public pizza box “bins” (they were basically a cube with an open top) in Los Gatos, CA. And to my surprise they had a stack of empty pizza boxes in them.
Get something off-the-shelf, add something to it to make it San Franciscan (or just a paint job). Don't design from scratch, we're a pretty unique city but... er... not that unique enough that an off the shelf trash can wouldn't work.
While we're talking trash we should scrap the CRV... the most idiotic policy whose only outcome seems to be trash/recyling gets emptied out all over the streets.
> incompetent management written all over it, but no one will be held accountable for these failures
Having worked in government, seeming incompetence is not the fault of administrators more than you'd think. The ideology of "government is the problem" has led to a lot of legislation that knee-caps good decision making e.g. forcing acceptance of the lowest bid.
Along those lines, as trust was retracted from government agencies expertise was often removed with it. Departments that use to keep technical personnel on staff to review policies and make recommendations were replaced with consultants who usually have many conflicts of interest.
I don't have good solutions, but it's a stick and multifaceted issue. There are no easy answers sadly.
I know that HN is know for its excess hyperbole (e.g. "the US is no better than Nazi Germany"), but after living in SF for coming up to 2 decades, I'm starting to realize the level of corruption in the gov't is probably up there with cities like Chicago.
Whether it's the planning department, sanitation, government contracts, etc, it's kind of startling seeing multiple high-level people get snagged. I mean the federal gov't through the DOJ has active corruption investigations going on - I assume the feds don't get involved unless there are some big fish to fry.
It would explain just how poorly SF is run despite one of the largest per capita budgets for a city/county (plus airport) in the US.
Includes maintenance, security, and supplies. And the maintenance and security staff will need to be paid reasonably per city expectations. Knowing San Francisco that toilet will get trashed quickly and have drug needles and stuff that needs to be cleaned up.
Given that the toilet was designed to address these issues, yes the maintenance and security costs need to be included. That is why they bought the self-cleaning armored toilets to begin with, to cut down on these costs. These toilets have mechanical machines that self-steam the interiors, the seat tilts up and self-cleans, the floors and walls are made of steel to resist vandalism and there are all sorts of sensors in place to automate the toilet.
So to the degree that this equipment breaks down or fails to deliver on the self-cleaning promise, those costs should be included in the total cost of the toilet, no?
Those Rube Goldberg machines will never survive contact with the public. 90% will be "out of order" at any one time, and in 5 years they'll all be scrapped.
I know just enough English English to know that securomad is security-crazy in American English. But it was like an etymological word riddle to get there.
There is so much corruption in this city the trash cans are an entertaining artifact of a much, much deeper problem. The quest for trash cans isn't bizarre when you consider where the incentives for those in government lie...
This is a city spending $55,000 per tent to "support" a parking lot camp ground with porta potties.
Let’s say 2 people per tent. That’s a population of 500. Let’s say there’s 1 security person per 10 homeless person @50k/year. That’s 2.5 million/year. Let’s say you need triple that for round the clock coverage. That’s still only 7.5 million. Let’s say food and restrooms eat up the rest of the budget. Are the homeless a prison-like demographic where you need a security guard every 10 people for order? Heck, even prisons don’t have this level of security. This feels like a grift for funneling money to security firms that hire off duty cops/ex cops for their services. The city should just hire the homeless directly for providing their own security services. At least that way the money would also be going into the community that needs it.
Maybe a bay-area startup like Bird or Lime could disrupt the streets of SF by covertly dumping^H^H^H^H^H^H installing trash cans all over town. Or even better, put the trash cans on the back of their scooters and offer discounted rides to destinations in need of cleanup. They could even pay their customers to ride out to a recycling facility which converts the collected waste material into green energy.
I'd be happy to read the overly sarcastic comments if SF had decided to buy an off-the-shelf solution which it turns out was unsuited to the climate, or which came with an obligatory maintenance contract, or which couldn't be uninstalled for the marathon, etc..
This is really being blown out of proportion. Spending $400k on a prototype for something that will cost $10M+, will be on every street, will be interacted with by every citizen seems pretty fucking reasonable. Their unit costs are basically in line with what other cities are paying. SF has its bullshit, but I don’t see this as that.
I really don’t see how it’s blown out of proportion. One, the article mentions that it is rather unclear, other than one idea or claim that it’s because of aesthetics, why the project is even being undertaken. That alone is cause for major concern. They’re spending money and wasting resources without even knowing why. Secondly, spending money on something when there’s already a solution seems bewildering, especially when there is no clear reason why those solutions don’t work. If it truly is aesthetics, is that what the people think or was it just someone’s personal feeling?
