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Comment by muaytimbo | Hacker News Reader

I lived in New Haven for 4 years. The difference in the amount of trash between American cities is vast, compare NYC with Chicago. Or really any city on the east coast with Chicago for that matter.

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I'm not sure if you mean that Chicago is clean or dirty? I saw a lot of both last time I visited, it's hard to say. It certainly seemed a lot cleaner than, say, Rochester NY or Philadelphia when I visited, but not sure if that was just the areas I was in.

Of course the difference is vast, I think you could compare one part of NYC with NYC even and end up with vastly different ideas of trash. And that's kinda what I am going on about; the trash under highways in some part of the city is a meaningless metric.

Chicago is a much cleaner city. No comparison with New Haven, NYC (where I used to live), Philly (where I live now) or really anywhere else on the east coast. The culture of throwing trash on the ground is endemic on the east coast.

I was flying from NYC to Denver a few months ago and a Denverite and I struck up a conversation on this very topic after observing multiple people throwing trash on the floor in LGA. Speaking of which, Denver, another city that is much cleaner than anywhere on the east coast.

It's because Chicago has alleyways to hide their trash and NYC doesn't. It's not that Chicagoans are any cleaner or have cleaner habits

Chicago also uses cans instead of throwing trash onto the streets. In conjunction with using alleyways I think we have planned structural differences between the two populations. Surely the beginning of an argument for the "cleaner" and "cleaner habits" between the two.

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