I saw one yesterday, apparently sweeping, there were a few small streams of some kind of liquid shooting out. What I thought was odd was the dust cloud above the sweeper. It was like a hoover but without a collection bag. Are they all like this or was this one special, special in that it was broken.
I can picture the driver’s conversation with his boss. “But bwoss, gee willikers, the sucker machine is broke agin”
“I doesn’t care, you git out thar and you sweep, boy. I dunt pay you to whine.”
Yeah, I don’t think they work at all. It seems like they just recirculate the dirt–moving it from one section of the street to another. It’s fun to watch them maneuver those vehicles though.
Not if they belong to the Teamsters Union. :rimshot:
They work in the sense that the city can give out $25 tickets to anybody parked on the wrong side of the street on any given day.
Truth to tell, in DC we now have these brand new orange sweepers that look like a cross between a golf cart and a vacuum cleaner. They are small enough to go up onto the sidewalks and I see the drivers eyeballing the paths they clean as if looking to make sure they catch every little cigarette butt possible.
They have bags that catch the debris so it’s not just blown up into the air.
The problem is that the sweepers were not designed to sweep the mean streets of the city.
The problem is that the sweepers were not designed to sweep the mean streets of the city.
Oh, don’t get me started on cigarette butts. Grr.
If you live in a region where sand is used during the winter to increase traction, the street sleepers work well in the spring. They’re designed to pick up light debris and they seem to work okay where I live (althogh the equipment seems to be about 25 years old). Even when they don’t work so well, it breaks up the debris enough that the next rainstorm will move it into the storm grates.
However, their use in the summer season seems questionable. In the spring and winter they can ticket and tow you for parking on the street where plows might need to get through. In the summer, there’s not much to clean, so I believe it’s a method of maintaining a continuous source of revenue for the city.
A woman was killed by a street sweeper in DC last year. Dragged under the metal brushes, it was not pretty. Those public menaces should be banned.
As opposed to the cars that kill hundreds of people a year?
Damn… I thought this was going to be a shotgun question about the Stryker-12.
My life has unfolded in such a way that I have come to know a lot more about street sweepers than I ever wanted to. I’ll share a bit…
Street sweepers come in many sizes and configurations, but there are two basic types. I’ll call them ‘vacuum’ and ‘non-vacuum.’
The non-vacuum street sweeper cleans pavement using an array of motorized brooms. A few sweep debris directly into a collection hopper, but most gather and direct debris to the bottom of a ramped conveyor belt that carries it up and drops it into the hopper. The ‘snail-trail’ these machines leave behind is water, pumped from an internal tank and sprayed on the pavement to control dust. The dribbles of debris left behind (we in the biz call 'em windrows) are usually the result of gaps between worn or badly adjusted brooms. This is the type that brandocet is probably referring to.
Vacuum street sweepers, as the name implies, use moving air to ‘suck’ debris into a collection box or bag. KV and Attrayant are almost certainly referring to this type. When properly adjusted and skillfully operated, vacuum street sweepers do an amazingly thorough job, but they’re typically more expensive to buy and require more maintenance than the non-vacuum type. Also, they’re generally less maneuverable than the non-vacuums, they’re noisier, and they’re much more difficult to operate correctly. Vacuum types sometimes also employ water as a dust-control agent, but also to lubricate the air passages, to weight the debris so that it doesn’t just blow away, and to reduce the static electricity that can be generated by dry air. Some also feature brooms to collect and guide the debris to the vacuum nozzle.
I operated both types for years when I worked for an asphalt paving company; we used them to clean streets in preparation for paving. One in particular, a monster we called “Ol’ Yeller” because of its paint job, would clean a 6-foot-wide swathe that you could eat off of. It was mounted on a single-axle Ford 800-series cab-over truck (for maneuverability) and featured an 8.2-liter diesel V-8 ‘pony’ motor that drove a 3-foot-diameter turbine ‘blower.’ I could pack over 12,000 lbs. of dampened debris in the box, but the rear tires would be half-flat and I was about 9,000 lbs. over the legal axle load limit…