After allowing myself my one day to stay in and be a code monkey, I came out of my house this morning around 9:30 to find the street eerily empty. Sometime between yesterday and today, Medford’s famous No-Notice Street Sweeping was scheduled for my area. How this works is, sometime on an arbitrarily-selected Sunday afternoon, No Parking notices appear on telephone poles along the street. Any cars still there by early AM Monday get towed, ostensibly for the City to clean the streets. That is to say, if you decide to exercise your right to spend Sunday indoors, and thereby miss the 12-hours’ notice, you’re likely to be walking to work the next day*.
Yeah, I’ve ranted this before.**
Anyway, I ran to where I parked early Sunday morning to find, oh say could I see by the dawn’s early light, that my car was still there. How I dodged the bullet this time, I don’t know. Last times around, the tow trucks were already rolling on Princeton St. by 8am. (The time before last, I got there just in the nick of time; they were picking them off sequentially, and mine was three cars away from the tow truck. An older neighbor was actually going door-to-door waking people up to warn them.)
This time I got curious, thinking “Surely these street sweeping dealies must be publicly well-documented somewhere, and I just didn’t get the memo.” Like, the intarweb maybe. A good-faith search reveals the following:
The City of Medford doesn’t have a website, or domain, in the *.ma.us hierarchy.
But they do have one at medford.org, which says there are to be street sweepings four times per year (I’ve counted one), with a tentative schedule subject to change at any time.
And there is a Street Sweeping Schedule (.pdf), tentative dates and streets notwithstanding.
But it’s over six months out of date (Spring ’06).
Not helpful.
Interestingly, although an excellent revenue generator for the City of Medford, the twice-ish-annual street cleaning doesn’t seem to do much to keep the screws and nails out of my tires.
* not to mention paying wads of cash to get it back from someone’s impound lot, as well a ticket to the city directly. Not to accuse anyone of corruption or anything, but to get a car back from a City towing is on the order of $90, not counting any tickets tacked on. When I had my car towed legitimately for a bad starter, the fee was $35.
** ultimately, a point will be reached where future entries in this blog will consist entirely of meta-entries backreferencing combinations of previous entries. Eventually, all possible meta-entries will also have been written, and I can just post the final all-tying-together meta-meta-entry and mark the whole thing readonly…
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