Lastly, San Francisco is riddled with trash and dirty streets. It seems rather surreal they’d spend so much on aesthetic trash cans, that may or may not work better than the existing solutions, when the streets are literally covered with human feces.
> San Francisco's streets are so filthy that at least one infectious disease expert has compared the city to some of the dirtiest slums in the world.
> "The contamination is ... much greater than communities in Brazil or Kenya or India," says Riley, who researched health conditions caused by extreme poverty in some of the world's poorest regions.
> Rubenstein from Public Works explained that in 2018, the department could not find a trash can that fulfilled an exacting list of features: a rolling inside can for easy emptying, a sensor to alert workers when a can is full, durability to withstand street life, and be tamper-proof.
> ...
> There were no off-the-shelf models that met most of those requirements, except for the Bigbelly. But those, at a cost of about $3,900 a can, were deemed too expensive. Nor were they particularly attractive, she said. The PEL [product] can also fit most of the requirements. It costs $6,400,
I'm not sure that's all that convincing given none of the prototypes have an accurate cost build. Also, the article below has some further detail that no other city has such requirements, so it's confusing why San Francisco does. And it doesn't address the question of will it actually help anything. One of the biggest problems seems to be people just dump trash next to existing trash cans or even where no trash cans are. This doesn't seem to address that. The requirements also address a symptom, homeless rummaging.
My original point stands in that it's not blown out of proportion and should be discussed.
You've not demonstrated this is actually costing more than a plausible alternative, just moved quickly on to complaining that it's an outrage to be spending so much and that they should be spending it on other things.
Lots of sensible ideas have components that cost more than the cheapest available alternative component e.g. if for example they introduced electric garbage trucks, it would be short-sighted to focus on just the up front cost of that vehicle versus a standard diesel alternative.
If other aspects (quiet operation, maintenance costs, fuel expenses, longevity) are counted then it may cost less overall, which is the only figure we should care about.
Yes, I can't prove that my hypothetical EV truck will deliver those future cost savings but if you're arguing against it without even mentioning those, then that's a very poor quality of argument and highly suggests you don't have anything better to use as your argument.
I'm also highly dubious, of why that article, from the same source, keeps referring to "primarily" and "most" of the bins that other cities use. Either they have a really strong case, and they have no idea how bad their presentation makes them look, or they are using these weasel words because they don't have an actual case. Since it seems to be some local civic government feud, I'm leaning towards the latter.
edit: reading further around this, the actual corruption seems to mostly stem from the trash collection being given to a monopoly in 1938, and there being no laws against that monopoly from giving gifts to the city employees that oversee them. Which seems insane, but also run of the mill for the US, where they often manage to be less market-oriented than European governments, while at the same time offering less benefits to the actual people paying for them. One of the drawbacks of living in an oligarchy rather than a democracy I guess.
> You've not demonstrated this is actually costing more than a plausible alternative.
Of course I haven’t, how could I? That’s up to the people running the project. My entire point was that this does not seem blown out of proportion to me and should actually be something for San Franciscans to push on. My personal opinion is that this does indeed seem like a vanity project on the outset but without more details, it’s hard to know. I think enough are there to not write it off though.
That linked comment just repeats the lie that they didn't even look at off-the-shelf options in an angrier tone. It's still just as easily refuted by reading to the end of the article.
Maybe there really is a rotten core to SF refuse collection, maybe there really is something going on with Bill Gates and Covid Vaccines, but angry people on the internet saying things that are demonstrabaly not true in an outraged tone is not a good basis for believing either proposition.
There are plenty of examples of SF government being wasteful, but this does seem pretty reasonable to me. Most cities can afford to be less concerned with the “tamper proof” feature, and when you add that to the other requirements, it’s not unreasonable that a custom bin is needed.
Plus, as other commenters have said, it’s one of the most visible public works, so it contributes quite a bit to the character of the city - a unique look would be nice.
This article seems like a political hitjob but, as the kind of nerd who actually thinks about street furniture, I was thinking it might be about one of those cool things where the small, visible interface leads to an underground vault:
65 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 143 ms ] threadThat says nothing about the rest of this article, though.
Well, except the first question presented in the article is "why are we paying for any prototypes in the first place, instead of just using cans that already exist?"
Prototype costs seem pretty relevant to that question.
I can totally understand why a larger city like SF wants to spend some resources on this rather than just pick the next best off-the shelf solution without much thought.
They could come up with the best possible trash can ever invented and it wouldn't move the need on resident's quality of life.
Total waste of money.
I mean I've only been to San Francisco a few times, but apart from the Tenderloin I thought it was a very beautiful city. Yeah, homelessness and public defecation are a problem, but do these have to be brought up in ANY discussion regarding SF? Groups of people can deal with multiple issues at once.
