Stopping Litter in Riverside?
There is apparently a public meeting coming up on the 1st at NW Buffalo Community Center at 7pm to discuss litter in Riverside and Buffalo, and how to stop it. Since I will be unable to attend the meeting, I shall air my comments here. First of all, Buffalo needs to take an interest in actively keeping its streets clean and tidy. That includes repairing damaged roadsigns and streetlights. If the city leaves hunks of streetlights laying on the ground, and refuses to fix up their street side fixtures, then why should people care about picking up their own garbage? Obviously the city is giving an impression that the city itself doesn't care about leaving garbage and broken items laying around. Secondly, In order to reduce litter, we need public garbage bins. And not just plastic totes. One program which worked well in Toronto is OMG Media's combined garbage / recycling bin, which also made money from ad's placed on the side of them. The money from the ad's paid for the cost of maintaining the bins, and also put extra revenue into the cities funds. OMG Media (read: not the city) would service the bins themselves, removing the waste, and cleaning them. Sadly I think OMG Media got bought out by someone else, perhaps Astral Media Group. As far as I am aware, the bins are still around and still being serviced. I have been out walking here in Riverside and ended up with some garbage I had to throw out. I looked around, and could never find a public garbage bin. I rarely see any maintained public garbage bins. I think if we give people the option of street side bins, people might actually use them. As an aside to that, I know that there are some fears of bins being used to hide bombs... Seriously people, are you that scared of terrorists? If so, then the terrorists have obviously done their job and succeeded in terrifying you. If a terrorist wants to bomb something, they will bomb it. They won't look at it and say "hey, there is no garbage bin, I can't hide my bomb there... I think I will move on". So the excuse that garbage bins are good for hiding bombs and therefore we should not install them, is full of shit. Lets see... Do we want cleaner streets? Or do we want to make it slightly harder for a terrorist to hide a bomb, that - chances are - will never happen here in Buffalo in any of our lifetimes.