The Logic of Banning Grass Clippings From the Streets

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There's a law against placing grass clippings in the street. There are multiple reasons for this. Grass clippings are high in nitrogen, which stimulates algae growth in local waterways. As grass clippings decompose at the curb, they release the nitrogen, which then gets washed into streams as runoff from the streets, causing nutrient pollution. 

Grass clippings also are very dense, which means air can't penetrate into a pile of them, which means that the decomposition goes anaerobic, encouraging bacteria that release noxious odors. When a pile of grass clippings that's been sitting awhile gets run over by a car, it releases those foul odors into the neighborhood. 

A pile of grass clippings is ugly and mars the appearance of any property it is piled in front of, though psychologically this doesn't seem to register for most homeowners. As soon as the grass clippings are successfully purged from the property, they are someone else's problem and cease in some way to exist.

The last reason it is unlawful to put them in the street is that grass clippings can easily be left on the lawn, to quickly drop down between the new grass blades and return their fertility to the soil. 

Leaves: How Nature's Gift Becomes a Menace

Many homeowners find it convenient to rake or blow their leaves to the curb each fall. The leaves are then scraped off the pavement and hauled out of town to be composted. There may be some logic to this approach, but there's also considerable illogic at work. The illogic plays out in many ways: expense, the hazards of blocked traffic and bike lanes, global warming gases from all the scraping, hauling and industrial composting, nutrient runoff into streams, impoverished and hardened urban soils, bias against homeowners on busy or narrow streets, and a scarred streetscape. Here are photos that illustrate some of the downsides.

Leaf piles in the streets push bicyclists and pedestrians (on streets with no sidewalks) out into traffic lanes. I've heard of near misses, particularly at night.

Cars, too, must swerve to avoid leaf piles. Here's a common situation. Police records show at least two auto accidents precipitated by leafpiles.

Removal of the above leaf pile left a dirty street and scarred ground. Rains will sweep nutrients from the remaining decomposing leaves and bare dirt into the local waterway, adding to nutrient pollution.

The irony is that regulations require that silt fencing be installed at construction sites to prevent the washing of sediment into our streams, and yet uncontainerized leaf collection exposes dirt and coats long stretches of streets with leaf residue that can then wash into those same streams.

Loose leaf collection discriminates against homeowners on busy streets, where they must pile their leaves on the grass rather than the pavement. Covered by leaves, the grass quickly dies, leaving bare dirt far into the next summer.

Grass also gets killed on narrow side streets like Chestnut. One exasperated resident of very narrow Bank Street told me of the racket caused by a landscape crew that blew leaves from the backyard into the street, where they interfered with traffic for many days.

It's ironic to see this fertilizer sign on a lawn facing Hamilton Ave, while at the same time the lawn service is killing the grass with piles of leaves. You could ask "What are people thinking?", but I doubt much thinking is going on. Rather, there's a blind adherence to two customs: fertilizing lawns and blowing leaves towards the street.

Princeton main thoroughfare, Nassau St, should be a pride and joy, but the decorative flags and hanging flower baskets during the summer contrast with the lingering scars left behind by fall leaf pickup.

Here's another stretch of Nassau Street left bare and muddy after the grass-killing leaf piles have been removed.

And then there's the actual scars on the pavement, left behind by the "claw" that picks up the leaves.

It's hard to photograph the annual expense, which may be up around $1 million, or the hardened, leaf-cheated urban soil that sheds rain and adds to flooding, or the fossil carbon rising from all the public works department's machines to speed climate change.

Some people think that the answer lies in education and better enforcement of the town's leaf ordinance. I used to think the same. But past education efforts, of which I was a part, had negligible impact. Enforcement was tried, proved time consuming and was abandoned. Robo calls with schedule reminders have helped some, but it's doubtful that landscape crews, with rapid employee turnover and language barriers, will ever coordinate their work to conform to the town's five zone leaf pickup.

Blowing leaves into the street is much like being allowed to send underground carbon up into the air as CO2 from our exhaust pipes. The legacy of all that private convenience is a shared public burden. Deprived of the convenience of doing environmental harm, we would respond, as humans do, by being resourceful and inventive. In the case of leaves, we'd mow some of the leaves back into the lawn and blow others into a back corner of the yard to kill the weeds. We'd devote a tiny portion of our (largely unused) yards to leaf corrals that return nutrients to the soil, and if need be we'd stuff any leaves left over into yardwaste bags and rollcarts for efficient pickup. We'd take as our inspiration nature itself, which never hauls valuable nutrients away, but keeps them close by, to return to the soil from which they came. And we'd take pride in clean and verdant streetscapes.

