New London - Doomed by a tangled, urban network of streets, the city's use of single-arm refuse trucks known as “one-arm bandits” has come to a quick and pricey end.

The City Council recently allowed the Public Works Department to sell two of the three trucks for $82,500 less than it paid and use the proceeds to purchase two new rear-loader trucks that will be better suited to the city's trash hauling.

The one-armed trucks, which were purchased eight months ago for approximately $210,000 each, were intended to be operated by a single driver. In an ideal situation, the worker could drive down the right side of a street, and hoist, dump and return the city's roughly 90-gallon trash barrels with the truck's mechanical arm.

”Those trucks are absolutely the perfect units to have if you don't have the obstacles that New London has,” said Keith H. Chapman, the city's interim public works director.

But those obstacles - including lines of on-street parking, and a variety of narrow, one-way and dead-end streets - exist in about 60 percent of the city. As a result, two workers, in some cases, had to be assigned to the one-armed trucks: One to drive, and another to physically lift and position the barrel underneath the vehicle's arm.

”It's really not an efficient method,” said Chapman, who came to New London in March, months after the Public Works Department decided to purchase the vehicles. “When you have to have the second guy in the single-arm unit. ... We came to the realization that we're trying to do something here that didn't work.”

On Wednesday, a Minnesota private hauler who paid $172,500 for one of the $210,000 trucks drove it to the Midwest; the second truck, sold for $165,000 and was scheduled to be picked up late last week by a separate Minnesota company, Chapman said.

The price of the new rear loaders could equal or exceed the price of the one-armed units.

The city will keep one of the one-armed trucks, and sanitation officials have devised a route that allows the one truck to haul garbage five days a week in the city's neighborhoods of single-family homes, Chapman said. That truck will be able to make about a third of the city's total 8,500 garbage stops.

Until the city purchases the two, new rear loaders, it will use three of its existing rear loaders for the city's remaining trash collection.

One 11-year-old truck is out of service due to transmission problems, and, “the other three are able to limp along,” Chapman said.

“One thing about the refuse collection is it has to get done everyday,” he said.

The sale of the one-armed trucks won't affect the city's use of an estimated 9,000 green trash barrels - New London's only method of public trash collection, even for its schools and public-housing complexes, where scores of the barrels confront city haulers.

Chapman said the city would like to replace lines of barrels with large trash bins at the city's high-volume pick-up locations, but Chapman said this concept is in its “infancy of study.”