Mayor Bloomberg is considering vetoing a City Council-passed bill to stop the Sanitation Department from placing hard-to-remove stickers onto the car windows of illegally parked cars. He should.
Yes, the council is right that the stickers are hard (perhaps too hard) to remove and an embarrassment to car owners. But that’s their purpose. As Sanitation testified, the stickers are an important deterrent.
Cleaning the litter from New York’s streets is a critically important job. If it’s not done well, it gives our great city a bad reputation and makes it just plain disgusting. Some history:
In 1980, the city was just starting to recover from the 1970s fiscal crisis. At the time, Scorecard, the city’s litter-measuring system, estimated New York streets to be only 53 percent clean. Half of the city’s streets were filthy, with piles of litter everywhere — even in the “nicest” parts of town.
Today, New York’s streets are virtually litter-free — as measured by Scorecard, they’re 95 percent clean! If you hadn’t noticed, it’s hard to find a piece of litter (let alone a pile) in most places.
Starting in the Koch administration and continuing with every mayor since, City Hall has improved the city’s cleanliness. Street-cleaning workers were added, new equipment was purchased and substantially more business-improvement districts were created, all contributing to litter removal. Early in the effort, however, the city recognized that if cars blocked Sanitation’s efforts to get to the curb, there would be little improvement.
First, 98 percent of street litter can be found within 18 inches of the curb, where it is pushed by vehicles. Second, mechanical brooms (those big white funny-shaped trucks with the big brushes to catch the litter) are the most productive way to clean the streets. One trained worker on a sweeper can clean more than 10 miles of street a day. The next best thing the department has for this job is a worker pushing a broom and can. That worker, at most, can keep perhaps one or two miles clean in a day.
The big street sweepers are five to 10 times more productive. But they’re useless unless they have an open curb. Thirty years ago, it was hard to explain to people how much damage just a few illegally parked cars could do to street cleaning. (Apparently, it still is.) So we studied it.
We found that just one car on a short street (10 or fewer parking spaces) or three cars on a long street (24 or more spaces) would drop the probability of a sweeper making the street clean from 99 percent to 46 percent. Just two on the short street and six on the long make it virtually impossible. That means that just a few illegally parked vehicles can make the expense of training and paying a skilled worker to operate a costly piece of equipment a big waste of money.
Having made the case, the city took steps to stop illegal parking. First, traffic agents drove close to sweepers to ticket cars. Next, the city coordinated towing efforts to make the message even clearer. Then, in the late ’80s, the city instituted the stickers.
Would you rather have a sticker or get towed?
Illegal parking dropped dramatically, and the city got much cleaner. This was an astounding accomplishment, one that many people thought could never happen. Today, Sanitation picks up all the waste and cleans all the streets with about 30 percent fewer workers than it had 30 years ago.
Eliminating the stickers would be a huge step backward. The improvements in cleanliness coincide with the city’s rise from the dreary 1970s fiscal crisis to its position today as the world’s leading city.
Could the stickers be made easier to remove? Sanitation testified that it would be willing to consider that. But if the council wants Sanitation to use “Post-it” note quality stickers, I say stick it to them. Everyone should obey the law.
Lucius J. Riccio, assistant city commissioner for operations planning from 1981 to 1986, teaches management at Columbia University.