Note: This article was originally published in the Beacon Hill Paper, October 23, 1996.

There is a wonderful program run by the City of Boston: residential street sweeping. The program runs from April through October. Once a week residents are asked to move their cars to clear their streets. Street sweepers then run along the road, brushing up leaves, trash and other debris. The side of the street being swept clean alternates from week to week. The result is clean, litter-free streets which make residents proud and visitors marvel.

Or at least, that’s the theory. In practice it appears that no one is happy with the program. On one side are complaints from those aggravated by the annoyance of moving their cars every Sunday evening. Residential parking spaces, in very short supply even when both sides of a street are available for parking, are simply unavailable on street cleaning day. Car owners find themselves with the choice of paying for parking in a garage or getting a parking ticket by keeping their car on the street.

On the other side are residents who watch, frustrated, as street sweepers lumber along a street, dodging cars that have failed to move and hence failing to clean the curbsides. Particularly annoyed are those who complied with the rules — going through the headache of moving their cars — only to see others blithely leave their vehicles on the street with the only consequence a $20 fine.

One solution is for the city to get tough. Don’t ticket cars; tow them. Once towed, the curbs would be available to be cleaned. Indeed, implementing this policy would not require new legislation or regulations. The streets are already posted as two zones for violating street sweeping regulations. The only thing that’s needed is the willingness of the transportation department to do it.

So why not start towing? My personal position is this: if I have been successful in moving my car on street cleaning day, I favor towing. If I have been unsuccessful, I am grateful that the only penalty will be a ticket.

I suspect I am not the only one to hold such conflicting positions. Towing sounds like a great answer, but when residents going to work find their car gone, and need to spend half of a work day, plus towing and ticketing fees, getting their car back, they will rebel. Even as it is, the street sweeping program enjoys fragile support from residents. My concern is that a strict towing policy would ultimately operate to undermine that support altogether.

The city’s Transportation and Public Works Departments feel the same way. Although towing has been used on a few occasions, the general policy has been to ticket. The hope is that the ticket will serve as a sufficient deterrent to enough people so that most — not all — of a street can be cleaned. The two Departments argue that compliance is generally acceptable and that the streets are cleaner as a result of the program.

Is the City’s policy on this the right one? Are my concerns about political support overblown? Perhaps or perhaps not. This is fundamentally a program designed to help residents. If there were a general consensus on Beacon Hill, or in any other neighborhood, that all residents supported towing, then I would gladly cede to their wishes. I am sure the city would too.

In the absence of that consensus, however — and the calls and letters I receive suggest that opinions are strongly divided on the subject — the middle course adopted by the City seems to be the right one: do a good (admittedly not great) job of cleaning the streets and encourage compliance with a small, not a big, stick.