Leaf blowers

This Troy-Bilt leaf blower is available at Amazon,
if you're so inclined. They also sell rakes.

I'm intrigued by leaf blowers. They are so pervasive, and yet I can't think of a single situation where a broom or rake wouldn't work just as well.

Many leaf blowers double as vacuums. But in my informal observations this fall I've never seen one used as a vacuum. They're always used to blow.

And blow is the kind of generic term that obscures the true nature of the action--which is re-distributing leaves, debris, dirt and particulate matter from the blowers' property to a common area like a street. The leaf blower is a tragedy-of-the-commons enabler.

Some people argue that leaf blowers are more efficient that rakes and brooms. For example, the California Landscape Contractors' Association says:

Most landscape industry estimates suggest that it takes at least five times as long to clean a typical landscape site with a broom and rake than it does with a power leaf blower. A similar estimate was provided in 1994 by the City of San Luis Obispo for its parks and public buildings; the city's maintenance supervisors estimated that their crews would take 50 hours to do work that took 10 hours with leaf blowers, and that much of the work would require the use of water.

Sure, efficiency is important. But as the following quote from this Wired News article suggests, the leaf blower can take things too far.

"A leaf blower, because it's so effective at pushing every speck of dust on the ground, it creates this determinism of getting every speck so the person is consumed with this goal," he said. "Without the leaf blower, the standard of clean would not be so high."

Indeed, the standards are too high. Which is why I see our building maintenance guy obsessively blowing out the gutters in front of our building almost daily. And somehow he doesn't realize that he's just pushing the dirt around. If he swept it up and removed it, maybe he wouldn't have to blow so often.

There's a certain incongruity to it all--how people enjoy the immaculately clean lawn/patio/gutter the leaf blower gives them, but are quite satisfied with the filthy street/alley/sidewalk they created fifteen feet away.