Princeton doesn't need to be spending $1 million for a brand of leaf management that forces us to navigate through a scarred mess much of the year. We're better than this.

Composting Leaves in Paris's Luxembourg Gardens

The place? Luxembourg Gardens in Paris. The context? Highly formalized, immaculately maintained grounds. And what do they do with the leaves? Throw them out in the street and haul them out of town? No. They find an out of the way spot in the park, corral the leaves and let them break down into soil.

More on how nature is managed in Paris at this link.

Sump Pump-ageddon

Woe be the world when the sump pumps turn against us. And this, dear readers, I fear has finally come to pass. It was only a matter of time--or, more to the point, an extended period of freezing weather--before the needs of the indoor underworld (people's basements) would begin to wreak havoc on the great suburban out of doors better known as sidewalks and driveways.

It is, once again, that mischievous substance known as water--the only molecule at liberty on this earth to pass with ease from one state to another, from gas to liquid to solid and back again--that is playing tricks.

Rising out of the basement as a liquid, this sump pumpage acts much like a fresh spring, a rivulet, warm enough to begin flowing across the pavement towards Harry's Brook. In above freezing weather, this drainage is benign, flowing away from the house and down into the street, where gravity leads it to a storm drain that connects to the local brook.

But in freezing weather, the water solidifies into a glacier where before there was a driveway.

On Linden Lane, this thick crusting of road salt, along with the traffic cones that were just removed today, may well have been applied to reduce the hazard created by a sump pump that empties into the street and has proved hazardous during cold spells in previous years.



Sump pumps can also cause problems if they drain into the sanitary sewer (the one that carries water from sinks and toilets to the treatment plant), adding unnecessarily to the town's wastewater treatment costs. Some of Princeton's homes still have this faulty connection.

Far better than releasing sump pump water onto a driveway, out into the street, or into a sanitary sewer, is this backyard discharge,

which allows the basement water to flow out into the yard where it can seep into the ground and, during summer dry spells, quench the thirst of gardens, lawns and trees. It helps, of course, to have some slope to carry the water away from the house, which many yards do not.

As it happens, these two houses are built where once there was an actual tributary of Harry's Brook. Though the creek was filled in to build the homes, it still travels underground, seeping into their basements and necessitating a lot of work by their sump pumps. This is a domestic version of what happened with the Spring Street parking garage downtown, and speaks to the perils of trying to ignore or erase the original hydrology.

What water doesn't get absorbed by the uphill neighbors' backyards flows towards my yard beyond the fence, where I've actually recreated a streambed to imitate the original tributary. Conveniently, this frozen stream reveals what is hard to photograph at other times of the year, when the water flow blends into the grass.

Somewhere in Princeton, I'm sure there's some clever homeowner who has channeled sump pump water to make an ice skating rink in the backyard.

These are some ways to tame a sump pump's offerings, to give the mischievous water room to play, and to turn Sump Pump-ageddon into Sump Pump-a-Garden.

Diverse Bicycles and Street Names

A nice sighting on Hodge Road. Watch out for those speedhumps!

Where's Hodge Road? The glut of streetname-worthy personages in Princeton's history has caused many streets to adopt a Zelig-like quality of switching identities every couple blocks. Hodge Road begins its life in the eastern lowlands as Tyson Lane, but quickly grows restless during its slow climb, abandoning that name after only one block in favor of Littlebrook Road, then quickly changing names again, becoming Rollingmead Street. Its passage across the threshold of Snowden Lane seems a fitting time to adopt yet another alias, Hamilton Ave, perhaps to better fit in to a neighorhood populated with Harriet, Hornor, Harrison and Hawthorn. This Hamilton persona continues for a surprisingly long stretch before the street--excuse me ... Avenue--gives in to old impulses and flirts for a brief time with the name Wiggins Street. At Witherspoon, it senses another historical shift and takes the proud name Paul Robeson Place before settling on Hodge Road for its final blocks. Hodge ends at Elm Road, which if you turn right will soon become the Great Road, whose greatness may not be clear in the eye of the beholder.

Some have speculated that the tradition of name changing could have played a key role in confusing the British during the Revolutionary War, and has served to intimidate potential invaders, and benign newcomers, ever since. With the development of GPS by government researchers, New Jersey and Princeton in particular has lost this protective web of confoundment.

