Zürich voters ban noisy leaf blowers | Hacker News Reader

Zürich voters ban noisy leaf blowers

swissinfo.ch

125 pointsmfi137 comments

I live in a very leafy area with a lot of deciduous forest cover, so we're no stranger to leaves. I have never understood leafblowing. It seems like such busy work. It's not hugely common here but I have seen people carefully shepherding leaves into little piles on pathways, battling against the entropy of a light breeze. I'm sure there's a good reason but it always just seems like the ultimate expression of man trying to conquer nature in every way

I agree. Rake is far easier to get bulk amounts in autumn.

Leaf blower is still pretty useful for keeping things tidy, but I’m still embarrassed to use my battery one.

They ruin the look of the lawn you have put 1,000 hours of work into this season.

Well maybe that's the issue, I don't spend 1000 hours on my lawn

I live in an neighborhood with a lot of retired people, and I agree with the "busy work" sentiment. As soon as some leaves have fallen, you can hear them firing up their leafblowers. Why? Why not wait until there is a decent amount of leaves and ... use a rake? I really think it's because they don't have anything else to do and it gives them a sense of purpose.

I basically live in the forest and get an unreasonable amount of leaves each autumn. Most of these leaves are also from oak and do not decompose well, leaving the lawn a mess in the spring. Using a rake is unreasonable for me, and a leaf blower saves me many, many hours each year that I can spend better elsewhere.

> Using a rake is unreasonable

Why though?

It's generally a lot quicker unless you're a very old person

It's however infinitely more fun with the leave blower, I admit to that!

If you can clear my driveway faster with a rake than I can with a leaf blower, you are a superb athlete. Like John Henry.

Did you try rakes like this?

https://www.joom.com/products/681aed59eda2b001310d4e2c

A better rake will help me outcompete a leaf blower as well as better shoes will help me outcompete a car.

I'll tried a leaf blower only once (it was when visiting family) and I raked every other autumn day as a kid. Leaf blower was... extremely painful to use, for me. It felt like it took me 2x more time to achieve what rake would do effortlessly.

But a lot of it was probably familiarity with rake and a lack of skill with leaf blower. I am sorry ready to believe that technology progressed enough that leaf blowers are now usable. I'd like to see how it feels with wet leafs though.

Obviously, I'm not you, but at my previous home I had a lot of pine trees (so needles rather than leaves, and lots of cones to remove as well) on a corner lot (so effectively two front yards). I also had a mulching lawn mower.

During the fall and winter, I would mow two or three times. The mulching blade made quick work of the detritus and it was faster and less work than raking the whole thing. I'm far enough south that snow, while possible, was still a novelty not guaranteed to happen every year.

Raking requires more back work and they are moving the leaves onto the street for collection.

But some people seem to get obsessed with it and do it almost every day instead of the minimum number of times required to accomplish the purpose.

Around here if you simply let the leaves stay on your lawn you’re going to have a moldy mess and dead grass the next spring.

Grass can survive leaves, I don't see dead patches on my lawn because I didn't move the leaves around

I have the opposite anecdote. I left a lot of leaves on our lawn last winter (by pure laziness) and it definitely damaged the lawn. Edit: it was a rather young lawn, I guess (less than 2 years).

This is directly contradicted by a lifetime of witnessing dead grass under regions of leaves which were missed the previous fall.

Same here, it is crazy around Autum in Germany, I never seen anyone bothering with leaves back in Portugal, and worse many of those leaf blowers are diesel powered, so much for being eco-friendly.

My main use case for a leaf blower is to blow lawn clippings off the sidewalks, paths, and roads back on to my lawn after mowing and trimming. Rakes aren't effective for such small trimmed parts.

My leaf blower is battery electric though so its a good bit quieter than the gas ones others use, although I do agree its still one of the loudest parts of my yard maintenance.

> Rakes aren't effective for such small trimmed parts.

Well, yeah, they have such big gaps because leaves are big. Have you tried a push-broom? That would be the first thing I'd reach for.

Sure, a push broom would work for the base task of getting the trimmings moved off the path, but then I'd want to disperse said trimmings somewhat evenly across the yard instead of just piled up at the edges. A push broom wasn't as effective to do the same while taking more effort and time. Especially since for the trimmings that went out into the street I need to get them up over the curb as well.

I used to use a broom before I got the leaf blower. The blower is way faster and disperses the trimmings more evenly across my yard than the broom.

