It constantly blows my mind how dysfunctional SF is. Having lived in clean, safe, well run cities around the world, the amount of WTF generated by SF is unbelievable.
Its sad that 1) so many people just throw trash on the steet, 2) there is no law enforcement preventing this behavior, 3) the city isnt paying any people (in my area the prisoners do it from the jail) and then 4) that it has come down to the residents to come up with their own pool of money to pay for this... every week you read stories of the human feces on sidewalks, public urination, needles left on sidewalks, public drug use, all this is without law enforcement action to stop it. Its up to the leadership of elected officials to allocate money and make decisions to stop this type of behavior, but from most of what I have read about the subject it seems that the elected officials want to condone and even encourage this type of plague going on in san francisco. Its up to the voters to vote for the right people to make these changes, but I would never want to live like that or in that type of environment personally. I think thats why you see an exodus of families leaving san francisco. (I lived/worked there for a year)
From a relatively well-known perspective, that is essentially slave labor. The argument is this: The Constitution's 13th Amendment, which banned slavery, made an exception for prisoners. The obvious path, which many believe was taken, was to arrest many of the same people who were enslaved and use them as slave labor. And after segregation was ended in the 1960s, the US government's 'war on drugs' began the era of mass incarceration, which resulted in the former victims of segregation going to jail in large numbers.
There are arguments for doing it too, and picking up trash isn't hard labor. However, we need to think about who ends up picking up trash for a minor infraction, and who gets a warning and is sent home (I now nothing about your county in particular).
In Taiwan the locals, usually the elderly, sweep and clean near their own houses or the parks where they congregate. Some do it as part of a neighborhood group, while others clean parks and areas near temples for religious reasons. Good way to build community.
On another note, let people read without pop-ups please.
I used to clean up near my front door, but it became overwhelming.
I live in a "bad" part of SF, by choice - I have a huge, cheap apartment. Until about 5 or so years ago, the homeless situation was not that bad around me. There would be periods where people with problems would be around, but generally it wasn't a big deal. I'd clean up around my and my downstairs neighbor's doors, and a bit wider if needed. Some of the folks that used to live on the street here would also help keep things clean.
Then the cops decided we are good place to funnel campers. Inevitably, dealers followed, and the street went to hell.
I won't go in to all the ins and outs, I can become very boring on this topic. Suffice to say, when you have a local small business that considers piles of garbage a competitive advantage, sweeping out my bit of sidewalk became pointless.
And it's a good model I think, to take some responsibility for public property. Not just "your sidewalk", as in the sidewalk that touches your private yard, but also "your street", "your town center", and "your local parks". I'm not interested in hearing about if it's "your job" or "your trash", if there's a situation you are unhappy about, and you can directly impact it, why not do so?
I live in Oakland, CA, just off a major street. When I moved into this place I got annoyed at the litter on the street, until I eventually just started picking it up. The first day, I filled a trash bag travelling just 100ft along the sidewalk. A week later I would fill a trash bag every two or three laps of the entire street. Now I think I fill one trash bag per week. And I just feel better looking at, walking, or biking down my street, and I've gotten good conversations with neighbours to boot.
Culturally, right now, people will keep on littering on American city streets, and you and I aren't equipped to change that. It takes surprisingly little effort to carve out a considerably improved space though, and I find that when I consider it a gift to my neighbourhood and a constant task fighting against entropy (rather than something that can be "finished"), it's easier.
("you" in this context is a general "you", and not meant to be singling another_story out, of course)
In Canada they clear the snow/ice from the pavement in front of their own house. I've since heard it's (in at least some areas?) required though, which ruined the image a bit.
(And sort of odd isn't it? Instead of taxing you and providing you with this service, we'll require you to do it? Seems inefficient.)
I gave up cleaning the trash in my apartment courtyard as certain neighbors took it as an invitation to dump ever increasing amounts of trash (including entire kitchen sized trash bags) knowing "someone" would pick it up. Sometimes you just can't win.
