Zürich voters ban noisy leaf blowers(swissinfo.ch) |
Zürich voters ban noisy leaf blowers(swissinfo.ch) |
But some people seem to get obsessed with it and do it almost every day instead of the minimum number of times required to accomplish the purpose.
Around here if you simply let the leaves stay on your lawn you’re going to have a moldy mess and dead grass the next spring.
Why though?
It's generally a lot quicker unless you're a very old person
It's however infinitely more fun with the leave blower, I admit to that!
My leaf blower is battery electric though so its a good bit quieter than the gas ones others use, although I do agree its still one of the loudest parts of my yard maintenance.
Well, yeah, they have such big gaps because leaves are big. Have you tried a push-broom? That would be the first thing I'd reach for.
Leaf blower is still pretty useful for keeping things tidy, but I’m still embarrassed to use my battery one.
Letting your landscapers blow nutrients off your property is insane when it's difficult to find good quality top soil. The stuff you buy at Home Depot is essentially trash and rocks now. What comes out of the mower bag each spring can yield an incredible amount of dirt after it's had a full summer to cook in the pile.
We finally bought a battery-powered leaf blower. This is really not for the lawn, which is relatively small and easily raked. Rather, my wife likes to remove the leaves from the garden beds. These are difficult to rake, what with shrubs etc., and one generally brings a good deal of mulch along with the leaves. We also have a strip of gravel to one side of the garage, and the blower makes it possible to remove leaves without gravel coming along.
And since you asked, the leaves end up at the curb. The city has a couple of collections every fall.
Is there a reason why your wife wants them removed from the beds? Unless we're talking about an amount of leaves that's endangering the plants there?
Funnily, previously I lived next to a railway and also under fly path of airplanes and these sounds never bothered me. It's the tiny combustion engines that make high-pitched noises that are the worst.
In my home country (France), lights mean emergency, sound means "MOVE ITS URGENT" (and they generally ONLY use sirens when it is REALLY urgent). So when they started the siren, I put my warning lights on and moved slowly through the red light and to the outside of the road (I did not continue moving).
The guy ripped me a new one in Korean, but then I explained that I thought it was urgent because we were all stopped and they put the sound on so I moved out of the way in the safest way I could and even stopped. He calmed down eventually.
Apparently, it's normal in Korea for police cars to 1) always have the lights on and 2) just randomly blast the sirens going about their day.
TLDR: arms race against audibility for drivers, with residents’ sanity as the casualties.
Those leaf blowers put more garbage into the air than a car or pickup truck. They're that bad.
https://www.stadt-zuerich.ch/de/stadtleben/veranstaltungen-u...
But then again, we are talking about a country where in many buildings you are not allowed to shower after 9pm.. Or take out the glass to the recycling on sundays..
In a free society, where the default is "allowed", the only lever that you have is restriction.
We can also turn it around, we prohibit everything unless it's explicitly allowed. Then people don't have to complain so much about "too many prohibiting rules".
They can't complain if it's prohibited, straight to jail!
The glass thing is accurate tho!
We have this ban as well in Los Angeles and it’s been lovely, though it’s within 150m of a residential zone.
for what purpose, to make it someone else's problem and then they can blow them back?
I'm not convinced leaf blowing is faster than raking. I'm not even convinced it's faster than picking up leaves by hand.
I hated doing this as a kid btw, and it's one of the reasons I don't want a home with a lawn.
If you want to live in nature and in a city you need the tools to manage it. Cutting the trees down is also a valid solution.
It's the classic arsehole world we have become, people have to be indignant about everything.
For the people who don't create, lazy sloths sitting in their basements, they lash out at those who do.
Trees are a lot of work, when you work in gardening half the time is cleaning (leaf blowing, hedging and mowing) the other half is chopping them down because they are too much work for the owner.
But that's not it - I find this restriction interesting, and I wanted to learn more. I contrast this with the unrestricted American "freedom to" that I usually see in HN.
Zürich is testing "Lärmeblitzer"[1] which they want to put in certain places where people produce excessive noise with their vehicles. It will take time however as laws need to be changed to allow such devices to issue fines and they need to make sure the false positive rate is low enough.
[1] https://www.20min.ch/story/pilotversuch-wegen-autoposern-sta...
