The bins don't actually travel all the way to New Jersey, they stay on the street in front of your building, they're just to prevent having massive piles of garbage lining every single New York street, every single week.
Real answer: NYC has such insane amount of residential trash that it's actually more efficient to have someone (usually a super) just prepare the trash in specifically designed industrial bags on the curb 2x week. Like the amount is so large no single bin like this could manage any amount of trash, so they don't even bother loading bins they just process the bags directly into the garbage trucks. My building actually has like 15 bins like these where we can store our trash for the off days and our super sorts it all when the collection comes - they're all usually full 2x week.
So switching to a bin only system would be require either more collection days (an insane amount of spending SDNY is tax dollars) or we're just gonna get overflow trash on the street in shitty, easy to break homeuse bags. For reference there's zero trash on my street unless it's collection day and the city designated bags for those are pretty much indestructible and rarely spill trash.
Except rats have been chewing through the bags, hence the bins. Knowing NYC rats they will probably learn to chew into the bins too, though. Having put-out time and pick-up time closer together would/will make more impact on the rat problem, imho
Lots of cities have residential towers and have massive truck sized bins and/or compacting bins to deal with it. The big difference with New York is that it's towers were built before they seriously considered how to pickup and manage garbage so there isn't space for loading docks and alleys and the other infrastructure you need for that.
I'm still so pissed that Chicago dumps their sewage into the Mississippi instead of the lake where it belongs. New Orleans has enough shit thank you very much.
We went from bins to no bins and now back to bins. Not sure when NYC originally quit using metal trash cans, but that was a thing back in the day. Where I lived we used metal bins until the late ‘80s and then had to use municipal containers in the ‘90s.
Nothing he said was even that bad. He said "our revolution" which is talking about the changes happening in NYC. And we're going to dedicate a whole article to what people on social media have said about it? Wtf?
I literally tried to describe this is how they do it in France to a friend recently. She was like "wait they bury their trash and use elevators?!" Had to just show her a pic like this. I have to admit the first time I saw it, it floored me... like "holy fuck never thought of that..."