WestWords: What Does a Clean Street Look Like?

And How About a Metric for Trash Collection?

Leaving a rally a few weeks after the Parkland massacre, Society Hill, 2018.

I've been doing some thinking about trash. It's actually a pretty boring subject. Almost as boring as parking, and the subject lacks a Donald Shoup, the man who revolutionized thinking about parking. Not that there haven't been important innovations in the past few decades - recycling, and designing products for their full life cycle come to mind. The concept of minimizing the amount of trash from inception through final disposal is very useful. There's even a mantra for these ideas - reduce, reuse, recycle.

In addition to the 3 Rs, deep thinkers have come up with the 7 Rs - Rethink, Refuse, Reduce, Reuse, Repurpose, Recycle, and Rot. This last being a nod to composting. The only problem with the 7 Rs, from my point of view, is that I am never able to remember them all.

But I'm looking at a slightly different problem - how we collect and remove trash in a way that gives us clean streets.

Normally, when I think of street trash, I see two things: First, household and commercial trash that is placed out for collection, a portion of which always seems to wind up on the street and not in the truck. Second is trash dropped by street users - dog walkers, cigarette smokers, people who are eating a candy bar, someone who has finished reading the newspaper, a motorist discarding a banana peel - who decide not to use a trash can.

I'd like to expand that definition of trash to a definition that includes fallen leaves and what I call road schmutz. So, street trash, leaves, and road schmutz.

Three Issues

Let's start with leaves. I clearly remember a brisk autumn day, decades ago, when my young daughter and I were returning home. As we turned the corner onto our block we saw, stretching into the distance, a series of large, neat piles of fallen leaves. They had undoubtedly been made by the street sweeper, a City of Philadelphia employee who appeared on the block from time to time, with a broom and a barrel on wheels, and swept the sidewalk. As we approached the first pile, Alicia couldn't resist, and she jumped into it feet first. Just then I saw the street sweeper, who had been standing back by a stoop. The look on his face turned from shock to benign amusement when he figured out that my daughter was too small to scatter the pile of leaves very much.

Yes, the City used to sweep sidewalks, and even pick up leaves. One day I noticed that our guy hadn't been around for a while, and later on I figured out he wasn't coming back. I was helped along on this path by attending a meeting where Rina Cutler, who was in charge of streets and other things at the time, told us that the street sweepers had gone away and weren't coming back.

And so now it's up to us, the residents, to sweep the leaves each fall and bag them appropriately and set them out at the right time for collection.

Second, let's do road schmutz. This is the grimy particulate matter that quietly darkens your sidewalk. It also shows up on your window sills, and happily gathers in abundance in the gutter, nestling up to the curbstone. My understanding is that this material is mostly hydrocarbon particulates coming out of the tailpipes of passing motor vehicles.

We all seem to be remarkably accepting of it, but it definitely alters the appearance of our streets, much as the smoke from a fireplace can alter the appearance of a Rembrandt painting that hangs above the mantle. Hues are darkened and subdued, and images lose their original clarity.

I haven't hosed down the sidewalk in front of our house for quite a while, but I know that if I did that, the sidewalk would be a much lighter, brighter color.

Are the effects of grime a big deal? Well, people who restore old Frank Furness buildings seem to think so. Cleaning the facade of the Furness Library out at Penn revealed a building that is a startling, vivid shade of red. Who knew?

Finally, to the stuff we all think of as trash. I confess I live in a charmed world, just a few blocks from Rittenhouse Square. The local civic group, the Center City Residents' Association, partners with the Center City District, which primarily looks after the central business district, to have its street cleaners come along on trash day, after the City trash collection trucks have been through, and pick up the stuff that didn't quite make it into the truck. This makes a huge difference in the amount of trash hanging around on my block and many others.

Other neighborhoods are not so fortunate. The City publishes a litter index, which color codes neighborhoods on a map, using red for very trashy, followed by the progressively less dire colors of orange, yellow, and green. Most of Center City is green, with a few areas of light yellow. Large parts of the city are red, particularly in the north, south, and west. The far northeast and northwest look very green.

How Clean Is Clean? And, Do We Care?

Cleanliness is actually a controversial topic in Philadelphia. There are competing priorities.

