Hacker News Reader

Comment by stuaxo | Hacker News Reader

"..Atlanta does quarterly street sweeping.." this stood out.

Is that the normal amount. In the UK I see sweepers around, I guess maybe it takes that long to get around or do we just sweep more in other countries ?

EDIT: I looked up my area in London https://www.southwark.gov.uk/street-care/litter-on-streets-a...

  Most residential roads in the borough receive a litter- picking service every other day and are manually swept once every 5 weeks. Busy areas, such as retail areas, have a daily presence to make sure they're kept clean and litter free.

I know US infrastructure is worse, but this is to quite a ridiculous level - the amount of damage everyone is paying for, for their cars is insane.

View on HN

Madison WI checking in. We get two passes in March then monthly until winter. I checked our city website and the volume of debris was pretty surprising to me:

> In 2023, 6,633.46 tons of debris was swept from the roads and hauled to the Dane County Landfill.

At a glance London has 4x the population density. Atlanta, like most US cities, is sprawling. I would think this would make street cleaning less economical (although not to the degree of quarterly sweepings).

Dense US cities, such as SF and NYC, have more regular sweepings.

The City of Atlanta, like many (most?) urban governments, can't do simple tasks at a reasonable cost. It spent $27 million on a pedestrian bridge over a surface road and during the primary justification for it, the Super Bowl, wasn't even used.

https://atlanta.curbed.com/2019/1/29/18201457/super-bowl-lii...

Around the same time, a nearby suburban county only spent $10 million for a pedestrian and road bridge over a heavily used Interstate highway to get fans from parking areas to their stadium.

According to that article, it was used exactly for what it was intended for - to allow the privileged to stay away from the horrible urban masses.

> I know US infrastructure is worse, but this is to quite a ridiculous level - the amount of damage everyone is paying for, for their cars is insane.

It's not this bad everywhere. Atlanta is a notoriously corrupt and poorly run city.

Boston MA is twice a month (depending on the neighborhood, usually something like the 2nd and 4th Wednesday, but only usually one side of the street, the other side would be 1st and 3rd) from April 1 to Nov 30. Signs are posted, but usually 6am-8am and it's a tow zone for that period! so don't leave your car parked on that side or they WILL tow it.

NYC street sweeping is once or twice a week, for the most part.

My (my much smaller, car dependent city) is annually.

> US infrastructure

The state of infrastructure greatly depends on where you are in the US.

The amount of street sweeping is directly correlated with how much they can make ticketing cars that are parked in street sweeping zones. In San Francisco they sweep the streets daily and throw $70-80 tickets to any car caught during sweeping time. Does the street accumulate enough garbage in 24 hours to warrant another sweeping? Irrelevant.

My silicon valley residential area is swept twice a month. But I'm not sure more major multi-lane arterials are ever swept. At least, not during daylight hours.

> I know US infrastructure is worse

You know what you hear online, you mean.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com