City staff will seek approval from aldermen tonight to move street sweeping on residential streets from Thursdays and Fridays to Tuesdays and Wednesdays.
A memo to aldermen from Public Works Director Dave Stoneback indicates that a prime reason for the change is that the current schedule ends up having streets in south Evanston scheduled for their November cleaning — at the peak of leaf season — during the Thanksgiving Day holiday.
To try to deal with that in the past the city has added extra cleaning days in parts of south Evanston, but the memo says that creates additional inconvenience for residents with the additional parking restrictions.
The change in cleaning days is proposed to occur over four years, starting in Zone 4, south of Main Street, this year,
The switch would take place in Zone 3, bounded by the Metra tracks, Main Street, and the North Shore Channel, next year; in Zone 2, east of the Metra tracks and north of Main, in 2020, and in northwest Evanston’s Zone 1 in 2021.
The proposed new street sweeping map.
The last major change to the street sweeping schedule, two years ago, led to substantial confusion when installation of new signs explaining the change weren’t installed citywide in time for the start of the season.
The current street sweeping schedule has residential streets cleaned once a month with the west or south side of a street — the even-numbered side — swept on a Thursday and the east or north side — the odd-numbered side — swept on a Friday.
The new schedule change is expected to cost $3,000 to implement — to pay for stickers to add to new street sweeping signs installed two years ago.
Stoneback is also proposing that certain residential streets now cleaned between 4 and 7 a.m. be shifted to the daylight cleaning schedule used for other residential streets, to eliminate the loss of overnight parking for those residents.
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New street sweeping signage showing up (4/11/16)
Confusion at the curb (3/18/16)