Monday was street sweeper day.

[agamemnus]

So, it's about 7:00 am, Monday.

I get woken up by the loudspeaker asking all cars to move to the side of the road, because street sweepers are coming. Then they come for what seems like 4-5 times up and down the road; the street sweepers are incredibly loud and I can't shut them out even if I bury my head between the bed and the pillow and squeeze.

After the first or second pass, I stand up, go to the window, and examine the result. The road is mostly cleared of leaves, with some flattened leaves on one side of the road.

I go back to sleep.

Three or four hours later, I wake up again. I go look out the window. The road is covered in leaves.

This is what all the tax money is really paying for.

Sure, it might have cost only $200 to do this, but giving every resident a splitting headache for the morning... think about that. That's lost wages, and lost earnings, for maybe an average of 1 hour (because of the lack of rest), multiplied by the amount of residents in the area, which numbers perhaps 100... so, at a rate of $20 an hour, that's $2000.




PS: there weren't that many leaves to begin with, as some of my neighbors seriously enjoy lawnmowing their leaves.

[earthJoker]

That sounds crazy. The snow plows sometimes wake me up in winter, but there are no speakers or anything like that.

[agamemnus]

There are loudspeakers with a recording loop built into (or attached to) the street sweepers, but none on the snowplows.

[earthJoker]

If I'd be woken up like that in the morning, I would have an urge to kill someone

(Is that grammar correct?)

[']['ear]

Typical lolbertard myopia.

The point of street sweepers is not to get the leaves. Their point is to get the crap: litter, beer cans, dead squirrels, etc. Leaves are actually quite clean, and decompose nicely.

[Catgrrl]

lol, here they don't tell you they are coming. They go around your vehicle. The kicker is they leave a trail of dirt behind, so my street ends up looking worse.

Since I live in the suburbs it makes no sense for them to even come down my street. What would be more effective would to send the vaccuum trucks around more often to clear out our "stormwater" drains that become clogged with leaves and my douche neighbor's grass clippings.

[agamemnus]

Typical lolbertard myopia.

The point of street sweepers is not to get the leaves. Their point is to get the crap: litter, beer cans, dead squirrels, etc. Leaves are actually quite clean, and decompose nicely.

Yeah, I agree.. all of that crap is not a problem on these streets here, though. Also, I'm pretty sure that street sweepers would just sweep fragments of dead squirrels onto the pedestrian walkways... Ironically, it is a problem on many other streets in the center of the city, and those don't get cleaned enough.

[']['ear]

Yeah, but no reasonable bureaucracy would function on the basis of "let's sweep the streets with more trash on them more frequenctly." Think about it. You really want those guys to do studies and generate graphs and what not, and then implement a complex schedule where certain streets are cleaned more frequently than others? Or would you prefer to have them do it once a month for every street, thereby actually saving a bunch of money from not hiring some high-paid urban planning wanker? I'd prefer the latter. It's not that fracking hard to figure out when they are going to clean the street.

[Ominous Gamer]

lol, here they don't tell you they are coming. They go around your vehicle. The kicker is they leave a trail of dirt behind, so my street ends up looking worse.

Since I live in the suburbs it makes no sense for them to even come down my street. What would be more effective would to send the vaccuum trucks around more often to clear out our "stormwater" drains that become clogged with leaves and my douche neighbor's grass clippings.

In the movie Motherhood they show how in New York every inch of possible curb space is a parking spot, for the sweeper to be at all effective you have to move your car, or get fined.

[Dreadnaught]

Yeah, but no reasonable bureaucracy would function on the basis of "let's sweep the streets with more trash on them more frequenctly." Think about it. You really want those guys to do studies and generate graphs and what not, and then implement a complex schedule where certain streets are cleaned more frequently than others? Or would you prefer to have them do it once a month for every street, thereby actually saving a bunch of money from not hiring some high-paid urban planning wanker? I'd prefer the latter. It's not that fracking hard to figure out when they are going to clean the street.

I actually think that's not necessarily the most efficient approach. Over here we've equipped police cars with the ability to report potholes as they drive around and flag the data entry with an automatic GPS location. This allows the cops to highlight major needed repairs efficiently without having to field an army of pothole repairmen hunting for trouble at $20/hour.

More generally, making government electronically accessible so that people can report dirty streets could theoretically be a more efficient way to do this. Because leaving it to the rain and the storm drains really does do the job for some streets.

[agamemnus]

And they can replace the goddamn street sweepers with the money the save with non-rusting models.

Edit:

Or not.

Baker 41% [R]
Patrick 48% [D]
Cahill 8% [I] (really [D]) <--- spoiler.

Edit 2:
Yes, I know the state doesn't run these, but it was a metaphorical "or not"...

[earthJoker]

How do those sweepers look anyway? This is how ours look:


They just drive around through the whole day.

[Ominous Gamer]

More generally, making government electronically accessible so that people can report dirty streets could theoretically be a more efficient way to do this. Because leaving it to the rain and the storm drains really does do the job for some streets.

I work the Hillsborough County InfoLine. The phone and email system that the residents use to report code violations and other such problems the government would be in charge of correcting. Your idea in practice is extremely inefficient, you would end up with some streets that get sweep everyday and some streets that would rarely ever get reported, even if they needed it. Not to mention that allowing the rain to clear the streets would not only clog the drains, but also add an unneeded amount of pollution to the water system.

[Dreadnaught]

That's true, given my experience in my building there are always people who complain excessively. Though I think there is something to be said for finding a way prioritize instead of cleaning everything on a regular basis.