I do end up using a rake though for leaves, as for actual leaf gathering usage the rake is faster and far more efficient at actually making nice, easy to handle piles.

Are many HN members in Zürich? I was suprised to see this type of news with so many points, though it's quite amusing to see the mixture of different topics in the front page.

Many live in an HOA in the US - noisy leaf blowers are on the agenda at every meeting.

Zurich and its environs are basically the Bay Area of Europe. Probably explains the huge concentration of HN users.

Well there are the Zoogler's and the ETH ;)

Also, it's currently the middle of the night in the USA, so current users will skew towards those outside the Americas.

While Zurich is definitely an important IT hub, but "Bay Area of Europe" stretches things a lot.

Name one other place on the continent that has:

1) At least token engineering presence by every major tech company

2) Tech-savvy VC, legal, audit and tax services you can get on a short notice

3) A pool of talent to fill any engineering position

4) A funnel from a big engineering university to the industry that generates startups

5) Tax authorities willing to work through complicated situations like acquihires, IP riders in contracts for a consideration in the form of stock, etc.

It’s much smaller than the Bay Area, of course, but it’s the only place in Europe that has everything you need in one spot. (Except maybe London, but that’s more like the New York of Europe, minus the high salaries.)

Also, “IT hub” is a place where salaries are low and you plop down a call center. IT are the support roles that install antivirus, not a profit center. There’s a huge difference between that and a “tech industry.”

You said it yourself. I like Zurich, but I'm not sure just a list of checkmarks makes it comparable to Bay Area, or even brings it to the top in Europe. Quantitative metrics are important, and I think Zürich is too a bit small, and not quite fast-moving for the grande title.

Dublin competes on almost all these bullets, except maybe #4, even though there are a few universities in the area with prestige.

I’ve done hiring in tech, and the availability of broad spectrum talent in Europe really only exists in London and Zurich. There are hubs for different fields, but only those two places have everything, IME.

Berlin?

>>A pool of talent to fill any engineering position

Is it true for Zurich? Due to extremely high cost of living I guess there is small amount of unemployed IT people there.

Berlin’s tech industry is to Zurich and London as Berlin’s art scene is to New York or Paris.

And yes, Switzerland, but especially Zurich, is on another level compared to the rest of Europe. (Except maybe London.) I’ve been a hiring manager at multiple large tech companies: Europe in general has less tech talent than the US, but in London and Zurich you can fill any role, from kernel, through ML, computer vision, hardware, manufacturing, robots, quantum computing, etc.

Zürich has a world class university plus an incredible amount of tech companies.

Yes and I am also surprised to see this news here. (I voted yes to the restriction) We also approved an initiative for cheaper public transport which is cool.

We also approved the eID, pretty sure that's going to bite our a*

Thank you - it'll be years before I can vote in Zurich, but the neighbourly weekly leaf blower parade kept me closing my windows or working somewhere else

Not cool. It's not like a vote makes it actually cheaper to run public transport. It just means the city will tax the sort of tech workers who post on HN a lot more in order to give the money to other people (who already get subsidized rent and other privileges), driving ever more out to Zug, and that the currently well functioning public transport system will decay due to underfunding and lack of capital investment.

> will tax the sort of tech workers

What sort is this? Do you mean top earners?

Even if it doesn't make it cheaper to run (I honestly don't know, it could be that there are economies of scale, if more people use public transportation?), people spending time in Zurich (including residents) could benefit if this leads to less people driving in Zurich, thus less air and noise pollution, and more pedestrian-friendly streets.

Indeed if it leads to less infrastructure investment it might worsen, but it's not obvious that this is what will happen.

There are never economies of scale to this sort of thing. Look at other cities to see what will happen. Germany has recent experiences, London too.

Zurich especially has no improvement potential here because it already does everything possible to force people onto public transport e.g. parking is heavily throttled, driving through the city is extremely slow. Transit is already saturated at peak times. There aren't armies of people driving cars around who would take the train or bus every day instead if a yearly Abo was only cheaper. Maybe a small number but not many.

> Indeed if it leads to less infrastructure investment it might worsen, but it's not obvious that this is what will happen

Of course it will lead to less investment! Not just of public transport but everything. This decision opens up a 185M CHF/year financial hole in a city of ~300,000 residents. It's already one of the most expensive cities in Switzerland, and the most expensive in terms of corporation tax. A full 25% of companies were already considering relocating out due to the high taxes.