There is, for instance, strong resistance to bringing back alternate side of the street parking, which requires parked cars to clear one side of a street to allow for street sweeping to clear the gutter. Many people just hate this idea, and they have effectively blocked it for years. Before the pandemic hit, there were some actual signs of movement. We'll see what happens. (For a pre-pandemic story, click here.)

What lies under the parked cars. Wash West, 2021.

And then there's the Italian Market, where two recent efforts to organize a business improvement district have created almost a textbook case of misgovernment. Certain people don't want things to change, and they have the power to enforce their will. It's quite similar to what is going on in the U.S. Senate today. (I'm not going to get into the weeds here, but if you'd like to see some stories, click here and here and here and here and here.)

Finally I suppose there are some who may question whether a focus on cleaning streets is essentially a distraction from more important issues, like saving the planet. Well, I think substituting electric cars for cars that burn gasoline would be good for the planet; it would also reduce pediatric asthma; and it would result in visibly cleaner streets. So maybe spending time on clean streets adds a new battalion to the army fighting against global warming and poisonous air.

Two Strategies

It seems to me that the City is pursuing two basic strategies as it seeks to grapple with the issue of clean streets. The first strategy is to increase capital invested per worker; the second strategy is to push work onto the customer.

1. The idea that capital spending can increase worker productivity is an old one. After all, a carpenter can surely do more work with power tools than with hand tools. This isn't the only way to increase productivity, but it has been reliably effective.

2. An early example of pushing work onto the customer came when grocers decided they were tired of pulling cans of beans off the shelf, and told the customers to do the picking themselves. And of course self-service could be sold as empowering the consumer. I personally think this is a weak argument, but it has been remarkably effective over the years, allowing grocers to sell more beans with fewer workers.

At the Streets Department, both of these strategies appear to assume that the basic issue is a manpower shortage caused by budget constraints. As I started working on this story, I was inclined to agree with this analysis. After all, I've been watching the workers disappear for decades. And of course I read the newspaper stories about the City's budget difficulties.

Looking for a Metric

But can we prove that the problem is not enough workers? This thought led me down a rabbit hole. I had a look at the City's 2021 budget. (I looked at the 2019 actuals, to steer clear of the pandemic. When the 2022 budget came out, I checked, and the numbers are consistent, when you allow for the pandemic.)

In the budget there's a metric for total tonnage hauled, but that number by itself doesn't tell you very much. You need to know how many workers are hauling those tons. I looked for the workers who actually throw the trash and drive the trucks and found some numbers. I think I got them all, but I'm not sure.

Then I went looking for another city to benchmark against. A lot of cities are very close-mouthed about how many people work in their sanitation departments. New York, of course, loves to talk about numbers, and so I used it as my test case.

Just for fun I started by looking at workers per square mile; then I compared workers to the city's total population. And I looked at workers per street mile.

-The number of square miles in New York City is only about twice the number in Philadelphia, so it's not surprising that, with its larger workforce, it has about five times as many sanitation workers per square mile.

-When it comes to total population NYC has about twice as many sanitation workers per thousand residents as Philly does.

-On the other hand, NYC has about three times the number of miles of streets that Philly has, so it's not surprising that Philly has more than twice the sanitation workers per mile of street.

When I got to comparing tonnage hauled per worker, Philly actually did substantially better than NYC.

But I could hear some alarm bells ringing quietly in my ear. New York has more workers per square mile, and more workers per thousand residents, but Philly has more workers per mile of street. I think this means that Philly's collection network is much denser than New York's, which would help explain its better performance on tons of trash hauled. But I was very uncertain. This problem is more complicated than I had expected it to be.

So I sat and I thought.

Moravian Street, 2017.

A Few More Variables

While I was thinking I reached out to a convenience sample of well-informed New Yorkers and asked them how often their trash got picked up.

My daughter lives in a small apartment building in Brooklyn. She has three trash pickups per week. Plus a separate pickup for recycling once a week. There used to be another pickup - for composting - but that went away during the pandemic.

My brother lives in a large apartment building in Manhattan, and he reports two trash pickups and one recycling pickup per week.

