The assessment per front foot based on a street 30 feet wide and cleaned 50 times a season would be 1.77 cents.
Raymond W. Parlin, Deputy Commissioner Street Cleaning, New York City, says: “So definite are the needs of the cities for results better than those produced by sweeping that it may be safely prophesied that sweeping in the future will cease to be a primary method of cleaning a modern city and will become an auxiliary to other more efficient methods or used where only rough cleaning is desired.”
Cleaning by Flushing
All authorities agree that whatever method for primary cleaning is adopted, it is important that the street surface be frequently washed by the use of hose, horse drawn flushers, flushing cars, or power squeegees. Reports from cities show that flushing is replacing machine sweeping and that the automobile flusher is becoming popular. The Chief of the Atlanta Sanitary Department favors doing away with sweeping machine and cleaning the streets entirely with flushing machines. He says that sweeping machines are out of date and that flushers are the ideal machines.
The squeegee is a vehicle having a tank and a revolving rubber roller, which washes the pavement as the vehicle moves along the street and the water from the tank is sprinkled in front of the roller. Hose flushing is used in cities having graded streets and sufficient water supply. Street flushers have pressure tanks which depend for their pressure either upon the pressure from the water mains or upon the pressure obtained from a pump operated by a gasoline engine. The latter plan gives the better results.
Whinery is of the opinion that on well paved streets the most efficient and satisfactory method so far devised with the apparatus now available is hand cleaning by the patrol system by day, followed with hose or flushing wagons or scrubbing squeegees during the night. While this is somewhat more expensive than plain machine sweeping he thinks that no other method yet devised will produce equally clean streets at a lower cost.
Gustave H. Hanna says: “The use of flushers has proven not only the cheapest but the most satisfactory method of street cleaning that our experience in Cleveland has been able to develop. Statistics of the department show an average cost of 15.3 cents per square of 10,000 square feet for flushing to which must be added practically 9 cents for pick-up work, a total of some 24 cents per square as against 42 cents for work with White Wings. The White Wings are too convenient and necessary an adjunct to be wholly displaced under any consideration. Down town streets must be swept continually during the day and the hand sweeper with his small cart can also work to advantage in gutters of residential streets collecting dirt that has either been flushed or blown to the curb; but so far as our experience goes, the lessening of cleaning cost by cheaper methods means simply the extension of the use of flushers at every practical point.
“There is an argument of sanitation in favor of flushing. Hand sweeping causes a certain amount of dust and mechanical sweeping usually causes still more. I am opposed to the use of simple sprinkling as a means of laying dust. Ammonia and other products leach out of damp manure and form a scum on the surface that is nearly impossible to remove, and makes pavement slippery and foul smelling.
“Water should also be applied with force enough to carry the refuse to gutter where it should be properly collected with broom and shovel and removed. In Philadelphia flushing machines are used only on poorly paved streets and block pavement. High pressure flushing machines are usually operated similarly.”
Very reports that objection is made to flushing because materials are washed into sewers. The same objection, he says, might be made to hand sweeping, as many sweepers are like housemaids and sweep the dust into the catch basins to make work easy. The material need not reach the sewers if the operator knows his business. Many fear that the action of water when used in flushing will wear away the pavement surface or the joint materials. His answer is that it should, if such a class of pavement or of jointing is allowed to be laid, to expose the paving contractor.