Nearly 30,000 parking spots across the five boroughs are set to be wiped out to make room for garbage containers over the next several years as part of New York City’s ongoing “trash revolution,” a new study shows.

The eye-grabbing figure was revealed in a draft environmental impact statement published by the Department of Sanitation this week as part of the city’s controversial “Empire Bin” program to curb trash bags littering the sidewalks and keep rats at bay.

Sanitation Dept. officials said booting cars from city curbs to make way for the 66,000 Empire Bins was “an extremely worthwhile tradeoff,” according to the report released Wednesday.

Parking spots for cars could be lost so trash gets off sidewalks and into containers. Noel – stock.adobe.com

The bulky garbage containers would gobble up 29,842 parking spaces by 2032 — with upscale Upper Manhattan neighborhoods getting hit the hardest, the documents show.

Former Mayor Eric Adams launched what he called a “trash revolution” to “containerize” city trash instead of having garbage bags strewn across sidewalks.

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The effort, which already placed containers in slivers of Manhattan with some bins expected in Brooklyn this fall, has continued under the watch of his successor, Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

“In the wealthiest city in the wealthiest nation in the history of the world, no New Yorker should have their sidewalks covered in garbage,” Mamdani said in April about expanding trash containerization.

The number of spots set to disappear in the next five years, according to the study, amounts to about 1.52% of the city’s 1.96 million parking spaces, though some areas will see greater losses than others.

Both the Upper West Side and the Upper East Side could lose around 10% of their parking spaces – or 1,460 and 1,658 spots, respectively, data shows.

The Bronx will dump 2.49% of all spots and Brooklyn will hemorrhage 1.65% of spots. Queens and Staten Island drivers will deal with the least street space casualties at .58% and .10%, respectively.

Some of the Empire Bins in West Harlem. Christopher Sadowski

Overall, Manhattan will suffer the highest turnover, at 6.42%, out of the five boroughs.

It left uptown drivers honking mad.

“There’s such limited parking … finding parking spots in the area is pretty difficult, with the amount of people coming in,” Julian Rideiro, 20, said on the Upper East Side.

“Taking away from parking spaces in order to have more trash is not feasible. It’s not realistic,” said Clair, a 29-year-old veterinarian, also on the Upper East Side. “We could find other places to put our trash things.”

Sanitation wants to get garbage bags off the sidewalks. Helayne Seidman for the NY Post

A fellow vet, who gave her name as Jasmine, 23, agreed, saying “we need the parking.. [and] we’re already limited in spaces when it comes to stuff like that, so I feel like we can definitely find like something else to put our trash at.”

A Sanitation Dept. spokesperson defended the looming street changes.

“We are moving forward with a plan to finally get the trash off the street, once and for all,” the spokesperson said in a statement.

“This program has proven extremely popular in West Harlem and, in a great number of districts, the repurposing of street space necessary to finally stop forcing us to live around piles of smelly, disgusting trash bags will be in the 4 to 5% range. This is an extremely worthwhile trade-off.”

Trash in West Harlem has been fully containerized since June 2025 and parts of Brooklyn are set to receive bins by the fall, the city said in April.

The DSNY spokesperson noted that in 2023, the department estimated around 150,000 spots might be scrapped for containerization, but officials have since figured out how to carry out the mission using only one-fifth of that number. 

Swaths of Manhattan, Bronx, Queens, Staten Island are also set to get bins by the end of 2027, the city has said.