This brings up an interesting point. New York City collects trash from large apartment buildings. Philadelphia does not - it requires these buildings to hire private trash haulers.

Commercial Buildings

Both cities require commercial buildings to hire private trash haulers, but New York is in the process of establishing Commercial Waste Zones to rationalize the current helter-skelter system of private collection. As the NYC Sanitation Department's website puts it, "more than 90 different private carters crisscross the city each night to service the city’s 100,000 commercial businesses, driving long, overlapping and unsafe routes.

"The CWZ program will divide the city into 20 zones, each served by up to three carters selected through a competitive process. Five citywide contracts will also be awarded for the collection of containerized waste and compactors. This approach will reduce truck traffic associated with commercial waste collection by 50 percent, eliminating millions of heavy-duty truck miles from NYC streets every year, while strengthening service standards and allowing for customer choice." (For more on NYC's Commercial Waste Zones, click here.)

Next to the Union League, 2017.

Tonnage per Truck

Back to the large residential buildings. The fact that NYC picks up - and Philadelphia doesn't - strikes me as a big deal. It means that these two cities are conducting very different operations. One might even say non-comparable, but I have further thoughts on that.

One more complicating factor. My casual observation also suggests to me that the size of the crew serving a truck is variable, at least in Philadelphia. There may be good reasons for this - some routes may work better with more people; others with less. The amount of trash put out may vary over the course of the year. And so on.

So, what metric might allow us to compare the efficiency of trash collection in Philadelphia with the performance of other cities? There are so many variables that need to be filtered out. After a while I came to tonnage per truck.

And I looked for the number of trash trucks in Philadelphia's fleet, and I couldn't find it.

A man's got to know his limitations. I gave some thought to filing a Right to Know request, but I frankly think assembling and analyzing all this information is a job that is beyond me. Remember, our most appropriate peer cities aren't necessarily more communicative about their trash operations than we are.

Tonnage per truck should allow us to filter out frequency of pickups, size of truck crew, and differences in the types of buildings where the public sanitation service picks up trash. Will it filter out variations in network density? I'm not sure. But I think that's a rabbit hole within a rabbit hole, and this story is already too long.

If tonnage per truck does filter out all - or at least most of - the noise in the system, we should be able to use this metric to compare the efficiency of trash collection in Philadelphia with the performance of other cities.

Perhaps this comparison would tell us that we simply need to hire more people. After all, when you compare Philly and NYC staffing by square mile or total population, you're tempted to say Philly is understaffed.

But what if tons per truck doesn't tell us we're understaffed? Then perhaps we should look more closely at peer cities that perform well, and see if they're doing things that we might want to bring to Philly.

Of course, it's possible that Philly's Streets Department has a tonnage per truck metric, along with other internal metrics that might prove useful to outsiders trying to analyze the Sanitation Division's operations. But if such internal metrics are not there, somebody is going to have to roll up her sleeves and build them from the base data. Time for our city's controller, Rebecca Rhynhart, to do another one of her famous performance audits.

In Sum

Here we are at the end. So what I have I learned?

I think we're stuck with the Streets Department's two main strategies - push work to the customer, and increase investment per worker. What this means is that richer neighborhoods are going to be a lot cleaner than poorer neighborhoods. I personally think that is a suboptimal outcome. And even the richer neighborhoods are going to be dirty. The rotting leaves in the gutter can be hard to get to (parked cars), and many homeowners are content to stop their cleaning at the curb. And the road schmutz will continue to make the fabric of our built environment darker and murkier than I would like.

I think progress is possible, but many powerful constituencies are defending their perceived interests in ways that will make progress difficult.

Years ago, a friend of mine had moved to a nice block in Fairmount that was extremely short of street trees. She decided to organize a petition requesting that trees be planted, and she started going door to door asking for signatures. She remembers one older lady answering her door and listening patiently to the spiel. Then the old lady said this: "You want trees? Trees are dirty. If you want trees, move to the country!"

Don't assume that other people see the world the way you do.

Personally, I prefer Gordon Cullen's approach. Years ago, he wrote this: "... today the tree is more usually accepted in its own right as a living organism which is pleased to dwell among us."

Is it too much to ask for both trees and clean streets?