[scott125]

All the grass in the city centre has turned yella. Wonder when that last happened!

View attachment 1828252

2018 went green for August.

 

[Steppish]

i genuinely don't know what the answer to this is. I agree with the complaints though - the streets are a total state. And, while it doesn't stop me walking about the streets, it certainly makes the whole experience unpleasant

People living in the west of the city have said litter and rubbish makes them want to avoid walking through the streets.

After the Glasgow Times was contacted by local people to complain about the sight and smell of the streets in the morning we took a walk along the streets.

We saw bin bags burst open, with rubbish spilling out, gutters and pavements strewn with discarded bottles, masks and fast food takeaway cartons, and overflowing bins can be seen all along Dumbarton Road and Sauchiehall Street heading towards Charing Cross.

As the article says the council are clearing it up every day. It's not like Susie A is running around flytipping every night. But it's clear the current approach/ways of organising the refuse collection and street cleaning isn't working

“The West End is a complete tip until around 11am every morning.”

and yeah, like the guy spokesperson says - the root cause is people being scumbags. But how do we stop it? Throw enough money at the problem to keep it clean despite the scumbag behaviour? Or is there a way to combat the scumbag behaviour?

"However in every instance in the pictures shared by the Glasgow Times, it is clear that members of the public have not disposed of their waste appropriately."

“Either litter has been dropped on the street, recycling bins have been contaminated with general waste, domestic bins have been used for commercial waste or larger items have been fly-tipped.

“In every instance these incidents put unnecessary, additional pressure upon our resources that could otherwise be deployed on the overall maintenance of the city.”

Anger at 'complete tip' of Glasgow's litter-lined West End streets

People living in the west of the city have said litter and rubbish makes them want to avoid walking through the streets.

www.glasgowtimes.co.uk

 

[Steppish]

i walked into town yesterday along the length of sauchiehall street, and it must have been the first time i'd been along the pedestrianised bit for months. Maybe i'd forgotten in that time and was seeing it anew with fresh eyes, or maybe it's made to look even worse after you get used to walking beside the trees and nice paving of the top part of the street, but jfc the avenue works can't start soon enough. And anyone taking over that BHS store, regardless of who it is, will make a big improvement

 

[I3ingo_I3ongo]

The patch of tarmac outside the pub with the cheap plastic seating and free Tennents guardrails, with the empty BHS, empty Burger King, Pound land, "Grift Shop", McDonald's and a big gap site. A steady stream of Buses coming down from the station and the entire place caked in pigeon shit. Never mind the overflowing bins, smashed-up graffiti-covered phone box... that entire stretch of town is a disaster of epic proportions.

 

[pinna]

i genuinely don't know what the answer to this is. I agree with the complaints though - the streets are a total state. And, while it doesn't stop me walking about the streets, it certainly makes the whole experience unpleasant



As the article says the council are clearing it up every day. It's not like Susie A is running around flytipping every night. But it's clear the current approach/ways of organising the refuse collection and street cleaning isn't working



and yeah, like the guy spokesperson says - the root cause is people being scumbags. But how do we stop it? Throw enough money at the problem to keep it clean despite the scumbag behaviour? Or is there a way to combat the scumbag behaviour?

Anger at 'complete tip' of Glasgow's litter-lined West End streets

People living in the west of the city have said litter and rubbish makes them want to avoid walking through the streets.

www.glasgowtimes.co.uk

Purely anecdotal but I walked down a lane behind Byres road last week as I had never been down it before and was curious if if led anywhere.
At the bottom of a lane was a council street cleaner with all his equipment just skiving, he was startled when I walked down then walked to Byres road and half arsed picked up some litter nearby before returning when I was walking away.

Generally though the problem is terrible on some streets. The new system of businesses leaving bin bags out for collection for maximum 1 hour is not enforced at all. Bins are constantly overflowing everywhere you look. I agree the problem is the folk using the area but some people are just lazy - they need to either empty bins more frequently or start fining businesses for not complying with rules and people for littering. The also need to find a neater solution for large bins and recycling bins as these again are not emptied frequently enough.

A few friends of mine who are not from Glasgow but now live here are always going on about how it is the dirtiest city they have lived in, I find it hard to believe people here are worse than everywhere else.

Also that council spokesperson is exactly what I expect from this current GCC, defensiveness and no ideas/solutions. They really are bad for the city.