Look at it like this. This decision is so bad that even public transit advocacy groups are criticizing it!

https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/various/public-transport-critic...

> The public transport information service (Litra) and the public transport industry organisation Alliance Swiss Pass are also critical of general discounts. Public transport always costs the same, even if customers pay less – in the end, the taxpayer pays more, they said.

How bad does a decision have to be for the subsidized services themselves to tell you it's a mistake?

It comes on top of other catastrophically expensive recent socialist decisions like the 13th AHV, buying up so much housing in prime real estate and restricting it to low earners, etc. Where will the money come from? It will come from higher taxes on "high earners" like tech workers (ordinary tech workers). It will come from us. This vote increases the cost of public transport for us, and probably by a lot. It just won't show up on the ÖV bills.

I think many HN readers have a sensitivity to noise.

Zurich is an important city for IT in Europe, and a city I personally like as a visitor.

But that's not it - I find this restriction interesting, and I wanted to learn more. I contrast this with the unrestricted American "freedom to" that I usually see in HN.

Many, many US towns are banning gas powered leaf blowers - and even gas powered lawn equipment, generally.

The leafblower is one of those partisan issues where one camp likes to score internet points by joining the chorus against Unpopular Thing even though they have never been impacted by it, and the other camp defending it because their area really gets a lot of leaves compared to the rest, leaves kill their lawns, and brooms/rakes are seemingly ineffective or they don't exist.

I moved to a neighborhood where a surprising majority of the residents do not outsource their lawn care and I think this makes the biggest difference. The noise reduction of simply not having beaten up landscaper trucks with muffler deletes driving through the streets every day is a massive help.

Letting your landscapers blow nutrients off your property is insane when it's difficult to find good quality top soil. The stuff you buy at Home Depot is essentially trash and rocks now. What comes out of the mower bag each spring can yield an incredible amount of dirt after it's had a full summer to cook in the pile.

In Washington, DC, gasoline-powered leaf blowers are forbidden. But less than an hour ago, I passed a powerful-looking one ready for use on a lawn nearby.

We finally bought a battery-powered leaf blower. This is really not for the lawn, which is relatively small and easily raked. Rather, my wife likes to remove the leaves from the garden beds. These are difficult to rake, what with shrubs etc., and one generally brings a good deal of mulch along with the leaves. We also have a strip of gravel to one side of the garage, and the blower makes it possible to remove leaves without gravel coming along.

And since you asked, the leaves end up at the curb. The city has a couple of collections every fall.

Leaves in garden beds keeps moisture in, keeps dust low, help insulate against thermal events, and becomes a good source of nutrients over time.

Is there a reason why your wife wants them removed from the beds? Unless we're talking about an amount of leaves that's endangering the plants there?

I live in the Netherlands. Moved right next to a cycling path that connects my district with the rest of the city. Big mistake - the sound of mopeds is unbearable. On top of that, there are kids who enjoy revving their engines. The sound drives me mad, but for reasons out of scope of this comment I can't move out. Fortunately, the city scheduled a ban on combustion engine mopeds. The problem is that it'll take a few years for the ban to come into force.

Funnily, previously I lived next to a railway and also under fly path of airplanes and these sounds never bothered me. It's the tiny combustion engines that make high-pitched noises that are the worst.

Maybe it’s just me but I wonder why western countries don’t implement noise limits for vehicles with sirens in residential areas (fire trucks, police, ambulance etc.). It always felt to me unnecessarily loud.

I don't now where you live, but there seam to be drastic differences between countries. These vehicle do have an in-city and out-city loudness. Also here they tend to have the siren off most of the time and only turn them on immediately before an intersection.

Funnily enough, I got into trouble in Korea (Jeju to be specific) because of this. I had just stopped at a red light (huge intersection), and I saw a police car get behind me, they had their lights on and put on the sirens.

In my home country (France), lights mean emergency, sound means "MOVE ITS URGENT" (and they generally ONLY use sirens when it is REALLY urgent). So when they started the siren, I put my warning lights on and moved slowly through the red light and to the outside of the road (I did not continue moving).

The guy ripped me a new one in Korean, but then I explained that I thought it was urgent because we were all stopped and they put the sound on so I moved out of the way in the safest way I could and even stopped. He calmed down eventually.