Similar here just north of SF, I find it to be a bit of a community psychology thing. I found it the same when I lived in Japan (though wherever you go there are always those few houses, or that one park...)
It's not official but a lot of us take trash bags out on our walks and hikes too. I like to save up the really out of reach stuff for new years day. It's a nice way to start the year and kinda fun to go MacGyver on those really long-neglected beer bottles under blackberry bushes. Close in feel to geocaching...
It wasn't until I rented a floor of a house (and garage and front yard) in SF (Outer Sunset) last year that I really noticed the problem in North America with personal responsibility and keeping streets clean.
I'm constantly picking up litter from my tiny front yard, sidewalk, and curb. Cigarette butts are the worst and I bought a small electric leaf blower to help deal with it quickly. It wouldn't be as much of an issue if everyone took care of their own front property as well, instead of leaving litter and letting it blow onto mine. Also doesn't help that people see a full garbage can at nearby fields and just place their waste next to it instead of bringing it with them.
I think the big problem here is that there's no inertia to keep the place clean.
I recently ran into a great youtube video※ about how Japan stays clean (spoiler: it's about personal responsibility from a young age). When kids have to clean their own classrooms and be held accountable by their peers, they grow up with good habits. When I lived in South Korea, it wasn't as spotless as Japan despite a similar education, but not as bad as North American cities.
I would absolutely support littering enforcement officers, paid by large fines (in addition to community service), constantly roaming areas. Not sure how practical it would be in lower density areas like Outer Sunset but I can see it working along any commercial strips, or downtown.
I was a Patreon supporter of Clean Streets and was pleased with having cleaner streets in my neighborhood. Unfortunately, these guys just closed shop. Here is the email I received on Oct 23:
> Alas, Clean Streets is closing up shop.
> You may have noticed the falloff in times and quality the past couple weeks. [Redacted name] lost his main cleaner and has not been able to adequately replace him.
I don't understand. I often hear about people making $200k, $300k a year in that city. I know that it's not everyone, but I think there are lots of people like that. Why is this problem not solved by the market? That may make a good YCombinator project, go to San Francisco-based tech companies, ask them (or the people in them) to give you money to clean the streets. Is this because there is no cheap labour in San Francisco?
If you’re willing to use money to solve the problem, you move to the suburbs. No sense paying property taxes to a municipality that squanders them and then paying the equivalent of property taxes all over again for a private company to actually do what the government was supposed to.
Great question. Maybe markets aren't a functional solution to problems of public commons? I can't think of a community problem where a market-based solution even helped, let alone solved the problem.
I can’t remember the details but Google tried to create free WiFi across all of SF and eventually dropped it due to the problems of getting everything through city hall.
One of the things that causes littering is a lack of trash cans or a lack of non-filled trash cans. Not all littering (or throwing recycling in the trash) is done out of pure malice. If you make it easy for people to throw trash out, they generally will. If you make it hard to throw trash out, many will litter.
Stronger fines and other enforcement would help, but the first thing is to make sure that you actually have accurate places to throw stuff out (or have the culture where people bring stuff with them and throw out at home, like some non-American countries). This article mentions how the streets got really bad during the pandemic when the city stopped doing certain things.
SF, NYC, and other cities with trash problems could significantly solve this just by having more trash and recycling cans and by changing them more often. You'll notice how much cleaner DC and its surrounding urban areas are than SF and NYC and that's because they have a bigger commitment to making it easy to not litter and they do more cleaning.
Worse than that, SF has tried removing trash cans on a theory they’re and attractive nuisance. An absence of trash cans works in Tokyo, not so much in North America:
> One of the things that causes littering is a lack of trash cans or a lack of non-filled trash cans.
Yes, surely a primary cause. There are areas without trashcans anywhere. Which is so insane. As public policy it seems obvious to maximize trashcans everywhere to make it convenient to keep it clean.