 

[Glasgow2050]

You know what is an absolute disgrace where Argyle Street meets the M8 at the Kingston Bridge and you need to walk under it to get to the Hydro. It is absolutely beyond belief that ahead of the climate change summit at the Hydro that nothings has been done with this route where it follows the express way to the Hydro. For most of the delegates staying at the big hotels in the city centre on Argyle Street like the Radison this will be the route the will probably walk. It’s not as if the money is not there as they are currently doing all the new public realm paving at the Kelvin Hall which stretches all the way behind it where it won’t be seen. This money should have been spent on this approach to the SECC from the city centre. In the eyes of the world we are going to confirm that Glasgow is a dump as that’s the way most people will walk to the event.

 

[Due East]

The thing that's annoying me now is scrappy plants and weeds growing everywhere. Loads of buildings have plants growing out of them too. it looks absolutely terrible.

This kind of vibe at a random bit of street.

 

[eenbiertje]

Purely anecdotal but I walked down a lane behind Byres road last week as I had never been down it before and was curious if if led anywhere.
At the bottom of a lane was a council street cleaner with all his equipment just skiving, he was startled when I walked down then walked to Byres road and half arsed picked up some litter nearby before returning when I was walking away.

Generally though the problem is terrible on some streets. The new system of businesses leaving bin bags out for collection for maximum 1 hour is not enforced at all. Bins are constantly overflowing everywhere you look. I agree the problem is the folk using the area but some people are just lazy - they need to either empty bins more frequently or start fining businesses for not complying with rules and people for littering. The also need to find a neater solution for large bins and recycling bins as these again are not emptied frequently enough.

A few friends of mine who are not from Glasgow but now live here are always going on about how it is the dirtiest city they have lived in, I find it hard to believe people here are worse than everywhere else.

Also that council spokesperson is exactly what I expect from this current GCC, defensiveness and no ideas/solutions. They really are bad for the city.

I've heard from many many visitors (friends, family, work colleagues from overseas etc.) that Glasgow is the single dirtiest city they've ever been in.

Not to give the council a free pass, but there definitely is something ingrained in the psyche of this city where a significant majority of people don't give a crap about leaving rubbish lying around. It's particularly bad across all of the UK (and something I've barely seen anywhere else to the same extent), but Glasgow is something else in terms of typical attitudes of people that live here.

 

[indiekid]

It’s very depressing. In all honesty we need to come down hard with harsher fines on littering.

 

[dadabouttown]

I kinda think good public realm and well maintained/cleaned streets transcends surrounding architecture in a funny kind of way. I've been struck how some architecturally nondescript or even on the face of it ugly neighbourhoods I've encountered sometimes abroad can feel really pleasant and human places because the public realm is looked after and used and enjoyed.

And as a general rule, I actually think it's often more important to improving the image and feel of cities than shiny new developments.

I'd add street clutter and retail signage/displays as another element that adds to the sense of 'not valued / not my problem mess' you get a lot of the time in the UK.

 

[Steppish]

i'd like to see more enforcement around littering. I think that is something that has got worse as police scotland have moved to closing local stations and just having cctv operators dispatching a car from a big central location - you never get police just walking on the street anymore. When did you last some? The chance of a patrol coming round the corner just as you litter and doing you for it is almost non-existent these days.

I also get the feeling the cleansing department are so stretched just trying to provide the day-to-day service they don't have time to investigate and solve the underlying issues. You report something and they'll come clean it up but is anyone monitoring what the problem locations are? Does someone have a big map of glasgow with all the flytipping, littering, and overflowing bins marked on it? Are they methodically going through the hotspots, visiting them, seeing what can be done to improve them? Maybe. Not convinced though.

They could push the use of the gcc myglasgow app to report issues. A "see it, report it" advertising campaign to encourage people to report the issues. And then put all the reported issues on public accessible website everyone can see. It's in part a problem of budget cuts, but it's definitely also partly a cultural problem and i think encouraging people to feel they are playing an active part by reporting the issues and then seeing them cleaned up, could help with that part (although they'd need to stop the infuriating habit of telling you that your report has been dealt with when you can just look out the window and see it hasn't. It's as though someone has been told they need to deal with reports within a week so they just mark everything as done 6 days after it is reported, regardless of whether it has)

 

[David Graham]

I've heard from many many visitors (friends, family, work colleagues from overseas etc.) that Glasgow is the single dirtiest city they've ever been in.

