[woodruffw]

This is true and also a simplification: NYC required steel trashcans for street pickup for decades, until getting rid of them for performance reasons (I believe the argument was that they made garbage pickup slower).

The city is now bringing back the trashcan requirement, but plastic this time. It remains to be seen how effective that will be (since rats will happily chew through heavy plastic to get to food).

Edit: I realized that I've also simplified: the new can requirement is for commercial pickups only. That's the majority of rat-inducing foot waste, but it's still just a partial solution.