This honestly appears to be a very difficult problem to solve.
It seems that to be truly be effective in rat reduction at a city scale the fix may need to come from elsewhere and may have very little to do with directly working on exterminating the rats.
Fixes may be needed starting from urban planning through waste/sewage handling methods at a street level all the way up to the city.
Also not sure if there would be enough leverage and incentives for any candidate who is going to be hired for this job at their advertised $120K to be able to achieve that kind of a change!
Seems like another easy win for the rats at the tax payers expense!
Oh let me tell you the story of Worcester, MA. Now Worcester (pronounced woostah) is much smaller than NYC but still nothing tiny. It has city trash pickup but instead of taxing its citizens for this service it came up with the ingenious plan to charge people for usage. If you want to throw out some trash what you do is you go to a nearby convenience or liquor store and buy these tiny flimsy yellow bags for a fairly steep price (when I lived there it was nearly $2/bag), and then you just put your garbage in the bags and put it on the curb and it’ll get picked up. This way those who generate more garbage pay more and people would be encouraged to generate less garbage. Genius, right?
No, wrong. So wrong. As I’m sure you can already see, it’s far easier to just leave your trash on the street than to take a trip to the city-ordained liquor stores to buy the approved bags. And with the bags being tiny and flimsy you don’t have much of an option for anything larger to get tossed. Got a big pillow? A dirty paint bucket? A 2x4? Just leave that anywhere. It was honestly one of the dirtiest places I’ve ever lived.
In NYC there are certain days at certain hours when garbage in black trash bags can be left at specific spots on the sidewalk/streets by the residential building supers.
There are rules to this, if garbage was left on the sidewalk everyday at all hours of the day then every block would have would lined up with garbage on the street.
Philly does the same thing. You put your trash out on the sidewalk the night before pickup (or morning). You can put out a bin, but since there's no room to lift them by machine, bags get pulled out of the bin and often get ripped open.
The building next door has dumpsters... I see rats running back and forth to them.
>It seems that to be truly be effective in rat reduction at a city scale the fix may need to come from elsewhere and may have very little to do with directly working on exterminating the rats
yeah, basically treat the root cause rather than symptoms of the problem. Hiring more rat killers is like taking pain killers instead of fixing whatever injury is causing the pain.
Realistically this problem would require some sort of position that has temporary authority across multiple departments where systematic changes need to be made to actually solve the problem. Instead you get more rat killers as a band aid solution
One underappreciated but is extermination generally leads to more rats. If you just kill off rats but do not make the area less hospitable to them, it registers as a good place to live due to less competition and they show up & breed.
This is currently a big issue in my city. Efforts are focusing on extermination only but since they can never get all of them it keeps making the problem worse in tbe areas of concentration.
Kind of like with weeds. Go ahead and pull them out, but as long as there are a few or some seeds remaining and a whole whack of substrate to grow in… They will be back in a hurry.
The rats can’t live there if food isn’t so readily available. I’ve seen the terrifying videos of them eating each other, but presumably even that could only last so long. Poorly managed waste seems to be a huge factor in this, and rats on a symptom.
Sorry for seeing nails everywhere as a robotics engineer but wouldn't it be awesome to have human-driven garbage trucks driving down 5th, 6th, 7th avenue while smaller https://www.nuro.ai/ sized autonomous vans go up and down the perpendicular streets picking up trash every day.
You increase frequency of trash pick up 5x at the same staff levels. Rats be damned.
Also seems like a constrained enough environment that you wouldn't get mired in autonomous driving corner case hell. It would be small bike sized vehicles driving in bike lanes.
I feel like the further I dig into automating anything, the more I find fucking everything has a huge margin for error and narrowing those margins is like a lifetime of engineering in itself.
Mind you I’m not an engineer at all, I just play one on the weekend. But really, some seemingly trivial stuff can become really complicated in a hurry. I can see automated trash pickup accidentally disposing of kids or something on the first day.
Like you though, I love the idea. I’m just more discouraged by my own incompetence.
yeah no offense but I think robots aren't the right solution here. Roosevelt island has a pneumatic system that sucks garbage through underground tubes. It's not foolproof, but it's probably a lot simpler and more efficient than a fleet of robots
My take is that it's the sheer population density that enables it. Large, dense European cities like Paris and Barcelona also have a rat problem.
Rats travel within a 100 meter radius from their nest in search for food, so more humans = more waste = more food. Even if we keep everything tidy there's always this 1% of assholes who litter.
At the same time the denser the city, the more difficult it is to conduct waste disposal services because even the nicest garbage container is going to smell, so you want it appropriately far from buildings and garbage trucks are large vehicles, which struggle in narrow alleys.