Here in Germany, I'm convinced the Police simply don't care about motorcycles with modified mufflers. The sound is deafening. In the last decade the noise has gotten worse and worse.
Once one of those small penis motorcycle owners saw that I was covering my three year old child's ears as he passed by, and only then did he put his bike into neutral and walked it by us.
And no, I don't have a loud motorcycle.
Aftermarket mods, revving your engine, or late shifting can net you a cool 5 figures fine.
https://lenews.ch/2025/01/17/switzerlands-strict-new-road-no...
Trees are really only a lot of work if you insist on keeping a grotesquely unnatural manicured garden; the only tree I've got that's any significant amount work is an apple tree that would turn half the yard to a rotten apple tripping hazard if you didn't pick them up. A couple more need trimming every few years to keep a path clear, but I would chalk that up to user error in choosing to plant them slightly too close to the path.
Contrary to what the "just tough it out" types would have you believe, noise pollution does cause appreciable harm to public health. Making lots of noise in a dense neighborhood where thousands of people live is just not worth the marginal efficiency improvement of blowing vs raking leaves. Tangentially, this is also one of several reasons why speed limits should be 30km/h in cities to limit rolling noise.
We've managed to maintain cities with trees for hundreds of years without leaf blowers, and have owned one I can confirm that it cuts maybe 20% of the time over simply using a rake.
I could understand the ban for residential use, fine - I agree just using a rake if it is just leaves, but for tree work / hedge work where the owner expects "tidy" as one of the things they see at the end of the job they're essential. Without then It'd mean an extra couple of hours on every job, which means less jobs, which means higher costs. The fine chips, the hedge cuttings and the tiny snapped twigs they take ages to clear up. Especially on gravel or grass. Fast moving air is the perfect tool for cleaning up this stuff on all surfaces.
All that being said, it is actually better to leave material for habitat and detritivores. It's really valuable, so in that regard it may force peoples hands in "accepting the mess" or as I like to say "the reconfigured habitat".
It'll boil down to "the cost", "the mess" or "the noise".
context: I'm an arborist as well as a software engineer.
Granted though, leaf blowers ain't it. We are way too lenient regarding noise pollution.
The reason is not only environmental, also many people (including myself) were unhappy with the noise of the petrol powered ones. They are very loud, and it seems the typical Zurich neighbor always decides to clean up his garden on a Saturday morning at 7AM.
How much of this is just to make things look nice, as opposed to actually functional?
Getting rid of all the litter for that “perfect lawn” requires re-introducing nitrogen artificially (historically lawns would be grown with clover, the clover being a nitrogen fixer for the grass, that stopped being a thing when people started widely applying broad-leaf herbicides like 2,4D, the lawn industry then labelled clover a weed to make killing it a goal rather than a negative side effect).
People used rakes.
When you work in gardening, you are paid to do so.
If people in Zürich decide to pay more for gardening and reduce noise, it's their decision.
(though quite frankly, from using a rake myself and watching people here use leaf blowers, I'm not sure they are faster in any way)
with leaf blowing, where do people blow their leaves/branches/trash to? to roads? to neighbors? making roads flood by blocking road drainage?
what about all these noise and dust from leaf-blowing? (even not counting all those fuel burning...)
maybe those leaf-blowing promoters are the "arseholes" ?
just rake them, put them in big bags & compost them
They always have been. But this is not a case of that. Leaf blowers are loud and disperse dog poop. It's disgusting. Use a broom instead.
I used to use a broom before I got the leaf blower. The blower is way faster and disperses the trimmings more evenly across my yard than the broom.
I do end up using a rake though for leaves, as for actual leaf gathering usage the rake is faster and far more efficient at actually making nice, easy to handle piles.
These, along with various other obnoxiously loud and/or big vehicles, are _strongly_ coded 'insecure man'. Not necessarily insecure about that in particular, of course, but insecure about something.
Not everyone, sure, but this isn't an issue of rakes Vs leaf-blowers and it isn't the problem with two-stroke leaf blowers.
If anything, people with leaf blowers probably put more thought into what they do with their leaves, because they have a bigger volume of them to deal with.
it's not to blame those workers, but re-think about the job itself
What sort is this? Do you mean top earners?