The vast majority of people aren't out to be filthy, but humans are also lazy. To keep a city clean, make sure there is a trashcan within sight at all times no matter where you are, and nearly everyone will use them and keep things clean. Remove trashcans and lots of people will give up and litter.
Same issue with public toilets. Make them available everywhere and nearly everyone will use them, everyone is happy. Take them away and the inevitable consequence is obvious, what else are people going to do.
Linked in the article, too. While it's not the only source of the problem, it's still a big reason people get tired of looking around for a can in SF and just toss their litter.
Why would you think a serious problem is necessarily simple to solve? Money for maintenance and cleanup is limited. San Francisco has legions of homeless, troubled, and then a big layer of irresponsible rebels on top of all of that. The idea that one of the greatest accumulations of irregulars and undesirables would be simple to clean up after does not correspond at all to the real scale of the problem. How many thousands of unhoused live in your city?
This isn't new, in SOMA and other neighborhoods they have had different associations you pay into for years for someone to go around and clean the sidewalks and ask some of the homeless people to move at 7-9am.
Besides actually cleaning the streets, it brings very big spotlight to the problem.
And in some rare cases, if activity like this may go viral, some people in charge of public sanitation might remember of the shame enough to do their work.
There are bureaucrats making 6 figures sitting around and doing nothing for 40 years now. I don’t think shame is going to get them into action. Shame would be what they feel looking around their city. They must be used to it at this point.
I just don't understand why throwing trash on the ground is tolerated. There is virtually no argument for why someone should need or be allowed to throw or leave their trash on the ground.
Most of us manage to get clothes on before we leave the house each day, and that's a lot more complicated than just putting trash into a bin (or god forbid, carrying it until you reach a destination which has a trash bin). So there is no excuse for littering.
I would impose very strict penalties for littering - namely forcing the one who is caught littering to spend two hours every day for a week, or even a month, walking the streets (and beaches or riverbanks or parks) and collecting trash.
If an alternative punishment must be provided, they could instead sit on the spot where they littered for a day, holding a sign which says "I'm a poorly trained human, and I throw my trash on the ground."
People are shitting in the streets, shooting drugs in the open and shoplifting with no consequences and you think SF is willing to impose severe penalties on littering?
> I just don't understand why throwing trash on the ground is tolerated. There is virtually no argument for why someone should need or be allowed to throw or leave their trash on the ground.
It comes back to the policies around law enforcement adopted by SF. Since it is effectively the epicenter of progressive politics in the world, there are a lot of radical policies in play. One of them is "restorative justice", which claims to make criminals / law breakers less stigmatized and more able to constructively reintegrate into society. Personally, I feel the motivations are sincere and have good intentions behind them.
However in practice, that framework of restorative justice has been warped into something more like an us versus them narrative, where those who break the law are viewed as helpless victims while those who seek to enforce the law are viewed as oppressors. I think this is partly because of the divisive nature of American politics in general, and partly because of the extremist language used by some activists who support these policies.
While I agree there is no excuse for this, and it shouldn't be tolerated (alongside open drug abuse, shoplifting, defecating on the street, assault, armed robberies, burglaries, and so on), the reality is that the politicians elected in SF and people like Chesa Boudin (the District Attorney) are very much all-in on restorative justice. In effect, they've decriminalized most crimes. And unfortunately it is a two-tier justice system where law abiding taxpayers are subject to the penalties of the law, while criminals are somehow not subject to penalties.
As far as I can tell, the only practical way out for SF is for constituents to wholesale reject fringe progressive politics and return to moderate politics that is closer to the Clinton or Obama era left. However, I don't view that as being very likely despite all the complaints, simply because the voice of activists is louder and more feared than other voices.
Lot of people with serious mental health and substance abuse issues on the streets of SF, at least when I lived there (moved away about 6 months ago).
