Ask a city what illegal dumping costs and you'll usually get a cleanup number: trucks, crews, tipping fees. Ask a supervisor and you'll hear something different. The expensive part isn't the trash - it's that the city pays for the wrong work before it ever gets to the right work. Every dumping report that arrives through 311 runs the same five-stage pipeline, and two of those stages are paid on every single order, before anyone knows whether the pile is real, the right size, or even collectable.
This is a walk through that pipeline using Oakland's real numbers: what it costs today, what changes when a pile is verified from the air before a truck is dispatched, and why we price the corrected work order rather than the flight.
The Pipeline Every Report Runs
Every illegal-dumping job - real or not - moves through five stages:
The first two stages are pure overhead the city pays on every report. Stage 1 happens no matter what the report says. Stage 2 is a drive-by that exists precisely because the report can't be trusted. Only after someone has spent that time and money does the city find out whether the pile is real, the right size, and collectable.
Why the Pipeline Assumes the Worst
Here's the uncomfortable part. Published 311 data can't reliably tell a real pile from a ghost, an understated pile, or one the crew won't be able to take. So the pipeline has to be built to survive the worst case on every order. In Oakland's data, the reports break down roughly like this:
| What the order turns out to be | Share | What it costs the pipeline |
|---|---|---|
| Ghost - nothing there | 20% | A supervisor trip, and sometimes a truck, spent on an empty lot |
| Understated - bigger than described | 20% | The bed fills early; the route breaks for an extra dump run |
| Un-collectable - mattress, hazmat, tires | 20% | Wrong truck; a second dedicated dispatch is needed |
| Regular - as reported | 40% | Clean, load, haul, dump, done |
Only about 40% of orders arrive "as reported." The other 60% cost the city something it never planned for - and none of that waste is visible in the 311 data, because the data can't see the ground.
What It Costs Today
Two of the five stages are paid on every dispatched order regardless of outcome: 311 intake and back-office, and route planning and dispatch. On top of that sits the supervisor drive-by pre-check. Then comes the drive itself - the truck, the crew, the miles between the yard and the disposal point, the load, and the tipping fee.
The unit costs come from real geography and labor, not guesses:
- Truck: Isuzu NPR-class refuse truck at about $48/hour all-in (diesel at ~$4.75/gal, plus wear - roughly $1.43/mile)
- Crew: two workers at $108/hour combined ($54/hour each, loaded)
- Supervisor: about $78/hour loaded, for the pre-check drive-by
- Distance: about 4.5 miles to a random Oakland site, one-way (78 sq mi city)
- Fixed points: everything routes between the OPW yard (7101 Edgewater Dr) and the Davis St Transfer Station in San Leandro
Man and equipment only - dumping and tipping fees are extra on top. A one-hour site runs about $156 all-in; a heavy eight-hour work order reaches ~$5,000.
Run the whole pipeline and reconcile it to what Oakland actually spends on illegal dumping, and you land on about $12 million a year (City Auditor, FY24-25) - on the order of $480-520 per closed request, across roughly 23,000-26,000 closures a year. That's the anchor: not a theoretical total, but the bill the city already pays.
And the waste is structural. The pipeline pays a supervisor to drive out on every report. It pays a truck to roll on the ghosts that slip through. It pays an extra dump run when a pile is bigger than described, and a second dispatch for material the first crew couldn't take. All of it because the report was wrong before anyone went to look.
The Same Pipeline, With Verified Ground Truth
Aerbits changes one thing, at the front of the pipeline: before anything is dispatched, the pile is verified from the air - images, not a drive-by. That lets the pipeline do what it can't today: confirm the pile is real, size it correctly, and classify the material.
With verified ground truth in front, the 20/20/20 failure mix collapses to zero. Ghosts are closed instead of driven to. Piles are right-sized, so the bed doesn't fill early and break the route. Materials are classified, so the right truck shows up the first time. The city still does every real pickup and cleanup - it just stops paying for the wrong ones.
The savings come in two flavors, and it matters which is which. Overtime, tipping fees, and special-handling fees are cash the city doesn't spend. But crews and supervisors are salaried - they're paid whether or not a wasted trip happens - so removing a wasted trip mostly recovers capacity, not cash: fewer wasted hours means the same crews clear more real piles. Both are real. One shows up on the ledger; the other shows up as more dumping actually cleaned.
So That's How We Price
Aerbits doesn't charge for flights, images, or a subscription. We charge one thing: the work order, corrected - each price set against the truck roll, validation trip, or wrong-equipment return it prevents.
| We charge for | What it prevents | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Creating a new work order | A pile 311 never reported - a supervisor trip, the work to open it, and the pile growing | $200 |
| Updating, correcting, or closing a work order | The truck roll, the supervisor validation trip, and a wrong-equipment return | $150 |
| Deduplicating 311 requests | Duplicate work orders from one pile, and the 311 time spent triaging each one | $100 |
Because the fee is tied to corrections, it scales with the problem, not with how much we fly. Change the volume, the blind-spot share, or the order mix, and the fee moves with it. Hot areas generate more corrections and cost more; quiet neighborhoods cost almost nothing.
Aligned incentives
We can only earn by making the city's work-order system match the street. We can't profit from inventing problems - a fabricated correction fails the first ground check - and we can't profit from ignoring them, because the model pays us to find them.
The Citywide Data Layer You Get With It
There is a byproduct worth naming. Every correction is a point on a map, so the same work that keeps work orders current also builds a complete, live picture of dumping across the city: how much, where, and which way it's trending. Because we're paid per correction across the whole city, we're structurally motivated to keep that layer complete. Your progress report and your work-order system become the same thing.
Sources & Methodology
This analysis models the full illegal-dumping pipeline - 311 intake, supervisor pre-check, the draw, route planning, and the drive - the way Oakland runs it today and the same pipeline with Aerbits ground truth in front. The savings are the wasted truck rolls, extra dump runs, and second dispatches the pipeline stops paying for; the city still performs every real pickup and cleanup.