As a tax payer, I've noted that San Francisco has actually been removing trash cans, that worked perfectly well, because people just dump trash beside them for the city to pick up. No trash can, no dumping? No, they dump anyways.
So the solution isn't to use the old design which seemed to work "ok". Or even talk to other cities to see if they have better options SF could just buy. It was to completely redesign a trash can. Insane. I'm waiting for SF to hire an outside firm to resign the tires on their city vehicles.
So yes, you can solve multiple problems at once, but there are also only so many hours in the day and so many tax dollars to work with and spending any time/money on new trash cans is less time solving actual quality of life problems.
Memories of human waste in the streets is the first thing I thought about after reading this article. I usually see at least one pile when I go into SF and walk around. I've also seen people actively relieving themselves and worse, and I've only wandered around SF maybe a dozen times.
Designing custom trash cans to optimize for esthetics in this context seems analogous to polishing a turd. It sounds like the bigger issue, ignoring potential corruption, is that they expect telemetry and sliding mechanisms in what notionally should just be some bent sheet metal, and assumed the stuff on the market was overpriced.
You're a tourist and you go to tourist places and most of those areas suck. They also tend to have more homeless people than average because tourists give more money to them than locals.
Tourist areas in most cities are also where most crime and homelessness live.
I lived in San Francisco for less than one year and saw people in the act of defecating in public more often than that. This was strictly a matter of walking between my apartment and my job.
Yes, unless public defecation has suddenly become some kind of understandable foible that might happen anywhere.
Unrelatedly, I find it interesting that, despite the fact that the Chinese name of the city is 旧金山, San Francisco insists on using a different name for itself in its official Chinese communications.
Want to end homelessness? Give people homes. We can't do that, though, because public housing is "socialism".
Want less crime? Make sure people can afford to live and you'll see less crime. Enforcement of the law isn't the problem here, especially since crime levels are generally at some of the lowest levels in decades.
Corruption is a strawman. You can point at basically anything and complain about "corruption" and people will agree with you. This isn't adding anything to the conversation unless you're talking about wanting to fix specific corruption.
The crime is often due to organized criminal gangs, at least the car break-ins and shoplifting, the most visible and quality of life impacting crimes. Nobody is stealing clothing from malls because they are poor.
And no, corruption is not a strawman. When the city says "we just need more money", saying "stop wasting money on redesigned garbage cans that enrich your donors" is an perfectly reasonable response.
It's excuses like yours that detract from actually fixing the problems.
1. Financial hardships
2. Mental illness
3. Lifestyle change
I'm saying that, if you're going to go down this path, costs in this ballpark are to be expected. That is, I don't think SF appears to be overpaying for their quixotic custom trashcans. (Again, at the ballpark/order of magnitude level.)
So this seems like a standard buy/build decision being turned into a political drama.
And the prototype cost is still irrelevant, we should only care about the total cost of ownership.
What's the solution, though? Obviously part of this is staggering corruption, but I wouldn't be surprised if a large part of the problem here is also just fundamental incompetence on the part of these middle-managers. This is exactly what I would expect to come out of the worst design-by-committee no-initiative meetings. Spiraling costs, no understanding or acceptance of tradeoffs, and zero shame about the failures of the process. This has incompetent management written all over it, but no one will be held accountable for these failures. How can that change? Should we keep a public record of the projects that city councillors are involved in/advocate for?
Or does it really need to change? It's kind of an issue of dueling narratives. There are some public projects that are massive, embarassing failures, and some that go ahead on time, under budget, and quietly. We only really hear about the first, and there does seem to be a group that benefits from pushing the idea that large government projects always and inevitably fail. I don't know how common it really is, and it's hard to trust any source as definitive on the matter anymore given the incentives involved. Although from what I understand, Cost Disease is a thing - the prices of public infrastructure has gone up an order of magnitude over the last few decades.
I'm sympathetic to the idea that there's a large amount of waste in government spending - I've worked for large companies in the past, and it's not a stretch to imagine government as just a larger, even less tightly fiscally managed enterprise - but I don't think "smaller government" is the panacea that some propose. Especially because I don't believe anyone ever actually tries to shrink the government; a solution that no one would actually implement is not a good solution. Are there any practical proposals to increase accountability and effectiveness of government entities?
Corruption is one, but are there actually incentives to run lean for a govt government here, or do they act like money is free.
https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/bikeshedding/
The people working on the shed probably are the ones who most likely just want to get on with it.
As for garbage cans, they could just order existing inexpensive products from any of the many suppliers out there.
And then there is their Wine bottle recycling receptacle. Looks like something out of some cartoon. Looks so unique!
[1]:https://myparttimeparislife.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/publ...