Apparently, it's normal in Korea for police cars to 1) always have the lights on and 2) just randomly blast the sirens going about their day.

I live in Paris, France and it’s so loud (but people here don’t really respect emergency vehicle so it could be part of why it’s so loud). In contrast, I spent a month in Tokyo Japan; and even though I was near a police station, it was nowhere near the sound level of what we have here. Curious what other countries you have in mind?

They’ve made them louder and louder over the years. That’s because cars have improved soundproofing to keep out the road noise of the tires against asphalt. But that also means it’s harder for drivers to hear sirens. Plus sound systems have gotten louder (in some cases almost drowning out sirens for people outside the vehicle as well as inside!)

TLDR: arms race against audibility for drivers, with residents’ sanity as the casualties.

Your points make sense, I didn’t think about it that way. I wish there was a standard to override nearby vehicles with radio / audio to signal the presence of the emergency ones, but probably not happening anytime soon… Maybe another future win for self driving cars that can be more aware of those things and smooth out traffic

Seems like one compromise would be that they can only be used during a few-hour period every other week or so. So you'd only get the noise in a predictable window.

That's just worse than what got voted in though.

In the US, at least, it doesn't help that almost everyone using leaf blowers are using the cheap, loud, stinky two cycle motor abominations.

Those leaf blowers put more garbage into the air than a car or pickup truck. They're that bad.

In Zürich, the worst offender is the outdated two cycle moped. Sadly, not much is being done about it because of the cult and retro status of these things.

At the Gold-coast the worst offenders are the Bugatti, Lotus and Ferrari leasers...how is it legal to be that loud??

Is it? Police do charge vehicle owners that have modified there vehicles, because they are now too loud.

People have loud motorbikes and cars because they want attention. It seems very fundamentally selfish.

I've spent a lot of time in the countryside where there is a motorway in the distance, and the general low rumble road noise seems to be mostly the tires etc. But then sometimes a loud motorbike revs and that really carries and intrudes.

Motorbikes herald a man’s passage unto the alehouse, where he doth hold court and lament, ‘Why must my women always cheat on me?’

Why, quiet but capable alternatives exist. Let's stop with all this outdated combustion technology.

You have to compromise on something to get change through. Realistically this problem will fix itself when electric blowers take over that can be used at any time and realistically work better now.

Why would you need to compromise? The vote passed with a 62% majority.

There are noise restrictions and quiet time periods in Zurich

https://www.stadt-zuerich.ch/de/stadtleben/veranstaltungen-u...

I'd like to add something. The problem is not just the noise. It's also the fine dust concentration.

https://environmentamerica.org/center/articles/leaf-blowers-...

Did they ban car alarms?

20 years ago there was a big gap between Western Europe, mostly no car alarms, and Eastern Europe, car alarms all the time blaring for nothing. Nowadays Eastern Europe turned quieter too. Is it different where you are?

I don't think I ever heard one in Zurich.

Let's start with banning car's first ;)

cars*

I honestly can't remember the last time I heard a car alarm going off for seemingly no reason. I live in a car choked European town.

It would be nice if we could solve our problems in a nice and civil way, and to be considerate to one another instead of making things illegal.

But then again, we are talking about a country where in many buildings you are not allowed to shower after 9pm.. Or take out the glass to the recycling on sundays..

A democratic vote and a clear regulation isn't a "civilized way"?

In a free society, where the default is "allowed", the only lever that you have is restriction.

We can also turn it around, we prohibit everything unless it's explicitly allowed. Then people don't have to complain so much about "too many prohibiting rules".

> Then people don't have to complain so much about "too many prohibiting rules".

They can't complain if it's prohibited, straight to jail!

The showering thing is an urban legend; you can have landlords try and enforce it, but it infringes on your basic right to enjoy your property iirc and is unenforceable.

The glass thing is accurate tho!

When I used to live there, about 20 years ago, getting notes under the door from some neighbour complaining about whatever noises during the evening used to be common.

I wish there existed a law that defined a single three-hour or so window of time on Saturday during which you could mow your lawn, and if you do that outside that window, you get sent into a room where you're bombarded with sounds of angry lawnmowers for 96 hours straight.

Cool, now do loud motorbikes in cities. Those things, several times louder than cars, should be illegal anywhere but on isolated highways.

100000% Agree.

