Street Cleaning

Parisians out for a walk with their dogs are stumbling across an unexpected sight these days: city workers handing out bright green canvas pouches with plastic bags stuffed inside. "I love my neighborhood--I scoop it up," the bags say. Pooper-scoopers have come to Paris. As any tourist knows, the French capital is notorious for dog excrement littering its sidewalks and streets--and for letting an estimated 200,000 dog owners get away with it.

Los Angeles streets will be swept three times a month instead of weekly because the city has removed 50 of its 135 sweepers from service to repair faulty brakes. The sweepers were taken out of service after city maintenance workers found cracks in the brake plates of several of their Athey-Mobil sweepers. The work is expected to take about 30 days. In a release, the city Department of Public Works said the work was needed "because of defective brakes caused by a manufacturing or design flaw."

When the street sweepers finally roll into Gloria Lopez's Colonia Independencia neighborhood, she will be one happy woman. For many years--too long for the 71-year-old community leader to count--she and her neighbors in the unincorporated area near Anaheim have asked the county for street-sweeping services. But the answer was always "No."

From mean streets to clean streets, Larry Lieswald has watched Los Angeles' transformation from a perspective few can match. For 33 years he has piloted a street sweeper along a 20-mile downtown route bounded on one side by skid row and on the other by the city's glitzy financial district. When he started scrubbing streets in 1965, the tallest commercial building in town was 13 floors, and street crime consisted mostly of benign winos drinking in public. That didn't last long.

Dear Traffic Talk: In my area there are signs posted: "No Parking, Street Cleaning between 8 and 10 a.m. on Monday and Tuesday." The sweeper passes at approximately 8:20 a.m. every week. The parking patrol comes by a little later, but I have seen them come by again and give tickets as late as 9:45 a.m. even though they know the street has been cleaned and the cars they issue tickets to weren't there the first time they went through. Is this legal? Michael J.

City streets would be swept twice a week rather than once under a proposal being studied by the city staff. Acting City Administrator Ray Silver said sending street sweepers around twice as often could cost the city as much as $200,000 a year. But, he said, that could be paid with money generated from parking citations. Officials estimate about 20,000 citations would be issued annually at $32 each.

Streets may be swept once--instead of twice--most months to save the community money. Rossmoor Community Service District officials Wednesday will consider buying a contract that calls for monthly sweeping from February to October. In November, December and January streets will be swept twice a month to gather fallen leaves. The contract costs $17,200. Last year, the price was $30,000 with twice-monthly sweeps.

The street-cleaning crew's orange vests and yellow dump trucks are the only splashes of color on a rainy skid row morning. The workers rake up soggy bagels, paper plates, athletic socks and foam cups into a huge pile. A skip loader noisily swallows the trash and spits it into the dump truck. The crews then head off to another skid row spot identified by police earlier that morning--a narrow brick alley that often doubles as a movie set.