Beyond trash, the streets actually had a lot of shit and piss on them, too. I think it's hard to really understand just how bad it was unless you go there. I'd watch movies and they didn't seem real to me because the streets were too clean.
To me it seems like an obvious failure of the government, but perhaps it does reflect a popular sentiment of the dominant culture, that people's individual right to live a life of misery in squalor on the street trumps any other concern. I dunno.
How law and punishment works:
You can put death penalty for littering, but if you know you can get away with it because nobody is watching (and you don't care about it), you will continue doing it. The opposite a smaller fine but with good monitoring (where you know that you will get caught) is better.
Even better is getting the idea inside people's brain. "I don't litter, because this is how I am". There is a book titled "Made to stick" where they expose the case of Texas and the problem they had with littering. A campaign was made "Don't mess with Texas", basically everyone should police anyone who doesn't comply with this don't litter attitude. This was done by appealing to the ideal of what a Texan should be, through clever advertising and marketing. Never been to Texas btw :)
This is only part of the issue. I've been picking up trash for years while walking or hiking in the outdoors and have observed a lot of different situations and setups that are really common:
- Pocket design on clothing isn't designed to allow easy litter insertion, exactly. A lot falls out of coats, jogging pouches when people think it's secure. Open wrappers from things like candy or granola bars have this banana-peel splaying effect that can help them to practically leap out of pockets while being stuffed in.
- Animals like local corvidae can spread litter like crazy.
- Wind, especially on garbage collection day, or around outdoor events
- Some hilarious amount of litter is meant to stay there because someone really does intend to come back and get it later. From water bottles left by runners to legit trash left by well-meaning people who really will be back soon, and then feel angry and confused about how they are perceived when they find that another do-gooder picked it up
- Vehicles, from garbage trucks to other work vehicles headed from site to site...man, some of the trash vortices I've seen :D
The inexcusable people you mentioned, I guess, are easy to spot and often easy to clean up after because they'll put their trash in the bag before hucking it out the car window, so you can use their bag to hold other trash as well. Or at least it's thrown in the same general area, and amounts to a couple bottles.
If they are drunk/high you can often get their names and stuff really easy too. Starbucks cup, receipt...wallet...oops they forgot that lol. Stage a gentle community intervention if so inclined, nobody necessarily needs the police involved.
But emotionally if someone has just had it with rules and abuse of rule systems for control purposes, if they perceive that they have been unfairly treated by society, I find that those are the litter bugs people worry about. But I can also sympathize...
The real question isn't the obvious, but what we find when, discovering that the obvious isn't working, we dig deeper.
Do you live in a community with these problems? Try speaking to the people there; you may learn a lot. They aren't fools who have never considered the issue; they are intelligent, mostly well-meaning human beings who nevertheless find themselves in this situation.
I'm not talking about the obvious, so please avoid pinning on me the anti-obvious ('I support litter!'). The obvious in this case is an obstacle, preventing us from seeing and addressing the reality.
> I just don't understand why throwing trash on the ground is tolerated.
Tolerated? Come around some neighborhoods and not tolerate it. Who said the problem is our toleration?
> I would impose very strict penalties
This is an understandable reaction to bad behavior, but it doesn't work. Humans aren't so easily pushed around and it becomes a tool for harassing innocent people (e.g., minor drug possession offenses).
[+] [-] mbrodersen|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jijji|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wolverine876|4 years ago|reply
From a relatively well-known perspective, that is essentially slave labor. The argument is this: The Constitution's 13th Amendment, which banned slavery, made an exception for prisoners. The obvious path, which many believe was taken, was to arrest many of the same people who were enslaved and use them as slave labor. And after segregation was ended in the 1960s, the US government's 'war on drugs' began the era of mass incarceration, which resulted in the former victims of segregation going to jail in large numbers.
There are arguments for doing it too, and picking up trash isn't hard labor. However, we need to think about who ends up picking up trash for a minor infraction, and who gets a warning and is sent home (I now nothing about your county in particular).
