Adventures with Dr. Lady Cutie Troublemaker

So I went to my sub-neighborhood’s meeting tonight. It’s not like a Neighbors for Neighbors, let’s all meet our friends kind of meeting. It’s a street cleaning, zoning, crime prevention kind of meeting. Representatives from the Boston Transportation Department and the Department of Public Works were there. It was pretty tense!  I ended up seated between the prez of the organization and the pretty ornery transportation engineer who was NOT going to be putting a mid-block crosswalk anywhere as long as he had anything to do with it. And he was NOT going to slow down the pace of his little list to stop and deal with this woman who was clearly very upset about the lack of a crosswalk where she thought there should be one.

Here’s what really amazed me. Some streets are cleaned and some streets aren’t. Why? Um, I think the answer was something along the lines of “just cuz.” Lesser streets (dead ends, for example) are basically never on the list. From November to April, no streets are on the list. In order to get street cleaning going, you have to have a lot of money, primarily to enforce parking. It’s all very complicated. One resident said he’d lived in his house for two years, and his street wasn’t ever cleaned.

The one thing I am happy about is that there is a crimewatch because apparently, according to the police officers that were there, the summer gets “very busy.” I don’t like the sound of that at all. Sigh.

Nice people though.