Do you know how many cans a large residential building would need to put out on a garbage night for example? Or a large mixed use building? You gotta remember, NYC is a very vertical city. They would completely block the sidewalks and/or streets for quite a bit of length. Bags can get piled up on top of each other. I think on the more residential areas of the city, where it's mostly townhouses, brownstones and other buildings usually not more than 4-5 stories high, they use cans.
Yeah it's not like New York hasn't heard of garbage cans, there is just way, way too much of it to work that way.
My building has about 50 units. We store garbage in the building and then on garbage days move it all to the curb. It's usually a garbage mountain.