[']['ear]

Is it that much more efficient, Dread? The old method was not search and fill, but go to the list that had been called in and fill. Besides automation, what have you improved? Given how long it takes them to get filled, I'd guess the rate limiting step is still the number of staff they have filling and not the detection step.

I'm used to something like this:

[GGT]

lol, here they don't tell you they are coming. They go around your vehicle. The kicker is they leave a trail of dirt behind, so my street ends up looking worse.

Since I live in the suburbs it makes no sense for them to even come down my street. What would be more effective would to send the vaccuum trucks around more often to clear out our "stormwater" drains that become clogged with leaves and my douche neighbor's grass clippings.

Same here. In the city there are signs posted "No parking third Wednesday of the month for street cleaning" or whatever. Everyone scrambles to move their cars or they get a ticket and/or towed.

Leaf pick-up is so strange here. We're supposed to put them in the street gutter. But that just causes flooding when the storm drains get clogged. And if we get snow or ice before all the leaves are picked up, they sit there all winter. Because the township trucks have converted to snow plows.

ps aggie--I mow most of my leaves, it's good for the grass.

[Ominous Gamer]

Though I think there is something to be said for finding a way prioritize instead of cleaning everything on a regular basis.

I don't know how many cities can do it, someone already mentioned how its a set schedule so the residents know in advance, but... It would be rather easy to set the trucks up so that they are able to measure the amount of debris they pick up. They could use that, over time, to determine how often a certain street/neighborhood needs cleaned.

[agamemnus]

The road is absolutely filled with leaves today. Twice as many as before the street sweepers came in. It's still not a problem at all though.

Our street sweepers are as small as Earthjoker's, but the "brooms" (4 of them, at least, I believe) are located under the truck and they are wider.

[Ominous Gamer]

The road is absolutely filled with leaves today. Twice as many as before the street sweepers came in. It's still not a problem at all though.

Would the already cleaned leaves have magically dissappeared before these new leaves fell? Do you enjoy driving on leaves?

[agamemnus]

There aren't enough for it to be a problem, and I don't drive cars that can't handle a few leaves.

Also, we live on a hill, so all the leaves just fall downhill eventually... or are swept away with rain.

[']['ear]

Again: the leaves aren't the point of street sweeping. Never have been, never will be.

[agamemnus]

But again: there is nothing but leaves there...

[']['ear]

You live in magic clean city? Congrats!

[agamemnus]

Ugh... not the whole city, but this street is completely clean. The only trash (trash left by ignorant trash) next to the park on an adjacent street didn't getting cleaned up by the street sweepers, anyway.

[Catgrrl]

That's why I think it's dumb that they occasionally come down my street, as it is residential and clean for the most part. All of the tall trees are in our backyards and like GGT we mow our leaves into the grass (our mower has a mulch option) or till them into our veggie garden.

If there is garbage in the street it is usually in front of our few homes that lack the pride-in-ownership. Or is in the actual yard which a street sweeper doesn't get.

And they leave a trail of mud behind them so my street is actually dirtier after they come by.

I get their usage in more urban settings but in residential areas it is a waste of time and money to run them.

[earthJoker]

You live in magic clean city? Congrats!

Is littering a problem in residential areas in your place?

[GGT]

Aggie lives in the northeast corridor. (I think.) That could mean many different things.

Some slightly ex-urban places have the same issues with street trash that urban cities have. When there's mixed-use zoning, sometimes merchants don't tend their street fronts (sweep the trash and keep it clean). Sometimes pedestrian traffic or car traffic exacerbates the problem, but no one takes the initiative to clean it up. Or residents get tired of having to clean up after local merchant's clientele that throws their trash in the street, in front of their home. Straw wrappers, gum wrappers, empty bottles, empty bags. There aren't always public trash receptacles around.

The city closest to me used to have a huge problem with street trash. Tenants would move out (frequently) and leave a sofa or stained mattress at the curb, broken lamps or busted baby strollers. The landlords didn't give a crap. Fining them didn't do a damn thing, because they were slum lords. The gutters used to be littered with used diapers, broken chairs, black bags spilling with stuff, small litter to large trash, rodents would rip things apart, foraging for the food pieces. And it would just sit there. Collecting and mounting.

So they started twice-a-week trash pick-up. And once a week heavy trash pick-up, for things like sofas, toilets, and fridges. And weekly recycling with special green bins for glass, paper, plastic, aluminum. And special yellow bins for organic trash like leaves, branches, grass clippings. And monthly street sweepings with those little trucks that have rotary brushes and vacuums. They also added more street lights, on the premise that people wouldn't dump trash or litter if it was under a shining light.

It's much cleaner now. But they don't have the revenue to keep paying for these services, because it's mostly low-income housing. The city service taxes were already astronomical, so they did some strange county-wide accounting/assessment thing where we all pay for the city trash clean-up. Ditto for the city school funding.

[agamemnus]

It's just better to put litterers in jail, like they do in Singapore. It's supposed to be one of the cleanest places on the planet.

[Being]

It's just better to put litterers in jail, like they do in Singapore. It's supposed to be one of the cleanest places on the planet.

They put gum chewers in jail too. They got a big jail for such a little island and don't want to see it going to waste.

[earthJoker]

It's just better to put litterers in jail, like they do in Singapore. It's supposed to be one of the cleanest places on the planet.

We don't put them into jail and still somehow manage to keep our streets clean. Well it became a problem in the centre of the cities.