[+] [-] qweqwweqwe-90i|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] another_story|4 years ago|reply
On another note, let people read without pop-ups please.
[+] [-] _jal|4 years ago|reply
I live in a "bad" part of SF, by choice - I have a huge, cheap apartment. Until about 5 or so years ago, the homeless situation was not that bad around me. There would be periods where people with problems would be around, but generally it wasn't a big deal. I'd clean up around my and my downstairs neighbor's doors, and a bit wider if needed. Some of the folks that used to live on the street here would also help keep things clean.
Then the cops decided we are good place to funnel campers. Inevitably, dealers followed, and the street went to hell.
I won't go in to all the ins and outs, I can become very boring on this topic. Suffice to say, when you have a local small business that considers piles of garbage a competitive advantage, sweeping out my bit of sidewalk became pointless.
[+] [-] patrickyeon|4 years ago|reply
I live in Oakland, CA, just off a major street. When I moved into this place I got annoyed at the litter on the street, until I eventually just started picking it up. The first day, I filled a trash bag travelling just 100ft along the sidewalk. A week later I would fill a trash bag every two or three laps of the entire street. Now I think I fill one trash bag per week. And I just feel better looking at, walking, or biking down my street, and I've gotten good conversations with neighbours to boot.
Culturally, right now, people will keep on littering on American city streets, and you and I aren't equipped to change that. It takes surprisingly little effort to carve out a considerably improved space though, and I find that when I consider it a gift to my neighbourhood and a constant task fighting against entropy (rather than something that can be "finished"), it's easier.
("you" in this context is a general "you", and not meant to be singling another_story out, of course)
[+] [-] OJFord|4 years ago|reply
(And sort of odd isn't it? Instead of taxing you and providing you with this service, we'll require you to do it? Seems inefficient.)
[+] [-] throaway46546|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] themodelplumber|4 years ago|reply
It's not official but a lot of us take trash bags out on our walks and hikes too. I like to save up the really out of reach stuff for new years day. It's a nice way to start the year and kinda fun to go MacGyver on those really long-neglected beer bottles under blackberry bushes. Close in feel to geocaching...
[+] [-] jonpurdy|4 years ago|reply
I'm constantly picking up litter from my tiny front yard, sidewalk, and curb. Cigarette butts are the worst and I bought a small electric leaf blower to help deal with it quickly. It wouldn't be as much of an issue if everyone took care of their own front property as well, instead of leaving litter and letting it blow onto mine. Also doesn't help that people see a full garbage can at nearby fields and just place their waste next to it instead of bringing it with them.
I think the big problem here is that there's no inertia to keep the place clean.
I recently ran into a great youtube video※ about how Japan stays clean (spoiler: it's about personal responsibility from a young age). When kids have to clean their own classrooms and be held accountable by their peers, they grow up with good habits. When I lived in South Korea, it wasn't as spotless as Japan despite a similar education, but not as bad as North American cities.
I would absolutely support littering enforcement officers, paid by large fines (in addition to community service), constantly roaming areas. Not sure how practical it would be in lower density areas like Outer Sunset but I can see it working along any commercial strips, or downtown.
※ - https://youtu.be/BOGMkgnc2YY
[+] [-] tcollier|4 years ago|reply
> Alas, Clean Streets is closing up shop.
> You may have noticed the falloff in times and quality the past couple weeks. [Redacted name] lost his main cleaner and has not been able to adequately replace him.
[+] [-] Zababa|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] closeparen|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] saulpw|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] refurb|4 years ago|reply
Imagine that shit… Google gave up.
[+] [-] pwthornton|4 years ago|reply
Stronger fines and other enforcement would help, but the first thing is to make sure that you actually have accurate places to throw stuff out (or have the culture where people bring stuff with them and throw out at home, like some non-American countries). This article mentions how the streets got really bad during the pandemic when the city stopped doing certain things.