Even if it doesn't make it cheaper to run (I honestly don't know, it could be that there are economies of scale, if more people use public transportation?), people spending time in Zurich (including residents) could benefit if this leads to less people driving in Zurich, thus less air and noise pollution, and more pedestrian-friendly streets.
Indeed if it leads to less infrastructure investment it might worsen, but it's not obvious that this is what will happen.
Zurich especially has no improvement potential here because it already does everything possible to force people onto public transport e.g. parking is heavily throttled, driving through the city is extremely slow. Transit is already saturated at peak times. There aren't armies of people driving cars around who would take the train or bus every day instead if a yearly Abo was only cheaper. Maybe a small number but not many.
> Indeed if it leads to less infrastructure investment it might worsen, but it's not obvious that this is what will happen
Of course it will lead to less investment! Not just of public transport but everything. This decision opens up a 185M CHF/year financial hole in a city of ~300,000 residents. It's already one of the most expensive cities in Switzerland, and the most expensive in terms of corporation tax. A full 25% of companies were already considering relocating out due to the high taxes.
Look at it like this. This decision is so bad that even public transit advocacy groups are criticizing it!
https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/various/public-transport-critic...
> The public transport information service (Litra) and the public transport industry organisation Alliance Swiss Pass are also critical of general discounts. Public transport always costs the same, even if customers pay less – in the end, the taxpayer pays more, they said.
How bad does a decision have to be for the subsidized services themselves to tell you it's a mistake?
It comes on top of other catastrophically expensive recent socialist decisions like the 13th AHV, buying up so much housing in prime real estate and restricting it to low earners, etc. Where will the money come from? It will come from higher taxes on "high earners" like tech workers (ordinary tech workers). It will come from us. This vote increases the cost of public transport for us, and probably by a lot. It just won't show up on the ÖV bills.
> the lawn industry then labelled clover a weed to make killing it a goal rather than a negative side effect
People who are into bio gardening/farming use cover crops to boost soil fertility and avoid weeds, very often clovers actually. You can even use them as cover crops while growing other things, again to compete with weeds, every know and then you cut them down, leave them on the spot, they decompose and feed your crops/earthworms
However police is actively monitoring noise levels in some places, picking out the cars and remove them from the streets. Just last weekend my closest city checked 15 and removed about half of these cars in one evening.
Our street control systems are just getting started. Most people seem to have no idea whats to come.
I've spent a lot of time in the countryside where there is a motorway in the distance, and the general low rumble road noise seems to be mostly the tires etc. But then sometimes a loud motorbike revs and that really carries and intrudes.
During the fall and winter, I would mow two or three times. The mulching blade made quick work of the detritus and it was faster and less work than raking the whole thing. I'm far enough south that snow, while possible, was still a novelty not guaranteed to happen every year.
Germany has such a specific way of making laws with holes.
I really have no idea about all that. Just some absurdity I recently noticed.
1) At least token engineering presence by every major tech company
2) Tech-savvy VC, legal, audit and tax services you can get on a short notice
3) A pool of talent to fill any engineering position
4) A funnel from a big engineering university to the industry that generates startups
5) Tax authorities willing to work through complicated situations like acquihires, IP riders in contracts for a consideration in the form of stock, etc.
It’s much smaller than the Bay Area, of course, but it’s the only place in Europe that has everything you need in one spot. (Except maybe London, but that’s more like the New York of Europe, minus the high salaries.)
Also, “IT hub” is a place where salaries are low and you plop down a call center. IT are the support roles that install antivirus, not a profit center. There’s a huge difference between that and a “tech industry.”
>>A pool of talent to fill any engineering position
Is it true for Zurich? Due to extremely high cost of living I guess there is small amount of unemployed IT people there.
And yes, Switzerland, but especially Zurich, is on another level compared to the rest of Europe. (Except maybe London.) I’ve been a hiring manager at multiple large tech companies: Europe in general has less tech talent than the US, but in London and Zurich you can fill any role, from kernel, through ML, computer vision, hardware, manufacturing, robots, quantum computing, etc.
But a lot of it was probably familiarity with rake and a lack of skill with leaf blower. I am sorry ready to believe that technology progressed enough that leaf blowers are now usable. I'd like to see how it feels with wet leafs though.