o b s e s s i o n

From today's Post-Gazette (boldface mine):

What's with all this street cleaning?

Outrageous and embarrassing are two words that come to mind when I think about Pittsburgh's street-cleaning obsession.

I have lived abroad, as well as in Atlanta, Denver, Washington, D.C., Toronto and Calgary, Canada. In none of these places do they clean the streets so often. Two to four times a year is the average frequency. In contrast, not only does the city of Pittsburgh dedicate personnel to this useless activity, but they also dedicate enforcement people to ticket offenders.

The inconvenience and hassle this causes to those who would park on Pittsburgh streets is doubly infuriating, when you consider the total wastefulness of the enterprise.

People of Pittsburgh, we shouldn't have to continue this legacy of foolishness. Let's give the cleaners and enforcers meaningful work.

M. ISAACS
Squirrel Hill


Now. I'm not saying that I don't understand people feeling inconvenienced by having to move their cars for street sweeping. Sure it's a bother. I don't have a car right now, and even if I did, our street is sorely neglected by the apparently gung-ho street department so maybe I can't fully identify. But can't this fellow save the intense rhetoric for something like war, or famine, or racial discrimination or something? "Legacy of foolishness"?! You show me someone from another town who refers to Pittsburgh disapprovingly as "The Street Cleaning City" and I'll concede the point, dude.