Behold: The NYC Free Parking Rat
People come to New York City from all over the world to see our rats. Well, OK, they come to see the Freedom Tower, Central Park, and noble 19th-century brownstones. But they also see our rats. And our rats are an achievement of sorts. We have what is probably the biggest population of the fattest rats in the United States. And we owe it largely to something called free parking. That is why I propose renaming our prevalent rat species, the Norway Rat, as the Free Parking Rat.
Free parking isn’t really free. It is parking with an externalized cost. When private cars are stored in public space — with no payment to the public — the public loses out in several ways. It is not compensated for the use of some of the most valuable real estate in the country. In 2023, with the migrant crisis about to trigger 15 percent across-the-board cuts in city services — including police, fire, sanitation, schools, libraries — this is more than a minor inconvenience.
But the most visually striking externalized cost is the rat buffet. Residential buildings and businesses put out trash in bags on the sidewalk, those often narrow slivers of street space allocated to pedestrians so that motorized traffic can have the center. (That includes delivery trucks and other necessary vehicles. More on them later.)
There is plenty of space for the trash on the other side of the curb. Even a relatively narrow one-way side street is usually at least the width of three vehicles, one lane for movement and two more at the sides, with enough clearance to let them avoid scraping one another. But our custom is to place the trash on the pedestrian side of the curb, where nearly everyone walks, as opposed to the vehicular side, where a privileged minority parks. Go figure.
Not only do we put our trash where people walk, push their shopping carts, and trundle in their wheelchairs. We also leave it unprotected. This makes walking an epic experience. You squeeze down a smaller subset of the small subset of street space allocated to pedestrians past trash piles that approach the height of an average human. The bags may be covered in urine. Thanks, dog walkers! And rats scurry back and forth within inches of your feet. Thanks, drivers!
Residents of, say, Paris or Barcelona are especially astonished at the spectacle of the New York City rat buffet. In their cities, trash collection has been containerized. Trash is placed in covered dumpsters on the vehicular size of the curb. That keeps it away from rats, leading to a smaller population of less obese rats.
It also allows mechanized trash collection. A truck picks up a full dumpster and deposits an empty one in its place. No need for a human being to physically pick up the urine-soaked bag of trash and hoist it into the back of a garbage truck. In NYC we refer to our sanitation men as New York’s Strongest, expressing our appreciation for them as we do to firefighters (New York’s Bravest) and police (New York’s Finest). But such lip service is meager compensation for systematically destroying their backs in a process that is inherently brutal, inhumane, and now obsolete.
Whenever I advocate for reducing incentives for the ownership and use of cars, a car owner stands up on his hind legs and accuses me of wanting to obstruct the trucks that deliver groceries to my local supermarket and other businesses. I often wonder whether they are incapable of distinguishing between necessary vehicles that serve the public interest and useless private vehicles that congest and pollute a city designed for walking and transit. Perhaps they realize they don’t have a leg to stand on and hope I won’t notice them falling over.
But that does bring me to another externalized cost of free parking — a critical shortage of curbside loading zones. In the space occupied by one or two private cars, each side of every block could have a space for UPS, FedEx, USPS, and other delivery trucks. Not to mention vans owned by movers and plumbers and other contractors. Instead these vehicles must be doubleparked and delivery drivers must haul boxes and parcels greater distances from trucks to buildings. It is often backbreaking work, and doubleparking puts them in the active roadway, at risk from moving vehicles. If their work can be made easier and safer, shouldn’t it?
We do have some loading zones but not nearly enough to accommodate the need, especially given the explosive growth of online commerce at the expense of brick-and-mortar stores. I recently spent an hour canvassing local hardware and home goods stores for a 12-inch hand mirror. Though I live in a densely populated neighborhood loaded with stores, I couldn’t find this simple item. Like so many things, it has become hard to find in a store. I ended up ordering it online. Let’s give the delivery driver who brought it to me a break.
When will New York City join the 21st century and embrace covered dumpsters on the correct side of the curb? If it happens, it will probably happen incrementally. One encouraging sign is a pair of new laws that Mayor Eric Adams has gotten through the City Council. One requires businesses to install covered dumpsters — but on the pedestrian side of the curb.
It’s a start. Voltaire (or was it Montesquieu?) suggested that “the perfect is the enemy of the good” and it’s good that rats will no longer be able to feast on unprotected garbage put out by restaurants and supermarkets. But the process won’t be complete without two further changes. Those dumpsters need to move to the other side of the curb. And residential buildings need covered dumpsters too.
There’s hope on the latter front. Another new city law has brought containerized trash collection to 10 blocks of West Harlem bounded by Broadway, Amsterdam Avenue, and West 143–152 streets. Unlike a previous pilot program, this one uses automated lifts. The previous experiment ran into trouble when some trash still ended up in bags outside the bins. The solution would seem to be more bins — and more curbside space in which to place them.
By the way, the bins aren’t pretty. But compared to piles of urine-soaked trash bags being fed on by obese rats — not to mention towering boxy SUVs with angry grilles — they’re an improvement. Voltaire (or was it Montesquieu?) would appreciate the distinction.
Another initiative by Mayor Adams has been to reduce the number of hours in which trash bags are allowed to sit prior to collection. The previous 4 p.m. has been pushed to 8 p.m., or 6 with lidded containers, reducing rat-buffet hours by two to four hours. The assumption seems to be that rats — which are quite intelligent, not to mention quite hungry — will fail to notice the change in their feeding time over and over, day after day. But if the trash were stored properly prior to collection, it wouldn’t matter how long it sat in the dumpsters, unseen and unlamented.
The sticking point for bringing New York’s trash collection into the 21st century is not just putting the trash in bins, and reducing the time its sits there, but putting the bins where they belong. To clear that final hurdle, the city needs to prioritize. Which matters more, reducing the rat population and making our most densely populated city a more civilized place in which to live and work and walk? Or letting drivers park private cars in public space without paying for it?
We haven’t got enough public space to do both. We have to pick one or the other.
Getting covered dumpsters on the right side of the curb will require a frank and probably bare-knuckled discussion about driver privilege and the rational use of public space. That discussion doesn’t seem to be happening outside activist circles, and when it comes, there will be a lot of screaming, hair pulling, posturing, distortion, and outright lying — because the privileged never give up their privileges without a fight. We can count on them to fight dirty.
In the meantime, until New York City makes its trash collection rational and humane, let’s remind ourselves of our shortcomings by renaming the Norway Rat. Henceforth it should be known as the Free Parking Rat. Let that be the name by which we call it whenever the conversation turns to those piles of unprotected trash bags, the obscenely fat rats feasting on them, and the obscenely privileged drivers who force us to continue living in stark medieval conditions as bloated long-tailed rodents scurry across sidewalks within inches of our feet.
