An additional problem, in addition to the major one that trash trucks don't spend any significant period of time on major streets or consolidated routes, is that there is no readily available product for dynamic rewiring of trolley poles. The operator would have to come to a complete stop, exit the vehicle, and align the poles each time they turned onto an electrified street. This would add considerable time to the route and create a traffic disruption and safety problem for the operators. This could probably be addressed with some robotics and machine vision, but that's a whole new technology to develop that would still require years to be ready for use at city scale.
Overhead charging systems with automatic connection for buses have been developed by a couple of vendors (e.g. OppCharge) but are only used while stationary and have not achieved wide deployment. Wireless charging via pavement-embedded coils is actually a much better established technology and is in reasonably wide use for electric buses, but also hasn't been demonstrated in motion and is even more expensive to install than overhead catenaries.
It's largely irrelevant. Having walked around Manhattan and seeing people leaving trash out, garbage trucks are going to be overwhelmingly active on side streets and not the major thoroughfares. The potential charging time gained from overhead lines will be minimal. Furthermore, most garbage trucks have mechanisms to load and unload garbage which would prevent them from mounting trolley poles.
The issue is that garbage trucks drive serve each street equally often, for the most part. There's no streets where garbage trucks drive more often. It's not the situation that 20% of streets generate 80% of garbage that needs to be picked up [1]. It's block after block of townhomes and mid-rise apartments that are leaving out trash bags. Overhead lines inherently lend themselves to consolidated routes, but garbage disposal is the polar opposite of that.
1. High rise apartments generate a lot more trash, but they already have bulk garbage disposal systems and thus aren't part of the problem of picking up garbage bags off the street.
> It's not the situation that 20% of streets generate 80% of garbage that needs to be picked up
Not that number exactly, but many streets or blocks have no trash - office buidings, the highrise apts you mention, parks, highways, etc. And it's time, not distance that matters - you can charge the trucks where they spend the most time. My point is that you don't need 100% coverage or likely near that.
A drawback is that garbage pickup needs probably don't align with bus, snow plowing, or other needs, so ROI is lower for those wires.
Sure, much of Midtown doesn't have street trash pickup because skyscrapers have alternative garbage disposal infrastructure. The fact that 20% of streets don't produce trash doesn't alter the fact that the remaining 80% of streets have largely uniform trash distribution. There's no stretches of road where garbage trucks are spending significantly more time than others.
The fact that it's time, not distance, that matters makes matters event worse: garbage trucks will spend a brief period of time on a major thoroughfare to get to their trash pickup zone, but then spend hours and and hours working through block and after block of residential and low density (for NYC) neighborhoods with no overlap between truck routes. There are no roads where you can deploy power lines that will charge garbage trucks for any significant stretch of time. The only place where garbage trucks do spend long stretches of time is the depot: and you just need normal EV charges there. The low-density, distributed nature of garbage pickup fundamentally is at odds with overhead lines.
> The fact that 20% of streets don't produce trash doesn't alter the fact that the remaining 80% of streets have largely uniform trash distribution.
What makes you say it's uniform? Skyscapers, businesses, and others not using public trash services aren't clustered on one street; you find them all over town. The number of stops per street can vary considerably.
Again, skyscrapers pretty much always use garbage chutes and consolidate their trash. It gets sent to the he dump multiple times per day, not part of the street trash pickup schedule. You seem to be under the impression that the trash distribution is like this sequence:
1, 1, 9, 1, 2, 0, 8, 1, 9
In reality it's like this:
1, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1
There's a few gaps where there's little trash to pick up. But there's no hot spots where there's massive amounts of garbage bags to pick up off the street.
