Los Angeles introduces clean streets program/metrics, measures cleanliness of every street

Photo from Frozen Tropics.

Personally, I find DC's streets to be particularly dirty.  I find when I travel to other cities, they tend to be much cleaner, especially neighborhood streets, although of course, this isn't true for every street.

"Every Litter Bit Hurts" is a 10+ year old piece about dealing with litter in the city, based on experiences in the H Street corridor and a brief survey then of best practices, with suggestions for programs that could be implemented in DC.

For years, I've been a fan of the litter survey instrument created by Keep Australia Beautiful, because it has the kind of detail that I like.

And in my piece ("Outline for a proposed Ward-focused (DC) Councilmember campaign platform and agenda") about what I think would be a ward-focused agenda for a campaign platform and councilmember agenda, I included maintaining metrics on street cleanliness.

Los Angeles' new Clean Streets LA program ("City website rates cleanliness of streets, alleys," LA Independent blog) includes measuring cleanliness on all of the city's streets.

Note that the city already maintains a public database on road condition quality.

It's called Cleanstat.  From the website:

Each street score is based on four factors: litter, weeds, bulky items and illegal dumping. This assessment will be repeated every quarter.

Overall, they find most streets are "Clean" or "Somewhat Clean," and only 4% are "Not Clean."

Of the 39,915 road segments, 61% were rated clean, 35% were rated somewhat clean, while streets rated unclean made up 4% of total street segments.

LA has 22,000 miles of streets and alleys, so 4% still indicates a lot of dirty roads and alleys, over 800 miles.

=====
This weekend's cleanup of parks and rivers in the Potomac/Anacostia River watershed picked up a lot of litter, which was sorted for recycling as part of the collection.  Generally, many tons of trash are collected.