We’ll keep this brief so you can move your car to the other side of the street by noon. But the long and short of our beef today is this:

L.A.’s street sweepers are just for show.

Now, why such bold language on a Friday? It must be this video from Long Beach, in which photographer Jonathan Serra and his friends at the Cafablanca coffee cart show just what happens when we’re busy moving our rides and looking for alternate parking to allow street sweepers to clean our city roadways.

Apparently, it might be a whole lot of nothing. In the clip, which sounds like it’s set to some cast-away RZA beat, we first see a sign on the mobile coffee business that reads: “Street sweeping is a scam,” words that resonate with anyone who’s ever received a $75 fine for forgetting to move their car before lurking parking enforcement can spring into action.

We then watch a vehicle from city services come roaring down a block of the LBC’s South Wrigley neighborhood. In a fast pass-through of the gutter, the thing flies by at high speed, visibly doing little else besides stirring up some dust.

Meanwhile, we witness a stray coffee cup, lid, and napkin still sitting there in its wake, left behind like the start of some Disney animated short about cast-off crap that now needs to find its trashy parents in an epic journey through South Los Angeles. If you have ever been lucky to live on one of L.A.’s extremely rare streets with no street sweeping on either side of the street, you might have noticed that—and brace yourself for this truth—the streets actually look the damn same as the block next door with street sweeping. Perhaps Angelenos are actually capable of cleaning their own streets if it came down to it?

Although one look at L.A.’s seriously dirty streets and sidewalks these days reveals a city in bad need of some kind of functioning automaton set to “Clean,” this video does begs the question:

Do these things actually get the job done? Especially when set to ludicrous speed? Or is street cleaning simply a scam to make money off the ensuing tickets and penalties? Or is it somewhere in between? For the last seven years, data from Los Angeles City Controller shows that revenue from parking and traffic enforcement has brought in over $93 million dollars in L.A.

However, since 2017, the trend seems to be that the city is bringing in less and less revenue from tickets. At one point before 2017, Los Angeles made a net income of $20 million from parking tickets, which LADOT says it went towards their employee’s salaries and on parks, youth programs, trash cleanup, and more. Still, that same report released by the nonprofit journalism platform Crosstown quotes a representative from the Los Angeles’ Department of Transportation saying their “traffic Officers’ primary mission is to ensure the safety of our roadway and support the quality of life of our communities,” and not to give tickets.

We’d like to know your thoughts. Check out the video below, then let us know whether you think these street sweepers are really cut out for the job, or exist as just another ruse to get your money in our deranged kleptocracy.

Hit us in the comments.   See Also Medan Kitchen in the S.G.V. Is the Spot for Potently Delicious Home-Style Indonesian Food, Started By a 75-Year-Old ‘Auntie’ View this post on Instagram   A post shared by Jonathan Serra (@jserra_photography)

See Also Medan Kitchen in the S.G.V. Is the Spot for Potently Delicious Home-Style Indonesian Food, Started By a 75-Year-Old ‘Auntie’

A post shared by Jonathan Serra (@jserra_photography)

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I agree 100% it’s a scam. It does nothing. At my old work I didn’t have guaranteed parking, so on days the lot was full and there was street sweeping, I’d often have to move my car. I’d sit there at lunch and watch the sweeper go by and noticed every time that the street was no different when it left. I seriously think if they just paid homeless people to sweep the streets or pick up trash it would be a far better use of the money.

Not a scam! Pretty much anything the street sweeper doesn’t get it going to end up in the river or the ocean. During the early part of the pandemic when street sweeping was paused, the street I lived on got really bad. Trash lining the road and clogging the gutters and drains. The tickets might be a scam, and maybe they need to get better at doing it, but the alternative is just to let trash wash into the ocean.

Sweepers may not get all of the trash off our street, but they are definitely 100% cleaner than they would be without sweeping.

To be fair, the streets without sweeping in my neighborhood are filled with cobweb covered abandoned cars and junk so it’s hard to tell how much trash has accumulated near the curb in comparison to the streets with regular sweeping.

I couldn’t agree more that the street sweeping efforts in LA and its entire county are a scam to bring in revenue for the city. For a time, I lived in Bellflower and literally watched week after week the street sweepers roll by and not do a thing to actually clean the streets. In fact, in front of my own residence I had to clean up several messes left by these sweepers as they rounded a corner and left trash in their wake. The sweepers there were not only followed by a code enforcement car but also preceded by one as well. All counting on the time of day rather than staying out of the way of the sweeper. Since the times you were not allowed to park were posted, the city just kept writing tickets even if the sweeper was nowhere in sight. Taking away the right to clean up your own area and charging you for that privilege should be outlawed. I have lived around countless residents that clean up after themselves and others and should never be treated this way. These acts drive away responsible parties and add irresponsible people that don’t care to clean after themselves or their environments. Not the trend I would ever follow nor have my family be a part of.

Just yesterday, and again, as I’ve observed each sweep day, a group of us volunteers witnessed a similar event. We were cleaning up after a food distribution in front of our church. With not a single vehicle parked on the entire block, the sweet Sweeper, made a fast left turn onto the block. Brush swirling he roared down the block. In his trail, for that entire block, was all the debris he was supposed to have removed. Which is why for the past year I have periodically have gathered my broom, pushbroom, shovel and large bin and done their job by cleaning curbside debris for half our block.

I have often wondered about the ulterior motives for street sweeping. Besides the revenue from parking enforcement that this article discusses, I think street sweeping reduces the number of privately owned vehicles being stored for long durations on public streets. Street parking is technically limited to 72 hr increments, but this law is rarely enforced. Street sweeping forces vehicle owners to keep their vehicles in an operable state by the inconvenience of weekly relocation or the cost of fines. Long term vehicle storage, inoperable vehicles, and parked vehicles serving as housing is still prominent around LA but there presence is concentrated to streets that do not have street sweeping.

Won’t somebody please think of the cars?

Give me a break. Cars, car ownership, and the right to store your private property (cars) in public spaces (the streets) are the scam.

Your cars putrefy our air with smog and are one of the biggest contributors to the climate catastrophe. Your cars fill the rivers and oceans with brake dust and micro-plastics from their tires. Your cars fill our streets with metal, plastics, and broken glass that are the reason why we have to have street sweepers.

Your cars kill one Angeleno every 40 hours. Your cars slow down our buses and cripple our mass transit network — the second largest in the US. Your cars make it unsafe to ride bikes or walk in a city where it almost never rains. Your cars take up too much damned space — with 3.3 for every car — more than all of our parklands combined… even though they just sit empty for 98% of their existence.

Your cars are not appropriate for cities and don’t belong on city streets any more than boats or airplanes or rockets. If you would sooner die than extricate your ass from your car, maybe move to somewhere where they’re actually a necessity instead of a burden — somewhere like rural Montana or Wyoming. Trust me, you’ll love it — and those of us who live in a city because we like city-living will finally be able to have nice things. It’s a win-win!

Oh, and street sweepers obviously work. One sucked up a friend’s hat once and then the driver let him retrieve it from the filthy reservoir full of detritus from cars. It was gross — but he got it back.

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