I can't imagine there being a solution to rats in sewers. NYC is a sprawling city and the sewers are necessarily large and must be put in place where they can be dug up and replaced. I feel like the more sustainable option is above ground, but I don't know NYC that well.
My mom has told me that the rat problem in NYC used to be a lot less. The rat population exploded when buildings were no longer allowed to incinerate their garbage for air-quality considerations.
N=1, but my neighborhood in NYC has both feral cats and rats. Maybe not as many rats as other neighborhoods in the area, but enough that it doesn’t seem to be a real solution.
(There are other issues as well, like the cats destroying local bird populations and getting sick when they kill poisoned rats.)
There are a few different ways to address the problem of rats in New York in a creative way. One approach could be to implement a city-wide composting program, which would reduce the amount of food waste available for rats to eat. Additionally, the city could invest in more effective waste management infrastructure, such as sealed trash cans and improved sanitation systems, to make it harder for rats to access food sources. Another creative solution could be to introduce predators, such as birds of prey or snakes, into areas where rats are a problem. This approach would help to naturally control the rat population without the need for harmful pesticides. Ultimately, the key to addressing the problem of rats in New York will be to implement a comprehensive, multi-faceted approach that addresses the root causes of the problem.
I actually find it pretty cringe - trying to insert movie/cartoon tropes into real life. Definitely written by someone raised on too much TV and internet.
I wouldn't say cringe, it's just a form of content marketing. If it were a standard dry job post would we even be talking about it? It drummed up interest for the position while simultaneously showing a humanized NYC government who takes the rat problem seriously.
I don't know. This entire job listing smells of a PR role created to communicate how the New York government is getting the job done rather than actually getting the job done.
Thanks for making my day! You described exactly the picture i had in my mind...well plus he was from London and looked a bit like Sherlock Holmes (just for the interview of course).
>>New York’s Citywide Director of Rodent Mitigation.
That could be also the Director for IT security ;)
Being from Europe, is that whole thing New York City humor? It's incredible funny:
>>New York City’s rats are legendary for their survival skills, but they don’t run this city – we do.
Y'all know me. Know how I earn a livin'. I'll catch this furball for you, but it ain't gonna be easy. Bad rodent. Not like going down to the sewer and chasing mice and raccoons. This rat, swallow your whole pizza slice. No shakin', no tenderizin', down it goes. And we gotta do it quick, that'll bring back your stock traders, put all your businesses on a payin' basis. But it's not gonna be pleasant. I value my neck a lot more than three thousand bucks, chief. I'll find him for three, but I'll catch him, and kill him, for ten. But you've gotta make up your minds. If you want to stay alive, then ante up. If you want to play it cheap, be on welfare the whole winter. I don't want no volunteers, I don't want no deputies, there's too many CEOs on this island. Ten thousand dollars for me by myself. For that you get the head, the tail, the whole damn thing.
(I like that "island" still works because Manhattan)
Living in NYC with rats, I'm always reminded of Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, where Jack Shaftoe is in Paris in the late 17th century and meets St-George, the city's preeminent rat-catcher. St-George explains how no one is never going to exterminate _all_ of the rats, so he instead only kills the bad kind of rats and lets the "good" rats live, in a sort of multi-generational rat breeding program. St-George says that he has been doing this for many years, and his father before him, and his father before that. Jack asks, "how do you know the rats aren't breeding YOU?"
I had a similar thought today when feeding some crows. Usually they don’t like it when other people show up, and they leave or hide for a bit in a tree or some such. So by proxy I don’t like having people around since we all have to wait. It’s a nice bit of converged purpose I guess where I adapt my behavior as well. Most people who go there are usually oblivious of any birds. They just don’t see it.
The only reason this is a problem is because the city refuses to use containerized trash collection (such as dumpsters). Turns out, dumping trash bags on the street for 12 hours 3-6 times a week is basically a free buffet for rats.
The reason the city doesn't implement containerized trash collection is because that would mean giving up a few free parking spots every block.
It got worse during COVID-19 because the city temporarily suspended collection/extermination, which caused the rodent population to explode, and it's never recovered from that. But eliminating the regular meals for rats would be an easy, no-brainer way to fix it.
An anecdote: My NYC neighborhood has seen a building boom over the past decade. As far as I can tell, every new building puts its trash out on the street.
Some particularly memorable examples include a 75 story residential tower with absolutely record-breaking trash piles, and a ~25 story residential tower with a trash collection point on the onramp to the Williamsburg bridge. Garbage trucks have to stop in the road to collect trash, manually, bag-by-bag, at every stop.