SF, NYC, and other cities with trash problems could significantly solve this just by having more trash and recycling cans and by changing them more often. You'll notice how much cleaner DC and its surrounding urban areas are than SF and NYC and that's because they have a bigger commitment to making it easy to not litter and they do more cleaning.
[+] [-] tafda|4 years ago|reply
https://missionlocal.org/2021/03/newsoms-experiment-to-get-r...
[+] [-] jjav|4 years ago|reply
Yes, surely a primary cause. There are areas without trashcans anywhere. Which is so insane. As public policy it seems obvious to maximize trashcans everywhere to make it convenient to keep it clean.
The vast majority of people aren't out to be filthy, but humans are also lazy. To keep a city clean, make sure there is a trashcan within sight at all times no matter where you are, and nearly everyone will use them and keep things clean. Remove trashcans and lots of people will give up and litter.
Same issue with public toilets. Make them available everywhere and nearly everyone will use them, everyone is happy. Take them away and the inevitable consequence is obvious, what else are people going to do.
[+] [-] dorianmariefr|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] disneygibson|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] keville|4 years ago|reply
Linked in the article, too. While it's not the only source of the problem, it's still a big reason people get tired of looking around for a can in SF and just toss their litter.
[+] [-] imglorp|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ikt|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _dain_|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m0llusk|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] macinjosh|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gnopgnip|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] refurb|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rkk3|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baybal2|4 years ago|reply
Besides actually cleaning the streets, it brings very big spotlight to the problem.
And in some rare cases, if activity like this may go viral, some people in charge of public sanitation might remember of the shame enough to do their work.
[+] [-] kjksf|4 years ago|reply
San Francisco 2020 budget is ~$13 billion (https://londonbreed.medium.com/san-franciscos-budget-how-it-...)
This is the money that is supposed to pay for cleaning the streets and many more things.
For comparison, Austin budget is $4.5 billion (https://www.kvue.com/article/money/economy/austin-city-counc...)
What you see is unbelievable corruption and incompetence of city government, not the lack of money for cleaning the streets.
[+] [-] nbardy|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] legerdemain|4 years ago|reply
[*] http://astronaut.io/
[+] [-] horns4lyfe|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] itisit|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blunte|4 years ago|reply
Most of us manage to get clothes on before we leave the house each day, and that's a lot more complicated than just putting trash into a bin (or god forbid, carrying it until you reach a destination which has a trash bin). So there is no excuse for littering.
I would impose very strict penalties for littering - namely forcing the one who is caught littering to spend two hours every day for a week, or even a month, walking the streets (and beaches or riverbanks or parks) and collecting trash.
If an alternative punishment must be provided, they could instead sit on the spot where they littered for a day, holding a sign which says "I'm a poorly trained human, and I throw my trash on the ground."
[+] [-] refurb|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwawaysea|4 years ago|reply
It comes back to the policies around law enforcement adopted by SF. Since it is effectively the epicenter of progressive politics in the world, there are a lot of radical policies in play. One of them is "restorative justice", which claims to make criminals / law breakers less stigmatized and more able to constructively reintegrate into society. Personally, I feel the motivations are sincere and have good intentions behind them.
However in practice, that framework of restorative justice has been warped into something more like an us versus them narrative, where those who break the law are viewed as helpless victims while those who seek to enforce the law are viewed as oppressors. I think this is partly because of the divisive nature of American politics in general, and partly because of the extremist language used by some activists who support these policies.
While I agree there is no excuse for this, and it shouldn't be tolerated (alongside open drug abuse, shoplifting, defecating on the street, assault, armed robberies, burglaries, and so on), the reality is that the politicians elected in SF and people like Chesa Boudin (the District Attorney) are very much all-in on restorative justice. In effect, they've decriminalized most crimes. And unfortunately it is a two-tier justice system where law abiding taxpayers are subject to the penalties of the law, while criminals are somehow not subject to penalties.
