Stupid: NYC tries removing trashcans to make subways cleaner

Without trashcans there may be less trash to haul away, but it is all on the ground...

Via NYT:

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.[...] 

Nearby, in a narrow alcove between a pay phone kiosk and a vertical beam, riders appeared to have fashioned a rogue receptacle. Detritus piled about three feet high — a mélange of crushed energy drink cans; bottles of water and, in at least one case, vodka; mounds of wrappers and paper cups; and what appeared to have once been a white T-shirt. 

Dilu Chowdhury, 51, who operates a newsstand inside the station, said the surrounding area had become far dirtier in recent months. Customers often ask to use his trash bin. “I take it,” he said of customers’ waste, “but it is not enough.”