This is the policy for trash in NYC, and rats will remain a problem as long as it stays that way.
Go look at the absolutely massive piles of trash bags outside 20 Exchange Place in the financial district (huge office tower retrofitted to rental apartments) for an example of this. There's nowhere to put dumpsters and obviously no alleyway...
The only reason this is a problem is because the city refuses to use containerized trash collection (such as dumpsters). Turns out, dumping trash bags on the street for 12 hours 3-6 times a week is basically a free buffet for rats.
The US confuses the hell out of me sometimes.
How do you get to the moon and invent the internet, but can't figure out how to collect refuse in arguably your most prominent city?
Some cities in Europe use underground containers. (An arm on the collection truck can lift them right out of the ground. It's pretty neat.) I wonder if that is feasible for NYC.
This would be prohibitively expensive due to the number of underground utilities. In Manhattan, there isn't even a map of all pipes/etc. under a given street or sidewalk, because they were laid so long ago - every time digging is done, they need to carefully dig it up and see what's even there and document it.
So there's no way to even figure out how this could be done without doing all the digging, etc., and at that point the expense is prohibitive.
Not to mention that building that system would require giving up parking spots for the construction, which would cause the same political pushback from the same opponents, so at that point you might as well just do above-ground collection for a fraction of the price, since you'll be fighting the same political battles either way.
I once stayed at a flat in Berlin and there were rats living in the building trash container. They would literally be scurrying on the top of the pile when I opened it up to throw trash bags away. Hands down my worst experience with rats, even coming from NYC.
This was in Kreuzberg and there seemed to be a lot of rats there because of some abandoned buildings and construction + fields of dirt for them to burrow in
They could adopt Taiwan's musical garbage trucks with zero investment in new garbage containers or loss of parking. Garbage bags go directly from properties into the truck, spending no time festering on the sidewalk.
Great, then removing parking will also reduce the homicide rate, in addition to starving the rats, speeding up the bus service, and keeping everyone from getting cancer and dementia. Really, is there anything that banning cars doesn't solve?
I was watching a Disney+ documentary on the making of Disney World and was impressed that all the garage cans use pneumatic tubes to empty in a central dump not visible to guests. Is such a solution not possible at NYC scale?
> I was watching a Disney+ documentary on the making of Disney World and was impressed that all the garage cans use pneumatic tubes to empty in a central dump not visible to guests. Is such a solution not possible at NYC scale?
There is one portion of Manhattan where that is done, yes.
That would be cost-prohibitive in most of the city due to the amount of digging required, and the expense of digging in NYC (an old city which has extensive underground piping and infrastructure that was laid before these things were regularly documented, so there's no way to know which water/electricity/etc lines are in an area before you actually dig there).
The qualifications for the role are very poor if you're looking for someone to be effective:
> Bachelor’s Degree required, preferably public policy, or related design fields, plus 5-8 years of
full-time professional experience in a field related to this position
> Swashbuckling attitude, crafty humor, and general aura of badassery
Wouldn't you value someone who actually knows how to control vermin populations at scale in an urban environment? Why would you value someone who has a "public policy" degree. What even is that?
And why does this person need to be a funny pirate? In essence, Jack Sparrow with a public policy degree appears to be the ideal candidate.
To me it sounds like they're more interested in giving off the perception of doing something about the problem while entertaining the public about it, rather than actually solving the problem effectively.
You see a lot of private companies add silly qualifications like this as well. So I don't really think it indicates anything other than the dept in question trying to be more "hip".
That being said, it seems clear now that everything from the Adams administration should be treated as "giving off the perception of doing something instead of solving the problem" until proven otherwise.
>Wouldn't you value someone who actually knows how to control vermin populations at scale in an urban environment? Why would you value someone who has a "public policy" degree. What even is that?
Probably because the real solution (not putting trash directly onto the streets like it's 1780) isn't going to happen, so a degree in public policy will help make it look like you're actually going to do something.
It's a management role. They want you to understand and navigate the bureaucracy involved in being a middle manager in city government. Negotiating with Czar of Trash in order to make that real solution a reality, is probably more important than being an expert trap maker. But you definitely want that person on your team!
We put trash on the streets in Tokyo and it's fine; there's no rats here. The key is only putting the trash out the morning before pick-up (so it's only out there a short time; putting it out the evening before is not allowed), and also just keeping the city generally clean, which is NOT something NYC does.
