What takes years and costs $20K? A San Francisco trash can | Hacker News Reader

What takes years and costs $20K? A San Francisco trash can

apnews.com

15 pointsspcebar6 comments

Am I mistaken in understanding that this was the price paid for a prototype, and so included the cost of designing it, etc?

>City officials hired a Bay Area industrial firm to custom-design the pricey trash can along with two other prototypes that cost taxpayers $19,000 and $11,000 each. This summer, residents have the opportunity to evaluate them along with three off-the-shelf options added to the pilot program after officials faced criticism.

Last month, the city deployed 15 custom-made trash cans and 11 off-the-shelf trash cans — each of those costing from $630 to $2,800 — with QR codes affixed to them asking residents to fill out a survey. City officials said they intend to pay no more than $3,000 per can.

I'm not sure if it's design or just manufacture, but you're right that it's just for the prototype cans and not for production. People underestimate the amount of man-hours it takes to manufacture one-off products, and that's before you consider the price-hike that happens whenever you sell to the government

San Francisco's high density, active street life, and big tourist industry mean the trash cans get a huge amount of use relative to normal expectations. I've seen several of the new designs in place and they are quite impressive: functional and built to last.

The last iteration of this put in place the Big Belly designs, but they were vulnerable to vandalism and even minor vehicle collisions. Also their built in compaction was efficient but resulted in super heavy wads of garbage that collectors found difficult to reliably move.

> functional and built to last.

How about making it cost effective. The same can be achieved for far less.

The city is massively mismanaged. The world is laughing at us with our $20k trashcans that would still be overfilled and not enough capacity to empty them on time. These types of programs make me question any policies to increase taxes, instead the question citizens should ask is "How can the gov increase efficiency by 2x?". Focus should probably be entirely on improving productivity. Programs like this are everywhere and a giant insult to tax payers.

You aren't taking the issue seriously. Trash cans getting trashed is a big problem for the city. Ideally they should last decades, but cheap ones end up failing in only a few years. Most other cities also do not have the problem of homeless digging everything out of the bins all the time so building them to discourage that doesn't come up a priority.

Sanitation is a basic government service that is currently under strain in San Francisco so the primary task is to reach a basically acceptable level of service which currently is not the case. In general San Francisco aims for a higher level of service which costs more and that is something citizen voters can decide if they want to. Your idea that productivity is strongly linked to minimization of investment is not broadly held or proven.

Reminds me of Juicero. A completely over-engineered, behind-schedule, over-budget project that was designed with one sole purpose: transfer money from one pocket to another in the direction of investor to "startup".

The only winner here was the firm that designed it as they successfully made themselves quite a bit of richer.

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