Here in Germany, I'm convinced the Police simply don't care about motorcycles with modified mufflers. The sound is deafening. In the last decade the noise has gotten worse and worse.

Once one of those small penis motorcycle owners saw that I was covering my three year old child's ears as he passed by, and only then did he put his bike into neutral and walked it by us.

Not every inconsiderate person is compensating for something. Some people just have different opinions from you about how to behave in public.

And no, I don't have a loud motorcycle.

Well, no, but, you know, common things are common.

These, along with various other obnoxiously loud and/or big vehicles, are _strongly_ coded 'insecure man'. Not necessarily insecure about that in particular, of course, but insecure about something.

Problem with motorcycles in Germany is, they are usually too fast for the police to catch with their car, and the helmet prevents usable photos of the driver. But unfortunately the laws require that the driver committing the speed/noise/redlight offense is identified and fined, fining the owner by license plate doesn't work (except if the bike was modified).

Is that why some YouTubers started to make ads for a "sue your motorcycle speeding tickets invalid" company as if this is really working, because it is?

Germany has such a specific way of making laws with holes.

I'm not so sure that's actually true, because when you get a speeding ticket, the owner absolutely is fined. He has a right to identify the driver or just take it on himself.

If you Google "geblitzt anzweifeln" or something you find several companies doing exactly that. Most claim something like 50% of speeding tickets are wrong. One site claims they make 12% of their cases invalid.

I really have no idea about all that. Just some absurdity I recently noticed.

The owner also has the right to refuse saying anything, in which case it is on the police to prove who the driver was. For cars, that's usually easy, because they just compare the ticket photo to your drivers license photo or passport photo on file. For motorcycles, the ticket photo is usually useless, so if the owner refuses to identify himself or someone else, and the police cannot prove anything, the motorcycle owner goes unticketed.

As a biker, I hate these types of riders with a passion. All street legal bikes come out of the factory with reasonable sound levels, they have to go out of their way to specifically make it uncomfortable for everyone else. Pretty much every one of them is exactly the type of person you'd expect as well, insecure with an intelligence level comparable to a wooden spoon. Personally I tell nearly no one that I ride bikes, because the first assumption is always that you're one of those loud assholes.

Already done. Switzerland is a civilised country.

https://lenews.ch/2025/01/17/switzerlands-strict-new-road-no...

Making something illegal and actually enforcing it are two very different things though. Most countries in the world have a cap on noise levels your vehicle can make, most don't do much to enforce it outside of yearly checkups.

In most parts of Switzerland there is no yearly checkup, but every 2 years or whenever you get the invite (waited 3 years once).

However police is actively monitoring noise levels in some places, picking out the cars and remove them from the streets. Just last weekend my closest city checked 15 and removed about half of these cars in one evening.

Fantastic.

The laws exist, the issue is enforcement. Usually the police has to first find suspicion, then take your car to a garage and determine with accuracy that it is too loud. Automatic enforcement is coming soon.

Zürich is testing "Lärmeblitzer"[1] which they want to put in certain places where people produce excessive noise with their vehicles. It will take time however as laws need to be changed to allow such devices to issue fines and they need to make sure the false positive rate is low enough.

[1] https://www.20min.ch/story/pilotversuch-wegen-autoposern-sta...

Switzerland has noise ordnances, and like other traffic related offenses they are aggressively enforced.

Aftermarket mods, revving your engine, or late shifting can net you a cool 5 figures fine.

Sadly, it's barely enforced.

Depends on where you are. Thun and Bern started to enforce it much more just recently (with great success), afaik Zurich has their own task force as well.

Our street control systems are just getting started. Most people seem to have no idea whats to come.

Yeah, looking forward to it. People should have the freedom to move around wherever they want, but not to rob others from their quiet time and sleep in doing so.

I live near Zurich and sadly the noise from luxury sports cars and motorcycles can be unbearably loud (even through noise isolated Windows and away from the street). I don't think anyone really enforces it.

Here in NL some localities have local ordinances regarding noise pollution and they do actually enforce them.

Congrats!

We have this ban as well in Los Angeles and it’s been lovely, though it’s within 150m of a residential zone.

I love direct democracy.

honestly i don't get the point of leaf blowers, you move the leaves with an extremely loud gasoline powered machine from one place to another

for what purpose, to make it someone else's problem and then they can blow them back?