While we're talking trash we should scrap the CRV... the most idiotic policy whose only outcome seems to be trash/recyling gets emptied out all over the streets.
Having worked in government, seeming incompetence is not the fault of administrators more than you'd think. The ideology of "government is the problem" has led to a lot of legislation that knee-caps good decision making e.g. forcing acceptance of the lowest bid.
Along those lines, as trust was retracted from government agencies expertise was often removed with it. Departments that use to keep technical personnel on staff to review policies and make recommendations were replaced with consultants who usually have many conflicts of interest.
I don't have good solutions, but it's a stick and multifaceted issue. There are no easy answers sadly.
Whether it's the planning department, sanitation, government contracts, etc, it's kind of startling seeing multiple high-level people get snagged. I mean the federal gov't through the DOJ has active corruption investigations going on - I assume the feds don't get involved unless there are some big fish to fry.
It would explain just how poorly SF is run despite one of the largest per capita budgets for a city/county (plus airport) in the US.
https://archaeologymysteries.com/2019/02/26/how-did-the-roma...
So to the degree that this equipment breaks down or fails to deliver on the self-cleaning promise, those costs should be included in the total cost of the toilet, no?
This is a city spending $55,000 per tent to "support" a parking lot camp ground with porta potties.
Spoiler: much of the cost is for 24/7 onsite security
Even with 24/7 security (and SF wages) the costs seems high.
Lastly, San Francisco is riddled with trash and dirty streets. It seems rather surreal they’d spend so much on aesthetic trash cans, that may or may not work better than the existing solutions, when the streets are literally covered with human feces.
https://www.npr.org/2018/08/01/634626538/san-francisco-squal...
Quotes from that article:
> San Francisco's streets are so filthy that at least one infectious disease expert has compared the city to some of the dirtiest slums in the world.
> "The contamination is ... much greater than communities in Brazil or Kenya or India," says Riley, who researched health conditions caused by extreme poverty in some of the world's poorest regions.
> ...
> There were no off-the-shelf models that met most of those requirements, except for the Bigbelly. But those, at a cost of about $3,900 a can, were deemed too expensive. Nor were they particularly attractive, she said. The PEL [product] can also fit most of the requirements. It costs $6,400,
My original point stands in that it's not blown out of proportion and should be discussed.
> https://missionlocal.org/2021/08/san-franciscos-proposed-tra...
The actual three prototypes:
> https://sfpublicworks.org/trashcanredesign
Lots of sensible ideas have components that cost more than the cheapest available alternative component e.g. if for example they introduced electric garbage trucks, it would be short-sighted to focus on just the up front cost of that vehicle versus a standard diesel alternative.
If other aspects (quiet operation, maintenance costs, fuel expenses, longevity) are counted then it may cost less overall, which is the only figure we should care about.
Yes, I can't prove that my hypothetical EV truck will deliver those future cost savings but if you're arguing against it without even mentioning those, then that's a very poor quality of argument and highly suggests you don't have anything better to use as your argument.
I'm also highly dubious, of why that article, from the same source, keeps referring to "primarily" and "most" of the bins that other cities use. Either they have a really strong case, and they have no idea how bad their presentation makes them look, or they are using these weasel words because they don't have an actual case. Since it seems to be some local civic government feud, I'm leaning towards the latter.
edit: reading further around this, the actual corruption seems to mostly stem from the trash collection being given to a monopoly in 1938, and there being no laws against that monopoly from giving gifts to the city employees that oversee them. Which seems insane, but also run of the mill for the US, where they often manage to be less market-oriented than European governments, while at the same time offering less benefits to the actual people paying for them. One of the drawbacks of living in an oligarchy rather than a democracy I guess.
Of course I haven’t, how could I? That’s up to the people running the project. My entire point was that this does not seem blown out of proportion to me and should actually be something for San Franciscans to push on. My personal opinion is that this does indeed seem like a vanity project on the outset but without more details, it’s hard to know. I think enough are there to not write it off though.
This comment seems relevant regarding what problem they are actually trying to solve, if there is one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28639600
> One of the drawbacks of living in an oligarchy rather than a democracy
Agreed there.
Maybe there really is a rotten core to SF refuse collection, maybe there really is something going on with Bill Gates and Covid Vaccines, but angry people on the internet saying things that are demonstrabaly not true in an outraged tone is not a good basis for believing either proposition.
Plus, as other commenters have said, it’s one of the most visible public works, so it contributes quite a bit to the character of the city - a unique look would be nice.
https://www.elkoplast.eu/underground-containers
Probably hard to retrofit in the middle of cities though.
Or even pneumatic trash tubes, like in NY:
https://untappedcities.com/2020/04/09/inside-roosevelt-islan...
Which would seem more appropriate for HN discussion.