Free riding is rubbish

 Last year I lived on Rugby Road and would walk down Chancellor Street to get to the corner. I remember at the beginning of last year that my journey became more and more unpleasant due to an ever accumulating pile of trash and boxes on the sidewalk of Chancellor Street. After a couple weeks it got so bad that the boxes blocked the entire sidewalk and I was forced to increase the riskiness of my trek by venturing into the street just to get around this mess. As a third party who did not live on Chancellor Street, a negative externality was being imposed on me. How rude, I thought to myself–the residents leaving their boxes on the sidewalk are only considering their marginal private cost (and MPB), not the higher marginal social cost of them producing this trash. I suppose I could’ve offered them a Coasian solution such as paying them to remove their boxes, but magically one day they disappeared and I never thought about it again…

…until now. The tables have turned and I am now a resident of Chancellor Street. I now see that trash is a fee based service. Even though we pay, for some reason Charlottesville doesn’t collect our large boxes and they have now accumulated to a sidewalk-blocking level. Now that I am no longer a third party, I have a bit more insight into why this problem persists. The trash bins are shared between six different units. Hence, we have a free rider problem. There are many of us who could remove this trash ourselves or call the trash service and get it sorted out, but we all hope someone else will take this cost on. All residents of the six units will get the benefit of a cleaner sidewalk regardless of who bites the bullet and cleans it up, so alas we are in a stalemate of wills.