Pittsburgh’s stuck garbage truck and the new American politics of abundance

One February morning three years ago just before 7 a.m., Pittsburgh sanitation workers were shaking a 3,000-pound dumpster stuck in mid-air.

A truck’s winch cable had seized. Time crunched, these workers were trying to address a problem for which they had no training. Yet this particular problem happened a few times each month. Each fix cost the city a few thousand dollars, plus lost staff time and the risk to city workers — not to mention potentially millions in worker’s compensation.

This time, a foreman intervened with a front loader to safely return the dumpster to the ground, and newly elected Mayor Ed Gainey had staff looking for just this sort of problem to solve. They enlisted Pittsburgh Futures Collaborative, a nonprofit of regional civic consulting do-goodery. 

“Without a leader focused on creating an excellent organization onsite, everyone would have just gone about their business, putting themselves in harm’s way,” said Geoff Webster, Pittsburgh Futures chair.

Together Gainey’s team and Pittsburgh Futures identified a city sanitation worker who never had the problem, and determined it was because of how he prepared the equipment before his shift. 

“In less than 24 hours, they created a check process for all the winch cables before they go out on every shift, and they trained everybody how to do this,” Webster said. That required breaking existing policy and listening to an experienced frontline worker. Three years later, the once-common, costly and risky problem hasn’t happened again.

Winches and dumpsters in Western Pennsylvania might seem far from innovation. But that would overlook innovation’s best working definition: new solutions for old problems.

A rule of the early weekend hackathons that evolved into today’s civic technology and shaped my early career is relevant here: Develop software only once all analog solutions are exhausted. This represents the ideal of technology and entrepreneurship to solve actual problems for real people, in whatever way gets the job done.

Unfortunately, one current stinging criticism of government, especially the regulation-friendly progressive kind, is that it’s more focused on process than outcomes. Journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson have popularized this idea with their recent book “Abundance,” but the challenge surrounds us. 

Entrepreneurs and engineers know this well: No points are awarded for following a prescribed playbook if the company closes or the code malfunctions. Results matter. They should in public life too.

For example, adding housing faster, especially in economically dynamic cities with flourishing research and entrepreneurship climates, would add an extra 1.7 million jobs over the next decade, according to a 2024 McKinsey analysis. Entrepreneurs don’t pick places to start companies, they pick places to live and then start companies there. So, sensibly, any economic development strategy should solve for housing. And yet, expensive US cities often address sky-high housing costs with complicated schemes for mandating rents, rather than making it easier to build. 

Likewise, American transit projects get bogged down by overlapping if well-intentioned groups championing issues like environmental concerns or historical preservation. The average cost of building a mile of public transit in the United States is far more than in most other big countries, according to a recent report, including Canada, Germany, Japan, India and Iran. 

This is especially true in Democratic-run cities and states, places where residents are most likely to prioritize increasing housing affordability and public transit. 

This month, established Democrats lamented New York City’s freshly elected party nominee for mayor Zohran Mamdani, a self-described democratic-socialist. But most fail to match his plainspoken policy ideas that residents feel address their problems. The promise of local governance is, as New York’s last socialist mayor Fiorella LaGuardia is credited with saying, there’s no Republican or Democratic way to collect garbage. 

That includes addressing a frequently tangled winch. 

“Too often those problems are solved in a vacuum,” said Jake Pawlak, Pittsburgh’s deputy mayor and director of the Office of Management and Budget. “Without rapid engagement from the entire leadership structure, innovations would have been lost.”

This could be a happy outcome of engagement between experience-minded designers, entrepreneurial builders and civil servants. 

“Leaders need to set goals, create safety for continual improvement and listen deeply to frontline workers,” Pittsburgh Futures Chair Webster said. The compounding effects of small, gradual changes can’t be overstated.

In Pittsburgh’s case, the pragmatic, results-focused approach not only enhanced worker safety, it dramatically cut costs – just the kind of “government efficiency” that so many cheer. According to Webster and team, their dumpster training intervention avoided a projected 200 injuries and saved the city nearly $10 million in worker’s compensation costs over three years.

“Abundance” coauthor Thompson argues the ideological battle between big government and small government, regulation and deregulation, is misguided. Instead we should question what solutions produce the most effective outcomes, and pursue them. That might mean a regulation, or the removal of one. It could have once meant an intervention that now is unnecessary. 

Other times, as the Pittsburgh case study teaches, we just need to train a staff on how to disentangle a winch. Political success comes when leaders consistently solve problems for residents, and ensure they know it.

Or as Webster put it, move from “command and control leadership” to a “servant leadership” approach, committed to constant improvement and real-world outcomes.