It boggles my mind too, I always see these workers blowing leaves for HOURS in my street, you'd be more efficient with a rake, while using 0 gas, and producing 0 noise. Even from the workers perspective, you're just sitting there next to a two stroke engine with no emission filtering the whole day, that can't be good for your lungs. Same thing for removing temporary paint strips or killing weeds, they burn liters of propane slowly moving 50 meters per hour, the best part is that they're often two or three workers per burner, one holding the flamethrower, one pulling the gas tank, one pulling the half melted paint strip. Last time I saw them using a bulldozer to scrape a 10cm wide road paint strip... the amount of energy wasted is insane, we're truly living as if gas was free, unlimited and without side effects

I always saw people acting like game NPCs blasting a single leaf for what seemed like forever trying to get it into a specific spot.

I'm not convinced leaf blowing is faster than raking. I'm not even convinced it's faster than picking up leaves by hand.

I have been wondering also about this. Why would you use a leaf blower when you can use an electric leaf mulcher, which shreds the leaves, seed and sticks. You can then dispose the leaves in your garden or put it into bio waste.

So you can take them to a bag or trash can and they don't ruin your lawn.

I hated doing this as a kid btw, and it's one of the reasons I don't want a home with a lawn.

So jealous

> There is also a new restriction for battery-powered models. They may only be used from October to December.

If you want to live in nature and in a city you need the tools to manage it. Cutting the trees down is also a valid solution.

It's the classic arsehole world we have become, people have to be indignant about everything.

For the people who don't create, lazy sloths sitting in their basements, they lash out at those who do.

Trees are a lot of work, when you work in gardening half the time is cleaning (leaf blowing, hedging and mowing) the other half is chopping them down because they are too much work for the owner.

We had weekly leaf blowing outside our office regardless if it was raining or not by the management staff of other buildings. If you don't pick up what you blew away what is the point? It got really out of hand.

They are paid to do this, they are not paid to check the weather.

hmm then why are they paid to do this?

it's not to blame those workers, but re-think about the job itself

the point? well... blocking the road drains & inducing flood?

This wasn't the city, they were blowing the leaves into the street making that issue worse. The city uses other equipment to clean the roads, drains etc.

Hundreds of years gardening was done without leaf blowers.

People used rakes.

When you work in gardening, you are paid to do so.

If people in Zürich decide to pay more for gardening and reduce noise, it's their decision.

(though quite frankly, from using a rake myself and watching people here use leaf blowers, I'm not sure they are faster in any way)

this

with leaf blowing, where do people blow their leaves/branches/trash to? to roads? to neighbors? making roads flood by blocking road drainage?

what about all these noise and dust from leaf-blowing? (even not counting all those fuel burning...)

maybe those leaf-blowing promoters are the "arseholes" ?

just rake them, put them in big bags & compost them

They blow them into piles on their own property or collect them in bags and send them to compost.

Not everyone, sure, but this isn't an issue of rakes Vs leaf-blowers and it isn't the problem with two-stroke leaf blowers.

If anything, people with leaf blowers probably put more thought into what they do with their leaves, because they have a bigger volume of them to deal with.

> when you work in gardening half the time is cleaning (leaf blowing, hedging and mowing)

How much of this is just to make things look nice, as opposed to actually functional?

Looking nice is part of the function

That doesn't sound like a garden to me, a garden produces food.

And how much is to make it look like work, blowing that single leaf up and down the driveway is fooling no one.

It is, if anything, anti-functional: unless it smothers everything the litter provides nitrogen and nutrients as it decomposes.

Getting rid of all the litter for that “perfect lawn” requires re-introducing nitrogen artificially (historically lawns would be grown with clover, the clover being a nitrogen fixer for the grass, that stopped being a thing when people started widely applying broad-leaf herbicides like 2,4D, the lawn industry then labelled clover a weed to make killing it a goal rather than a negative side effect).

100%, like cutting grass, all the stuff you cut and move out of your lawn is nutrients leaving your soil, do that long enough and you'll get dead soil, then you'll need to buy compost... which is made from the leaves, grass cuts and bio trash that you city charges you to collect. It's a perfect cycle really.

