More Than a Mile of Legal Parking Spaces Slated to Disappear from Lower Manhattan
The City’s Department of Sanitation (DSNY) recently published a Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) for the launch of its citywide containerization program, which will install Empire Bins on local streets in a phased roll-out scheduled for completion by 2032.
Empire Bins hold four cubic yards of waste—or the equivalent of two dozen 32-gallon bags—and will be mandatory for all residential buildings with more than 30 units. They are a component in the City’s broader plan for a “Trash Revolution,” a containerization program budgeted at more than $150 million over the next five years that aims to eradicate traditional garbage bags from urban curbsides and thus (among other benefits) starve the local rat population.
In June, according to DSNY statistics, Lower Manhattan residents (roughly, Manhattan south of Canal Street, Pearl Street, and the Brooklyn Bridge) generated 2,352.5 tons of waste. This was divided between general refuse (1,780 tons); recyclable paper and cardboard (325.3 tons); metal, glass, plastic, and beverage containers (225.2 tons); and food scraps, food-soiled paper, and yard waste (22 tons). These gargantuan totals are dwarfed, however, by commercial waste generated within the same boundaries which will not be collected in Empire Bins—a tally that is approximately eight times greater (or almost 19,000 tons per month).
But finding enough Lower Manhattan curb space to accommodate a sufficient number of Empire Bins—each of them wider and taller than five feet, but requiring more than eight feet of horizontal length—to service the subset of Lower Manhattan’s trash volume created just by residents is a dilemma that DSNY is still struggling with.
The DEIS notes that Community District 1 contains 206,205 total linear feet of curb available for on-street parking, along with 10,310 existing available legal parking spaces. The same document estimates that 828 Empire Bins will be required to service Lower Manhattan residential buildings, which entails commandeering 354 spaces, or 7,060 linear feet of curb space, the equivalent of 1.3 miles of parking.
A 2023 report from DSNY, “The Future of Trash,” notes that half of local blocks have so many apartments that installing the required number of Empire Bins would mean taking between 50 and 150 percent of available curb space. (While occupying more than 100 percent of available space sounds like a contradiction, DSNY uses this as a metric to gauge the deficit of space it must reckon with.)
In other areas of the City, DSNY plans to mitigate this dilemma by doubling local collections to twice each week. But “The Future of Trash” analysis says that “containerization is not viable on 11 percent of street sections, where it would require 50 percent to 150 percent of street length; doubling collection frequency does not bring these streets under the viability threshold. This includes only mid-to-high density street sections that use shared containers.” The report cites Community District 1 as among these zones.
“In dense business districts like Lower Manhattan, the commercial waste tonnage is eight times greater than the residential waste tonnage, and requires up to 40 times the number of shared containers. This is an impossible amount of waste to containerize on the street,” the report continues.
“The Future of Trash” acknowledges that these constrictions will be worsened by the local proliferation of seasonal roadbed dining—a program that allows restaurants to claim space within streets for additional tables and chairs.
DSNY spokesman Vincent Gragnani responds that since the “Future of Trash” report was published, “we have come to find that containerization would be feasible on all New York City blocks, including Lower Manhattan. The DEIS, along with our public commitment to extend containerization to every district in the City, reflects current policy.”
Neither “The Future of Trash” nor the DEIS, however, quantifies two additional aggravating factors: the prevalence within Community District 1 of “Authorized Vehicles Only” parking spaces set aside for the exclusive use of government employees, and the local profusion of placard parking (legal or illegal spaces occupied with impunity by other government employees, who display credentials in the windshields of personal vehicles). Because of the local preponderance of government agency offices (municipal, State, and federal), Lower Manhattan has more of both of these categories contributing to a parking shortage than any other Community District in the five boroughs.
The DEIS does acknowledge one nuance with regard to placard parking, however. Under a category titled, “Potential Number of DSNY Collection Trucks and Employee Vehicles Requiring Temporary On-Street Parking,” the documents notes that the Sanitation Department will require curbside space for one truck and 11 employee vehicles in Lower Manhattan every weekday.