Also, to facilitate this, most buildings (esp. multi-unit dwellings) have large trash rooms for collecting and sorting trash before management puts it out on the correct day for that type of trash.
“The rats are absolutely going to hate this announcement. But the rats don’t run this city. We do” has become a top tier audio meme. I think I hear this in my head about as often as I see “(x) Doubt” or “This is fine (dog engulfed in flames)”
NYC really did a great job with the marketing on this.
I think the real reason TikTok was successful is it popularized the audio/video meme and the means for them to go viral.
Whatever it popularized is the exact opposite of what entertains me. I was recently sent a link to tiktok that was a video set to random music of a single screenshot of a single tweet.
Readit News
I imagine simply requiring bins/dumpsters would absolutely devastate the rat populations.
No, wrong. So wrong. As I’m sure you can already see, it’s far easier to just leave your trash on the street than to take a trip to the city-ordained liquor stores to buy the approved bags. And with the bags being tiny and flimsy you don’t have much of an option for anything larger to get tossed. Got a big pillow? A dirty paint bucket? A 2x4? Just leave that anywhere. It was honestly one of the dirtiest places I’ve ever lived.
There are rules to this, if garbage was left on the sidewalk everyday at all hours of the day then every block would have would lined up with garbage on the street.
This is what the new trash receptacles look like that businesses will be required to use: https://citibin.com/
The building next door has dumpsters... I see rats running back and forth to them.
But it’s probably too crowded I dunno. Maybe people should start eating the rats… lol
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/oct/15/urban-fo...
Honestly, I got no problems with the rats. They're kinda cute actually.
yeah, basically treat the root cause rather than symptoms of the problem. Hiring more rat killers is like taking pain killers instead of fixing whatever injury is causing the pain.
Realistically this problem would require some sort of position that has temporary authority across multiple departments where systematic changes need to be made to actually solve the problem. Instead you get more rat killers as a band aid solution
Deleted Comment
This is currently a big issue in my city. Efforts are focusing on extermination only but since they can never get all of them it keeps making the problem worse in tbe areas of concentration.
Kind of like with weeds. Go ahead and pull them out, but as long as there are a few or some seeds remaining and a whole whack of substrate to grow in… They will be back in a hurry.
The rats can’t live there if food isn’t so readily available. I’ve seen the terrifying videos of them eating each other, but presumably even that could only last so long. Poorly managed waste seems to be a huge factor in this, and rats on a symptom.
You increase frequency of trash pick up 5x at the same staff levels. Rats be damned.
Also seems like a constrained enough environment that you wouldn't get mired in autonomous driving corner case hell. It would be small bike sized vehicles driving in bike lanes.
Mind you I’m not an engineer at all, I just play one on the weekend. But really, some seemingly trivial stuff can become really complicated in a hurry. I can see automated trash pickup accidentally disposing of kids or something on the first day.
Like you though, I love the idea. I’m just more discouraged by my own incompetence.
https://www.npr.org/2017/07/26/539304811/how-new-york-s-roos...
Rats travel within a 100 meter radius from their nest in search for food, so more humans = more waste = more food. Even if we keep everything tidy there's always this 1% of assholes who litter.
At the same time the denser the city, the more difficult it is to conduct waste disposal services because even the nicest garbage container is going to smell, so you want it appropriately far from buildings and garbage trucks are large vehicles, which struggle in narrow alleys.
NYC is filthy.
NY can start by using garbage bins instead of the sidewalk. Even my suburban town collects garbage in an animal safe container.
This is the unofficial city byline: "New York City - where the rats always win."
Or like teams of trained dogs.
If your problem is hundreds of mice, get terriers. They just kill and move on, they don't play with the mouse or eat it.
https://youtu.be/l2Pyu-Cj0gg
Ratting dogs are certainly a thing, but it’s probably unsafe to release a bunch of dogs into the sewers.
(There are other issues as well, like the cats destroying local bird populations and getting sick when they kill poisoned rats.)
A bobcat on the otherhand... Depends how much you want to replace one animal with another.
--
ChatGPT
I dont want to be the director of rat extermination, but i wouldn't mind working for whoever writes copy on the nyc gov job postings.
More clever than cringe in my opinion.
>>New York’s Citywide Director of Rodent Mitigation.
That could be also the Director for IT security ;)
Being from Europe, is that whole thing New York City humor? It's incredible funny:
>>New York City’s rats are legendary for their survival skills, but they don’t run this city – we do.
