East Rock Pilots New Street Sweeping Solution

Tow-weary East Rockers will get two days’ notice now before the city snatches away vehicles in the path of street-sweepers.

That’s part of a new experiment the city is trying out to respond to a perennially thorny issue: how to clean streets without sweeping away cars as well.

In East Rock this is the latest of different city efforts, which earlier saw permanent metal signs replaced by paper notices.

Tenth Ward Alderman Justin Elicker (pictured on left) explained the new rules at a meeting of the East Rock Management Team Monday, at East Rock Global Magnet School..

The old permanent metal signs stated that cleaning would take place on the second and fourth Tuesdays and Wednesdays of each month. The city removed those signs in the summer of 2008. The city replaced them with paper signs that allow more flexibility, in case city workers can’t sweep on the appointed days for any reason. The city’s logic was that the route in East Rock is longer than average and is sometimes hard to complete on the appointed days.

This year, Elicker worked out a deal with the public works department to give vehicle owners extra notice before the towing hook comes to snatch their cars. According to the deal, the city has agreed to post the paper signs two days in advance for Route 4, instead of just one day ahead of time.

The deal aimed to fix a problem in East Rock, where residents periodically complain that the city has towed their cars with little or no notice. (Click on the play arrow to watch, and here to read about, a top city administrator’s explanation and strategy after one such outcry.)

Upon hearing the new plan, East Rocker Ron Oster pointed out an obvious problem, given the city’s budget woes: Two city workers posting signs on Sunday for the Tuesday cleaning day are getting overtime pay.

“Why can’t they put the signs up on the Friday before?” Oster asked. ​“That will give us two extra days’ notice and we don’t have to pay overtime.”

Elicker responded that the public works department says four days is too much notice — that people rip down the signs before the actual cleaning day if they’re put up so far in advance. That would put drivers back in the position of not knowing when they have to move their cars or risk getting them towed.

Alderman Roland Lemar, who represents East Rock’s Ward 9, stepped into the room in time to praise Elicker’s leadership on the issue. He said this was one of the only times in his tenure on the board that he actually received more emails praising something the city did instead of complaining.

Both Elicker and Lemar acknowledged it still isn’t a perfect solution, and said they’d keep working on it. After the meeting Elicker said he’d like to see the old metal signs go back up, but at least under the current regime residents are getting more notice than when the city first switched to paper signs.

“The bottom line is they should not be paying anyone to do it,” Elicker said.

The permanent signs came down in East Rock in the summer of 2008, Deputy Director of Public Works Howard Weissberg said by phone on Tuesday.

“We’re doing East Rock first as a pilot to see if there’s any change in ticketing or towing.” He said the department needs two full years of data to determine the impact of the change, which it won’t have until later this year. Of the 15 routes, eight plus downtown don’t have permanent signs. Even in places where they do exist, DPW is posting paper signs as well as an added reminder.

The signs are posted between 7 a.m. and 11 a.m. of the morning before the sweeping occurs — except for in East Rock, which gets the two-day notice, he said.

Two weeks ago, East Rock tried out the new posting schedule for the first time. A total of 209 cars were towed that week due to street sweeping, but the city didn’t have numbers on how many cars came from East Rock.

Overtime costs for posting signs on Sunday comes to $3,000 annually for monthly posting from April through October, Weissberg said. The annual cost for posting and pulling signs city-wide for those seven months (mostly in straight hours, not overtime) is $65,000 a year. But he thinks it’s worth it.

“The reality from what I’ve been told is there is very little compliance with permanent posted signs, which is why we supplement with paper signs.” Street sweeping tickets and tows dropped 58 percent from 10,524 in 2007 to 4,456 in 2009. Weissberg said that that helps the residents — whose cars are less likely to get towed — and also helps the crews do their work more efficiently if they don’t have to deal with vehicles in their way.

He added that based on work flow, streets are swept once or twice a month, ​“but the expectation before was that we’d be out there every one of the posted days,” which created a greater hardship on residents having to keep their cars off the street on every posted day. That didn’t always happen for a variety of reasons, like bad weather or the street just not needing to be swept. ​“One of the benefits of removing the signs is that it gave us some flexibility; now streets are only posted when we know we’re going to be working on those days.” And it obviously benefits residents when streets are not off-limits as much.

As to whether signs could be posted even further in advance so workers don’t have to post on Sundays, Weissberg said too many of the signs would disappear before the actual sweeping day — through vandalism or bad rainstorms, for instance.

He said, in addition to the paper signs, another improvement is the specific information now available every month on the city’s website, including which side of the street is due for sweeping on a given day.