> the lawn industry then labelled clover a weed to make killing it a goal rather than a negative side effect

People who are into bio gardening/farming use cover crops to boost soil fertility and avoid weeds, very often clovers actually. You can even use them as cover crops while growing other things, again to compete with weeds, every know and then you cut them down, leave them on the spot, they decompose and feed your crops/earthworms

https://underwoodgardens.com/cover-crops-beat-garden-weeds/

When we bought our house about 7 years ago, the lawn was in terrible shape. I’m not a huge fan of lawns—-I’ve been slowly converting it to a garden—-but my wife likes one. Instead of going chemlawn like many of our neighbors, instead we started planting clover. This horrified my father in law, who spends inordinate amounts of time removing clover and dandelions from his lawn. Anyway, after years of planting clover and the occasional overseeding with grass seed in the fall, our lawn now looks very nice. And it stays nice even during drought (like right now). We also just mulch all the fallen leaves with a mulching blade on our lawnmower. So much easier than picking up the leaves, and you can barely tell that I did not rake them. Admittedly the lawn is not 100% grass, but who cares? This is not a golf course.

Before the spread of broad-leaf herbicides and fertilisers it was just normal, you’d get clover mix at the grower or lawn care shop or your lawn seeds would come with some amount of clover mixed in.

You don't need a leaf blower to collect up the leaves in a reasonable time.

We've managed to maintain cities with trees for hundreds of years without leaf blowers, and have owned one I can confirm that it cuts maybe 20% of the time over simply using a rake.

And, IIRC, seems like some places are actually leaving the leafs in the gardens instead of cleaning them, and seems to be beneficial for wildlife and soil.

I find the the historic argument to be not so great, when trying to argue the current state of the world. In the 1950s we "managed" 5% child mortality rate (in developed countries). Trees are not kids, but the point is: If something has not changed for a few decades, that's probably something you would want to look at and see what can be improved.

Granted though, leaf blowers ain't it. We are way too lenient regarding noise pollution.

Maybe if you're just doing your own back garden and it's just leaf matter. But for professional arborists / municipal arboricultural teams, a leaf blower - specifically a backpack blower (battery / alkalyte | petrol) speeds up clean up by orders of magnitude.

I could understand the ban for residential use, fine - I agree just using a rake if it is just leaves, but for tree work / hedge work where the owner expects "tidy" as one of the things they see at the end of the job they're essential. Without then It'd mean an extra couple of hours on every job, which means less jobs, which means higher costs. The fine chips, the hedge cuttings and the tiny snapped twigs they take ages to clear up. Especially on gravel or grass. Fast moving air is the perfect tool for cleaning up this stuff on all surfaces.

All that being said, it is actually better to leave material for habitat and detritivores. It's really valuable, so in that regard it may force peoples hands in "accepting the mess" or as I like to say "the reconfigured habitat".

It'll boil down to "the cost", "the mess" or "the noise".

context: I'm an arborist as well as a software engineer.

No, this is democracy in action. People don’t want noise. Antisocial characters will have to deal with it.

Have you ever heard about rakes?

Rakes exist you know - we use those for our yard. It's not that hard really.

> It's the classic arsehole world we have become, people have to be indignant about everything.

They always have been. But this is not a case of that. Leaf blowers are loud and disperse dog poop. It's disgusting. Use a broom instead.

I don't get why you're so upset. Zurich gardeners can still use leaf blowers when leaves are falling, which is between October and December. Only they need to be electric.

The reason is not only environmental, also many people (including myself) were unhappy with the noise of the petrol powered ones. They are very loud, and it seems the typical Zurich neighbor always decides to clean up his garden on a Saturday morning at 7AM.

People managed to keep trees in cities just fine prior to the mid 20th century so I can't imagine it's an insurmountable obstacle. Beyond cutting the trees down, other valid solutions include (but are not limited to) letting the leaves be on the ground by the tree, using a rake, planting tree species with smaller leaves, or allowing the leaves to be picked up by the regular street cleaning trucks.

Trees are really only a lot of work if you insist on keeping a grotesquely unnatural manicured garden; the only tree I've got that's any significant amount work is an apple tree that would turn half the yard to a rotten apple tripping hazard if you didn't pick them up. A couple more need trimming every few years to keep a path clear, but I would chalk that up to user error in choosing to plant them slightly too close to the path.

Contrary to what the "just tough it out" types would have you believe, noise pollution does cause appreciable harm to public health. Making lots of noise in a dense neighborhood where thousands of people live is just not worth the marginal efficiency improvement of blowing vs raking leaves. Tangentially, this is also one of several reasons why speed limits should be 30km/h in cities to limit rolling noise.

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