Early spring leaves city looking scruffy
The early arrival of spring is leaving the city looking scruffy.
I went out yesterday and cleared the trash off my block. A lot of loose household rubbish had been tossed around on a windy day last month, and it seemed nobody had thought it their problem. Well, it isn’t any more.
Elsie Lefebvre dogpiles on the tidiness story.
Here’s the La Presse story about advancing the street cleaning schedule that DeWolf mentions below.
Meezly 10:46 on 2024-03-06 Permalink
Scruffy is an understatement!
DeWolf 11:27 on 2024-03-06 Permalink
I’ve noticed people doing their part to clean things up. I also notice the SDCs have been sending out their cleaning crews early (at least on St-Laurent and St-Denis) and I even passed by one of the elephant vacuum cleaners sucking up trash.
Still weird that everyone in Montreal seems to have seasonal amnesia and forgets that normally we’d still be under snow right now. The “omg Montreal is filthy” stories usually don’t come out until the end of March.
I don’t see how the city can start street sweeping before April 1 without upsetting everyone who has to move their cars, but the municipal machinery does seem to be slowly grinding into action a month ahead of schedule.
walkerp 11:33 on 2024-03-06 Permalink
That windstorm last recycling day was a big contributor to the mess, because otherwise it actually hasn’t been that bad. The lack of snow reduced the amount of hidden garbage and dog poop that usually accumulates over the winter.
Kate 12:03 on 2024-03-06 Permalink
I was downtown yesterday and walked a bit all over, and things didn’t look as bad as the articles linked above suggest.
DeWolf, do you know whether some of the same blue collar workers do both snow removal and street cleanup? Because it should be possible to have them change gears early.
DeWolf 12:37 on 2024-03-06 Permalink
No idea. But somebody on Reddit said they work as a blue collar for the city and that yes, municipal employees who do snow clearance during the winter do street cleaning during the summer, but there are bureaucratic processes and collective agreements that make it difficult to quickly switch.
La Presse has a story today that notes that much of the sweet sweeping equipment is leased, not owned by the city, and the leases don’t start until April 1. But the administration is also saying they will try to start street sweeping by mid-March, which I guess means people will need to start moving their cars two weeks ahead of schedule (cue the complaints).
Something needs to change though because with the little snow and long thaws we had this winter, things were pretty consistently disgusting right through January and February. Really, the entire trash collection system needs to change. We have too many open bins on the street that have a tendency to overflow. And door-to-door waste collection is not only inefficient, it makes everything dirty, because the éboueurs are pressured to move quickly and therefore have no incentive to be careful. During the summer, there are cleanup teams that manually pick up all the garbage left behind by the éboueurs, and this doesn’t happen during the winter, which is one of the big reasons everything gets so disgusting.
Kate 12:58 on 2024-03-06 Permalink
They have to move their cars for snow removal, so why should it be so much more of a pain to move them for street cleaning? If anything, the street cleaning is done at predetermined hours, rather than being assigned on the fly like it is after a snowstorm.
Ian 14:42 on 2024-03-06 Permalink
I think more of the issue is that all the signs warning people which side of the street is getting cleaned on what day only comes back into effect April 1. It’s a pretty arbitrary date though, as we usually get at least one more good snow in April. If the snow removal app was extended to be a street cleaning app when there’s no snow it would help a lot – assuming the street sweepers are ready to go in February or March as needed.
Another thing that would help a lot is if the residential garbage collectors were municipal employees. Here they are all on contract so rush through as quick as they can to max out their boss’s profits. Of course if making collection a municipal thing were to happen, cue the lawsuits.
I refer you back to this article seriesfrom Urbania that was reposted here in 2020:
JOURNAL D’UNE VIDANGE – PARTIE I
Un mois dans les caps d’un éboueur.
https://urbania.ca/article/journal-dune-vidange-partie-i
DeWolf 22:54 on 2024-03-06 Permalink
This is why we need to invest in a more permanent solution. In densely populated neighbourhoods, install bins at every corner where people can take their trash and recycling whenever they want, with municipal crews coming daily to empty them. Underground bins like in Amsterdam would be ideal, but we could also do what’s common in most European countries, which is to have small dumpsters with closed lids. As long as they’re emptied regularly there’s no smell, no mess.
Just for example, last May I was in Venice for work and staying in an apartment in the Lido, a more local suburban area with a density similar to the Plateau. When you take out the garbage, you separate your waste and take it to a little cluster of bins. It was no big deal – lots of old people in the area, too, and they had no problem wheeling their daily waste over in grandma carts. There was no litter around the bins, everything was perfectly clean.
Joey 15:20 on 2024-03-07 Permalink
I remember driving our recycling to the neighbourhood big green bid as a kid in the late 80s/early 90s. What a giant net waste that must have been, given the emissions of our Chevrolet Caprice Classic & what we now know about what actually happens to recycled material. I seem to recall there being two or three bins – maybe paper, plastic and metal?
It’s probably been 15-20 years since the city switched from green bins to blue/clear bags for recycling. IIRC the idea was to reduce garbage blowing around, since in theory the bags are sealed. In practice, at least in my area, each bag is torn open and inspected carefully by local can-collectors (who would lose out big time if implemented the kind of thing DeWolf proposes).
Apparently the pendulum is swinging back – the city will be handing out compost-sized recycling bins to residents in dense neighbourhoods. Since these bins have lids, there’s a chance that things will be cleaner. A minor improvement, but until we adopt something like what’s described above, we are committed to having household refuse sitting in our sidewalks at least two days a week.
Kate 19:34 on 2024-03-07 Permalink
Joey, yes, there were big green bins in the Plateau in the 1990s. I used to schlep paper and cardboard to an empty lot on Mont‑Royal. It’s long since been built up on. Almost forgot about that.