Not to give the council a free pass, but there definitely is something ingrained in the psyche of this city where a significant majority of people don't give a crap about leaving rubbish lying around. It's particularly bad across all of the UK (and something I've barely seen anywhere else to the same extent), but Glasgow is something else in terms of typical attitudes of people that live here.

London, Birmingham and Manchester are pretty bad too. As a country though, Italy is even worse than the UK. It is incredible when visiting a spectacular historic global city like Rome to find the streets strewn with litter and rats running around everywhere. I do hope things in Glasgow don't get any worse, in my experience it is really hit and miss. There are some days when I am in the centre and find it to be spotlessly clean, and other days where it can be pretty litter strewn, is it down to the shifts of the cleansing department? I would like to see more businesses take an interest in their section of pavement outside their premises, I think if it became culturally engrained in the UK for shopkeepers/bars/restaurants to keep the pavement in front of their shop swept and free of litter, it would go a long way.

 

[indiekid]

One thing that strikes me in recent years is you hardly ever see those street sweepers about anymore, at least from my experience. Just shows you how stretched they are now.

 

[dadabouttown]

The psychology behind littering explained - and why lockdown has made it worse | Yorkshire Post

The existing condition of someone's surroundings can play a role in their decision to litter, it turns out......."Put simply, if an area is well maintained, and free of rubbish, then we are less likely to litter. Conversely, if a place has a lot of litter and poor access to rubbish bins, we are more likely to litter,"

Fundamentally, I think the foundation for changing behaviours probably has to start with simply maintaining clean streets far better than we tend to do. That is a sort of enabler foundation that probably reduces littering behaviour by a lot of lazy but psychologically nudge'able folk - and then all sorts of other stuff can tackle the remaining hardcore offenders.

And even when litter is cleaned away, to some extent, cracked, potholed and weed strewn pavements etc probably add to the messy uncared for vibe that encourages littering.

 

[Steppish]

Yeah that's like broken window theory. Which led to some ott and illiberal policing, and made some really strenuous links between current low-level anti-social behaviour and future serious crimes, but it's basic premise of "keep on top of this stuff and you get less of it" probably holds

"Social psychologists and police officers tend to agree that if a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken. This is as true in nice neighborhoods as in rundown ones. Window-breaking does not necessarily occur on a large scale because some areas are inhabited by determined window-breakers whereas others are populated by window-lovers; rather, one un-repaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing. (It has always been fun.)"[1]

A successful strategy for preventing vandalism, according to the book's authors, is to address the problems when they are small. Repair the broken windows within a short time, say, a day or a week, and the tendency is that vandals are much less likely to break more windows or do further damage. Clean up the sidewalk every day, and the tendency is for litter not to accumulate (or for the rate of littering to be much less). Problems are less likely to escalate and thus "respectable" residents do not flee the neighborhood.

 

[Glasgow2050]

You know what is an absolute disgrace where Argyle Street meets the M8 at the Kingston Bridge and you need to walk under it to get to the Hydro. It is absolutely beyond belief that ahead of the climate change summit at the Hydro that nothings has been done with this route where it follows the express way to the Hydro. For most of the delegates staying at the big hotels in the city centre on Argyle Street like the Radison this will be the route the will probably walk. It’s not as if the money is not there as they are currently doing all the new public realm paving at the Kelvin Hall which stretches all the way behind it where it won’t be seen. This money should have been spent on this approach to the SECC from the city centre. In the eyes of the world we are going to confirm that Glasgow is a dump as that’s the way most people will walk to the event.

Yesterday and today there are mini bus loads of council workers in this area weeding and sweeping all the muck off the streets. What a difference they are making makes you wonder why they let it slip into such a state in the first place. New paving from the Kingston Bridge to the Hydro along the expressway with some nice lighting would be a great improvement too. Wouldn’t cost much either.

 

[scott125]

I find the pavements are right mucky and sticky when its been dry, smelly too. I did see someone pressure wash the paving around the GOMA other day.

 

[scott125]

I find the pavements are right mucky and sticky when its been dry, smelly too. I did see someone pressure wash the paving around the GOMA other day.

 

[scott125]

I find the pavements are right mucky and sticky when its been dry, smelly too. I did see someone pressure wash the paving around the GOMA other day.

 

[Steppish]

@Charlie_

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1422207519339032577