A small topic in the high stakes current environment, but I’ve always wondered: It’s really nice when the city sends a street sweeper through the neighborhood to remove the residual stuff from the fall and winter. It makes a real difference. But the purpose gets defeated when several cars happen to be parked and the sweeper ends up cleaning the middle of the road instead of the parts nearer the curb, where the debris is.
I’m wondering whether it’s possible to send or post an advisory to those living on the streets to be cleaned, asking them to move their cars into their driveways. Or if not that, to post a schedule for street sweeping on the DPW website, like construction is now listed? And like water main flushing.
http://apps.newtonma.gov/dpw/streetsweeping/schedule.htm used to list this information (complete with a map, if I recall correctly), but that bookmark no longer works.
I don’t feel like the street cleaners are out as often as they used to be. I can’t think of the last time I saw one on my street. On a positive note, we used to seem to be on a pass through route for the cleaners which was at around 5am and that has stopped. Used to wake me up all the time.
I feel the same frustration about this in general. Living on a street where many residents park on the street (winter ban is another topic), it would be nice to know when they are coming.
The street sweeping schedule, before the page was taken down, was useless, as it just showed, to my recollection, a general map of where sweeping was being done.
If I hear the sweeper in the morning, I run out, move my car for them, and let them do their work. It would be far easier to know move the car in advance.
Yeah, we have bigger worries these days but it can’t be too hard, once normal operations resume
While this is way down the list of my concerns right now, I can tell you, that our neighborhood is used as free parking near an MBTA Green Line stop. And the city may put out a sign that the street sweeper is coming the next day, but the free parkers still park there. They don’t care. It isn’t their home. It is their parking lot.
This is still a problem. My family currently has one car parked in the street, but absolutely no idea when the street sweepers are supposed to show up. Last month the driver got pissed our car was there and even started tearing up the street a little bit. (Of course, they also showed up in the middle of a very rainy July for reasons unknown.)
You can’t just show up on a random morning at 6AM with ZERO NOTICE and expect everyone to magically be in compliance. Is a reverse phone call the night/week a street sweeping is scheduled too much to ask? At least make a fair attempt to notify everyone, not expect us all to somehow psychically “know” without telling/reminding us.
Yeah, we never know when the street sweepers are coming. Our street always has cars parked on it, so it would be nice to have some advance notice so we could move our cars.