Thu, April 7, 2005
Street Un-Sweeper—11:03 AM
Here's something that happened to me on the way to work this morning. (Has it come to this? So busy am I that I haven't seen Lost in two weeks and I've resorted to telling stories about my commute!)
I was driving along Venice between Western and Normandie, this delightful little stretch that they just resurfaced and it's like smearing your ass with butter and sliding across a glass table – super smooth. While I waited for the light at Harvard to turn green (I timed it with my Oscar stopwatch once because I had it in the car with me for no reason: 21 seconds), I saw a street-sweeper turn right (west) on Venice from Harvard. Its little sprayers were spraying and its brushes were churning. As I watched it driving by, I noticed that the previously pristine street was becoming littered with trash and leaves that were falling out of the hysterically spinning brushes of the street-sweeper.
I've never really understood what the street-sweeper is meant to do. If it includes a vacuum system, it's not a very strong one. Mostly it just wets and redistributes the existing dirt, swishing it around with those whirling brushes. (I mean, I know what the street-sweeper is really meant to do: provide a flimsy justification for expensive parking tickets.) But as I watched all this trash fly off the hulking machine – like those little animated squiggles that always follow Charles Schulz's Pigpen around – it seemed to me like it was not only defeating the purpose of the street-sweeper, but actually counteracting it.
If you think about it, there are lots of things that we seem to do because that's how we're used to doing them – not because we've thought it out and determined that it's the best way.
Anonymous Coward — Fri, 4/8/05 1:14am
Ha ha! I had forgotten about those darn things. I used to think the same thing when I lived in LA. Here it comes... and there it goes... and somehow the street doesn't look any cleaner. Here in MY neck of the woods the street cleaner comes once a week and actually sweeps things up and makes things nice and tidy. Of course, maybe it's because they don't have that whole parking ticket thing to fall back on here - we don't let people park on the street (but we've got driveways so big that nobody even NEEDS to park on the street!) ;)