As far as I can tell, the only practical way out for SF is for constituents to wholesale reject fringe progressive politics and return to moderate politics that is closer to the Clinton or Obama era left. However, I don't view that as being very likely despite all the complaints, simply because the voice of activists is louder and more feared than other voices.
[+] [-] dilap|4 years ago|reply
Beyond trash, the streets actually had a lot of shit and piss on them, too. I think it's hard to really understand just how bad it was unless you go there. I'd watch movies and they didn't seem real to me because the streets were too clean.
To me it seems like an obvious failure of the government, but perhaps it does reflect a popular sentiment of the dominant culture, that people's individual right to live a life of misery in squalor on the street trumps any other concern. I dunno.
[+] [-] mromanuk|4 years ago|reply
Even better is getting the idea inside people's brain. "I don't litter, because this is how I am". There is a book titled "Made to stick" where they expose the case of Texas and the problem they had with littering. A campaign was made "Don't mess with Texas", basically everyone should police anyone who doesn't comply with this don't litter attitude. This was done by appealing to the ideal of what a Texan should be, through clever advertising and marketing. Never been to Texas btw :)
[+] [-] themodelplumber|4 years ago|reply
This is only part of the issue. I've been picking up trash for years while walking or hiking in the outdoors and have observed a lot of different situations and setups that are really common:
- Pocket design on clothing isn't designed to allow easy litter insertion, exactly. A lot falls out of coats, jogging pouches when people think it's secure. Open wrappers from things like candy or granola bars have this banana-peel splaying effect that can help them to practically leap out of pockets while being stuffed in.
- Animals like local corvidae can spread litter like crazy.
- Wind, especially on garbage collection day, or around outdoor events
- Some hilarious amount of litter is meant to stay there because someone really does intend to come back and get it later. From water bottles left by runners to legit trash left by well-meaning people who really will be back soon, and then feel angry and confused about how they are perceived when they find that another do-gooder picked it up
- Vehicles, from garbage trucks to other work vehicles headed from site to site...man, some of the trash vortices I've seen :D
The inexcusable people you mentioned, I guess, are easy to spot and often easy to clean up after because they'll put their trash in the bag before hucking it out the car window, so you can use their bag to hold other trash as well. Or at least it's thrown in the same general area, and amounts to a couple bottles.
If they are drunk/high you can often get their names and stuff really easy too. Starbucks cup, receipt...wallet...oops they forgot that lol. Stage a gentle community intervention if so inclined, nobody necessarily needs the police involved.
But emotionally if someone has just had it with rules and abuse of rule systems for control purposes, if they perceive that they have been unfairly treated by society, I find that those are the litter bugs people worry about. But I can also sympathize...
[+] [-] wolverine876|4 years ago|reply
The real question isn't the obvious, but what we find when, discovering that the obvious isn't working, we dig deeper.
Do you live in a community with these problems? Try speaking to the people there; you may learn a lot. They aren't fools who have never considered the issue; they are intelligent, mostly well-meaning human beings who nevertheless find themselves in this situation.
I'm not talking about the obvious, so please avoid pinning on me the anti-obvious ('I support litter!'). The obvious in this case is an obstacle, preventing us from seeing and addressing the reality.
> I just don't understand why throwing trash on the ground is tolerated.
Tolerated? Come around some neighborhoods and not tolerate it. Who said the problem is our toleration?
> I would impose very strict penalties
This is an understandable reaction to bad behavior, but it doesn't work. Humans aren't so easily pushed around and it becomes a tool for harassing innocent people (e.g., minor drug possession offenses).
[+] [-] DantesKite|4 years ago|reply
I like the idea of a $1000 fine or community service spent cleaning up trash.
[+] [-] sergiotapia|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Proven|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] bbbhahah|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] bbbhahah|4 years ago|reply
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