Now wait a minute. Think about this. You are hereby appointed the city official in charge of keeping the city streets clean. Tourism is a non-trivial part of the city's economy and a dirty (littered) city has been proven to deter tourism (IOW, the public policy of litter control is off the table for this thought exercise)
You have staff to pick up litter and in an effort to control costs, you station convenient trash baskets around the city, finding it more cost effective to dispatch a crew to empty them occasionally than to chase after every piece of litter.
Now, your reports indicate pickup costs are dramatically rising, baskets are filling up at a very fast rate, far sooner than typical littering patterns would indicate. You do a study and find out that apartment residents are bringing out their trash and putting it in your litter baskets. You learn you are subsidizing household trash pickup.
Living in an apartment yourself, you realize it is much more convenient for the resident to bring their trash, especially the daily newsrag, out to the street than to either store it in the apartment or divert their route to the apartment's trash collection point.
Your costs are going through the roof and there is heavy push back from the taxpayers to reduce costs. What do you do?
Bringing down my trash bag to dump in a city trash can isn’t what this article is about
I thought these cans were there for workers, so they could use them instead of carrying litter bags on their backs.
Are you are saying that they expect citizens to do their job and pick up litter for them, but those same citizens will fined if they put garbage in them?
This makes sense to New Yorkers?