It's Clean Sweep For City Streets!

With a whir and a swish and an occasional rumble Ann Arbor streets are getting cleaner. Those strange looking machines you sometimes see churning their way down city thoroughfares, picking dirt and debris out of gutters, are hitting the pavement like never before. And city officials say a vast improvement in street cleanliness is already evident. The credit goes to a new financial commitment to cleaner streets and changes in the city garbage operation that have resulted in healthier sweepers. While a skin-tight budget has most City Hall programs struggling to maintain past levéis of service, the street sweeping program is em'oying a veritable boom. This fiscal year Ann Arbor plans to sweep nearly 6,000 miles of streets, a 50 per cent increase over last year. This will be accomplished thanks to a 40 per cent increase in funds allocated for street cleaning, which will cost $77,000 this year. But for the cost of sweeping, city residents get more than clean streets. The dirt and sand that accumulates could prove a safety hazard to bicyclists who often ride next to the curb. Sandy streets also can lessen the breaking ability of cars. The sweeping also serves an environmental function. Dirt that doesn't get picked up eventually flows into storm drains, which flow into the Huron River. Ann Arbor maintains a fleet of "sweepers, four of which usually opérate any given week day. Three are used daily in residential areas, while one works nightly in the central business district and campus residential neighborhoods. Under a new cleaning program launched this summer, the city is sweeping up residential streets once every three weeks, while town busiigs area is serviced twice a week. John Millspaugh, street maintenance supervisor, said last year the goal was once a month, but no sweeping at all occurred during July and August. The problem was keeping the machines up to snuff. Millspaugh said the machines should be serviced daily, but financial problems prevented this. "We just drove them until we chewed them right down to the nub," he said. The s weepers are curious devices, looking something like a sawed off Volkswagon with a glandular problem. Their manufacturar, the Elgin Leach Corp., proudly proclaims when they were introduced in 1964 "a new era was bom in the street cleaning world." The sweepers are actually backwards tricycles, one wheel in the back and two in front. Furthermore, they steer from the rear. The sweeping is accomplished by brooms on each side that kick up the dirt and debris and push it underneath. There a larger roller broom throws the dirt onto a conveyor belt which carries it to a storage compartment in the front. Like many forest animáis the . sweepers travel in pairs, But it's for efficiency, not protection. One dump truck is used with two sweepers to collect the debris which is dumped at the sanitary landfill. The front end of the sweeper lifts out like a front end loader and drops the dirt into the truck. One recent day's collections included se ven yards of sweepings, which amounts to about 350,000 pounds of dirt. The devices pull doublé duty, being used in the late fall for the city's leaf piek up. Since the sweeping season began this spring, all city s.treets have been swept at least three times, says Hubert Haley, city maintenance er. But the biggest problem area is the same as the past, getting up the dirt on the campus residential streets. Because of sometimes inadequate offstreet parking areas many students have to park in the street. Ann Arbor has attempted a switch parking system to accommodate both sweepers and parkers, but this hasn't proved to be completely workable. In the past when the sweeping schedule was less than reliable, campus area residents protested because cars were ticketed for parking on streets scheduled for sweeping, but the sweeping didn't occur. One city official said, however, most of those tickets were tossed out by District Court. Instead of permanent parking restrictions, the city now places temporary signs on streets to be swept 24hours in advance of the sweeping.