Y'all know me. Know how I earn a livin'. I'll catch this furball for you, but it ain't gonna be easy. Bad rodent. Not like going down to the sewer and chasing mice and raccoons. This rat, swallow your whole pizza slice. No shakin', no tenderizin', down it goes. And we gotta do it quick, that'll bring back your stock traders, put all your businesses on a payin' basis. But it's not gonna be pleasant. I value my neck a lot more than three thousand bucks, chief. I'll find him for three, but I'll catch him, and kill him, for ten. But you've gotta make up your minds. If you want to stay alive, then ante up. If you want to play it cheap, be on welfare the whole winter. I don't want no volunteers, I don't want no deputies, there's too many CEOs on this island. Ten thousand dollars for me by myself. For that you get the head, the tail, the whole damn thing.
(I like that "island" still works because Manhattan)
HN post right above this "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (December 2022)". NYC is!
Deleted Comment
I still can't believe he went from someone I stumbled across on YouTube in a low-quality shaky-cam video 10 years ago (or was it more?) to making NYT headlines (and he deserves it): https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/30/science/mink-animals-pest...
His YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/josephcartertheminkman
Deleted Comment
The reason the city doesn't implement containerized trash collection is because that would mean giving up a few free parking spots every block.
It got worse during COVID-19 because the city temporarily suspended collection/extermination, which caused the rodent population to explode, and it's never recovered from that. But eliminating the regular meals for rats would be an easy, no-brainer way to fix it.
Some particularly memorable examples include a 75 story residential tower with absolutely record-breaking trash piles, and a ~25 story residential tower with a trash collection point on the onramp to the Williamsburg bridge. Garbage trucks have to stop in the road to collect trash, manually, bag-by-bag, at every stop.
This is the policy for trash in NYC, and rats will remain a problem as long as it stays that way.
The US confuses the hell out of me sometimes.
How do you get to the moon and invent the internet, but can't figure out how to collect refuse in arguably your most prominent city?
Most of us figured out that NYC is a (very expensive) cesspit and have no desire to live or work there. /s
1: https://www.census.gov/popclock/
The only solution are distributed dumpsters/large containers, which are not popular because nobody wants a dumpster in from of their building
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JtoSafhvLM
So there's no way to even figure out how this could be done without doing all the digging, etc., and at that point the expense is prohibitive.
Not to mention that building that system would require giving up parking spots for the construction, which would cause the same political pushback from the same opponents, so at that point you might as well just do above-ground collection for a fraction of the price, since you'll be fighting the same political battles either way.
Still great! No smell, less sidewalk space wasted, and garbage trunks can be less frequent since the containers are a huge underground volume.
This was in Kreuzberg and there seemed to be a lot of rats there because of some abandoned buildings and construction + fields of dirt for them to burrow in
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMQ1NfjPauw
- ensuring the truck arrives at or around the same time every week
- forcing people to be at home to throw out their garbage
Both of those are complete non-starters in NYC.
Much easier to use the system that nearly every other large city in the developed world uses (containerized trash collection).
There is one portion of Manhattan where that is done, yes.
That would be cost-prohibitive in most of the city due to the amount of digging required, and the expense of digging in NYC (an old city which has extensive underground piping and infrastructure that was laid before these things were regularly documented, so there's no way to know which water/electricity/etc lines are in an area before you actually dig there).
> Bachelor’s Degree required, preferably public policy, or related design fields, plus 5-8 years of full-time professional experience in a field related to this position
> Swashbuckling attitude, crafty humor, and general aura of badassery
Wouldn't you value someone who actually knows how to control vermin populations at scale in an urban environment? Why would you value someone who has a "public policy" degree. What even is that?
And why does this person need to be a funny pirate? In essence, Jack Sparrow with a public policy degree appears to be the ideal candidate.
To me it sounds like they're more interested in giving off the perception of doing something about the problem while entertaining the public about it, rather than actually solving the problem effectively.
That being said, it seems clear now that everything from the Adams administration should be treated as "giving off the perception of doing something instead of solving the problem" until proven otherwise.
Probably because the real solution (not putting trash directly onto the streets like it's 1780) isn't going to happen, so a degree in public policy will help make it look like you're actually going to do something.
Also, to facilitate this, most buildings (esp. multi-unit dwellings) have large trash rooms for collecting and sorting trash before management puts it out on the correct day for that type of trash.
NYC really did a great job with the marketing on this.
I think the real reason TikTok was successful is it popularized the audio/video meme and the means for them to go viral.
https://www.indy100.com/viral/rats-dont-run-this-city-we-do-...
My younger self had higher hopes for humanity.
Vouchsafing the violently vicious and voracious violation of volition?
I'm choosing to believe this is a v for vendetta reference
And a Ratatouille reference too!