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I bought my house 12.5 years ago. In that time I've seen street sweeping go from once a week to every other week to once a month.
Oh! Just so you know, the sweeping is NOT about cleaning up the trash dropped by passers by or lifted by the wind from the garbage truck or even the bits of detritus left after the Scooperizer(TM) has scooped the yard clippings we leave at the curb weekly. No. It's not about that at all. It's about "brake tailings" (a.k.a. asbestos) in the gutters that might make it to the bay. So, someone thinks that running the street sweeper up and down the street once a month is gonna keep vast quantities of asbestos from sneaking into the bay.
How do I know that this is what's going on? Because our neighborhood association had a city rep at a meeting where we were complaining about how littered our streets were getting what with the change in sweep schedule and the increase of trash after changing garbage companies. And that's what this representative of my city's government told us in all sincerity. *sigh*
ANYWAY, back to the original subject, in the last 12.5 years the city has given my street a facelift two or three times. The *type* of facelift varies between the kind where they grind down the top couple of inches then lay down a new, thick layer and the kind where they spray on some oil then lay down some gravel. (I really like the first kind. The second kind, not so much. You end up with sharp, loose gravel in the house.) This time around they are doing the oil-and-gravel treatment.
When I was a wee tyke, they always did the oil-and-gravel thing in my neighborhood. It was always done in the summertime, so we kids would spend the day watching the process. I don't recall a street sweeper (at least, not the big-mechanical-brushes-vacuum-on-wheels version we have today) being involved in the process, but someone must have done some sort of pre-clean. Then the asphalt truck would come through. This was a small thing with a kind of thin tar in it that they sort of mopped onto the street. Then guys would come along and shovel gravel on and rake it even. After that came the steam roller to mash the gravel into the tar.
Well, the process is still sort of the same, but not. Now the big-mechanical-brushes-vacuum-on-wheels street sweeper shows up first thing in the morning and runs up and down the street a couple of dozen times before the other trucks show up. Eventually a really big, wide tanker with an array of spray nozzles wider than the truck and fully half the width of the street shows up. It sprays something much thinner than the tarry substance of my youth on half the road.
This is followed by a gravel truck, but it's a two-part affair. Hitched to the back of the gravel truck is a gravel spreader. It has a steering wheel, but the gravel truck seems to be doing the driving and sharing in the steering. The spreader takes the gravel feed from the truck and scatters it in an even layer over the oil in a single pass. (When the gravel truck is empty, the truck and spreader unhitch so the spreader can hook up with the next load of gravel.)
Now here's where it really gets wacky. Instead of a steamroller, a bunch of large vehicles show up, each of which are almost as big as a steamroller. But these vehicles have four large tires on the front and four large tires on the back. Yep, they have eight wheels with tires. They drive up and down the street, at various speeds, forward and reverse, almost-but-not-quite playing bumper cars. Really. These guys, after the first pass, are driving up and down the street quite maniacally. This is apparently how they mash the gravel into the oil.
The signs all along the street say no parking during the workday for three days. I don't remember what they do on the second day, but I think the come through and sweep up the excess gravel on the third day.
If anything new or different comes along, I'll post it here, but for now I'm going to assume that there are no new surprises.
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