A San Francisco Public Works pilot placed trash cans on every corner and mid-block in a busy neighborhood. Counter-intuitively, this saturation did not significantly decrease litter, revealing that can availability is not the primary driver of public cleanliness; human behavior is.
The public perceives a city's ability to manage trash collection as a proxy for its overall competence. Similar to "pothole politics" or snow removal, visible failures in this basic service lead citizens to logically leap to the conclusion that the government is failing in other, less visible ways.
San Francisco's Public Works department reveals a paradoxical challenge: for every citizen request to add a trash can, another request often follows to remove it from the same spot. This is because public cans can become magnets for illegal dumping and other nuisances, creating a constant tension between convenience and order.
San Francisco's $20,000 trash can prototypes drew media outrage, but this cost covered initial industrial design, development, and custom manufacturing. The final mass-produced cans cost a more reasonable $1,400 each, showing how prototype expenses don't reflect the final unit price for public infrastructure.
San Francisco's process to select and roll out a new public trash can design will span nearly nine years. This lengthy timeline illustrates how mandated public feedback periods, competitive bidding laws, contracting, and unforeseen crises like COVID can extend the schedule for seemingly simple infrastructure projects far beyond public expectation.