Our Ongoing Progress-Blog Post #2

The Beginning Stages of our Project Planning and Development

After meeting with the City of Vancouver and City Studio representatives and engineers we received a lot of helpful information and interesting ideas for beginning the preliminary stages of our project.

Our main goal is to help the City of Vancouver keep its streets CLEAN from litter content and find a way to EFFICIENTLY place every bin so that daily pick-up is reduced from 3 to 2 times a day.

Did you know that the City spends approximately $1.5 million every year just on garbage pick-up? There are three rounds everyday; once during the day and twice at night. We want to try and place the bins in a clever way so that they don’t all fill up as quickly as they do now but are still close enough to prevent people from littering.

Project constraints:

There are 7 different types of bins scattered along the streets of Vancouver. Of those 7 there are:

-300 Large bins (240L)

-1200 Standard bins (80-100L)

Total = 1500 bins

Project Research:

We are currently reviewing precedent examples for initiatives in other cities. We are looking into cities such as Portland and Seattle for progressive examples of street furniture. We believe that Portland and Vancouver share similarities in many ways, so it should be easy to  bring over ideas from these cities. Also, we are looking into Copenhagen for examples of procedure. These precedent examples should give us a direction for best practice in Vancouver.

Another part of our research is looking at traffic maps and layouts in order to locate the heavy traffic intersections/street blocks as our primary targets. These primary targets will be analysed in a more detailed fashion, for example sufficiency of receptacle volumes and efficient accessibility. Additionally, we will be looking at the West Broadway Corridor (where the 99 B line runs), major downtown streets and intersections near Skytrain stations (where there are high volumes of pedestrian traffic) to determine where garbage bins will be allocated. Do you ever notice that at certain times of the day, garbage cans are pretty much filled to max capacity in these areas? Folks, we are working towards a solution to a problem that will help keep our and your neighborhood clean!

Application:

We hope to be able to apply our findings in two ways. The first, in a remodel of the current flow chart that describes the procedure of litter receptacle placement in different scenarios. We hope to update this information and add a few more dimensions to it.

The second way, which may be difficult given our time constraint, would be to provide a GIS model for litter receptacle placement in Vancouver. With the proper data and layers we believe this is a possible outcome