via Fark
Having never visited New York City, MTA officials decide to banish garbage cans from subway stations to help keep them cleaner
The evidence has piled beside turnstiles and beneath benches, along subway platforms where riders found nowhere else to place their coffee cups or apple cores and on the tracks where tattered newspapers and crushed bottles seem to have taken up permanent residence.
Yet despite some riders’ resourceful disposal methods since trash cans were removed from two subway stations last year, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority says the counterintuitive plan has worked: trash hauls have decreased, it said, and the stations are cleaner.
As a result, the authority said, the pilot program has been expanded to eight more stations, including stops at 57th Street in Manhattan, Brighton Beach in Brooklyn, and East 143rd Street in the Bronx.
“I’m actually very intrigued by this,” said Joseph J. Lhota, the transportation authority’s chairman, before urging riders to treat the subway “as you would treat your home.”
Asked if the measure could eventually be extended into a systemwide policy, Mr. Lhota said, “It could be.”
At the two stations that have been without trash bins since last fall — the Eighth Street and Broadway station in Greenwich Village and the Flushing-Main Street station in Queens — the number of trash bags hauled out by workers has decreased by 50 percent and 67 percent, the authority said.
Officials have described the logic of the program simply: If there is nowhere to discard trash, riders will take it with them — often outside of a station.
more
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/31/nyregion/mta-expands-an-effort-to-remove-trash-cans.html?_r=1
Degree of Fail to be determined but as one commenter asked:
You're kidding... right?
Having never visited New York City, MTA officials decide to banish garbage cans from subway stations to help keep them cleanerThe evidence has piled beside turnstiles and beneath benches, along subway platforms where riders found nowhere else to place their coffee cups or apple cores and on the tracks where tattered newspapers and crushed bottles seem to have taken up permanent residence.
Yet despite some riders’ resourceful disposal methods since trash cans were removed from two subway stations last year, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority says the counterintuitive plan has worked: trash hauls have decreased, it said, and the stations are cleaner.
As a result, the authority said, the pilot program has been expanded to eight more stations, including stops at 57th Street in Manhattan, Brighton Beach in Brooklyn, and East 143rd Street in the Bronx.
“I’m actually very intrigued by this,” said Joseph J. Lhota, the transportation authority’s chairman, before urging riders to treat the subway “as you would treat your home.”
Asked if the measure could eventually be extended into a systemwide policy, Mr. Lhota said, “It could be.”
At the two stations that have been without trash bins since last fall — the Eighth Street and Broadway station in Greenwich Village and the Flushing-Main Street station in Queens — the number of trash bags hauled out by workers has decreased by 50 percent and 67 percent, the authority said.
Officials have described the logic of the program simply: If there is nowhere to discard trash, riders will take it with them — often outside of a station.
more
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/31/nyregion/mta-expands-an-effort-to-remove-trash-cans.html?_r=1
Degree of Fail to be determined but as one commenter asked:
You're kidding... right?