While traveling from Tyson to Hodge, you may as a Princetonian of highly advanced discernment wish to point out to fellow travelers the subtle differences in road width, surface texture and overall bearing that distinguish a Lane from a Street and an Avenue from a Place. Also, a tip for those lost and searching for a particular street in Princeton: just keep going straight. You'll probably find it.

To Pave or Not To Pave

Having watched a few baseball games over the years, I had come to believe that it's over when it's over. This looks over to me. The American Water Company proactively replaced an old water line in our neighborhood, then laid down a nice patch along the middle of the street--a street that looked to otherwise be in good condition. The street, like a dental patient, had received a filling. There seemed no need for an expensive crown.

But no, I was wrong. It's not really over until the fat lady sings, in this case the fat lady that chomps a few inches of asphalt off the street.

The fat lady, being a primadonna, brought her whole weighty entourage,

some of whom looked like they hadn't changed much since World War II.

After a couple days of hefty labor and ponderous groan, they moved on, leaving a gloriously paved street in their wake. Beautifully done, and looking at it from the narrow perspective of a neigborhood, it's pleasing to have it done. American Water says it's all part of replacing the water lines. But taking a larger view, surely there are streets elsewhere, crumbling, plagued with potholes, in greater need of care. If most teeth can function long and well with minor patching, then why not streets? At least on the surface, it seems like a big production for little gain. I know not why the fat lady sings.

Water Line Redux

As Yogi Berra, the famous installer of urban water mains, once said, "It ain't over 'till it's over." The sound of yet more heavy equipment groaning on a nearby street yesterday meant that the climactic overnight repair blitz the other night had segued into a surprise encore. I went out and got the lowdown from the American Water supervisor about the water lines that run beneath the fair streets of our fair town.

He said they would have finished the other night, but they had been slowed down by careful digging in the vicinity of a high-pressure gas line that turned out not to exist. Though no alligators have been found beneath Princeton's streets, that I know of (now that would be a scoop), there are a slew of pipes, and sometimes the various utilities forget where they put them all.

Each year, they choose some more water lines in Princeton to replace. There are several reasons for this gradual updating. The pipes here on Horner (one of the founding families of Princeton, by the way) are probably 60 years old, and are made of cast iron. Because cast iron reacts with the chloramines that are used to disinfect our drinking water, the new pipes are lined with concrete in order to prevent contact with metal. The pipes are also laid in a bed of gravel that will reduce the stress on the pipes from the ground's shrink and swell. The new 8" pipes replace the old 6" ones, meaning more water flow capacity, just in case anyone wants to pour more drinking water on the lawn.

The supervisor proudly pointed out that no one loses water service during these updatings. Because the water lines form an interlinking network under our streets, the break in the water line during replacement doesn't affect anyone's water access. The water is simply "backfed", which means it flows in from the other end of the street. The water lines, like the streets, allow flow in either direction.

At the same time, the company is replacing water meters for each residence. The foreman explained that two-income households make it harder to access indoor meters during the day for monthly readings. The new meters transmit their information wirelessly to a meter guy driving down the street. Within a few years, they may put antennas on the tops of water towers, and simply collect individual meter readings that way. There's a gain in efficiency but also a reduction in workforce needs. It would be nice if these boring jobs like reading meters, once phased out, could be replaced by more interesting and useful jobs, but I don't think business works that way.

Late Night Operation

The climax came at 4:30am. I awoke to lights flashing in the bedroom window blue and red, and an impassioned duet of mid-range D flats pulsing in the night made day by backhoes outside repairing the road. A water line had been recently replaced, and this looked to be the final patch job.

I ventured out in my nightcap to find a steamy scene of hot asphalt, groaning machines and foot soldiers deployed to make Harrison Street passable by dawn. The surrounding homes were cast in a garish light. A few stars and a half awake moon offered their everfresh light and timeless telling of time, for anyone interested. We could learn from them. Unlike much-trod earth, they need no repair.

The metal slaves, so skillfully maneuvered, performed a bulky ballet, balanced on well-tired treads, beeping their D flats to warn all groggy neighbors that the backhoes were, once again, backing up.

Memory returned of the cavity the dentist had recently drilled and filled. Part dentistry, part vascular surgery, asphaltistry is the means by which our aging infrastructure of water lines is made new. There's the tough skin of the road to break, the cavitied old pipes to remove, the new to install, the links to homes to tie in to, and finally the wound to fill with steaming asphalt and scraping blade.

I'm glad for what sleep I got, glad the crew made haste safely, glad someone is fixing some small part of the world,

glad it's done.