A friend posted something about this today, and it fired me up enough to write my own post -

Here in Winston-Salem, we are afforded, via our property tax dollars, leaf pickup. All we have to do is rake/move all of our leaves to the curb (not in the street, mind you, but towards the curb - W-S does not have all that many sidewalks) and a big truck comes around and vacuums them up. It actually comes a few times, so you have a couple of chances to get your leaves all to the curb. All of this - and the attendant rules - are pretty common knowledge.

Unfortunately, many of my fellow residents are, well, either ignoramuses or mortally fear covering a small area of their lawns for a few days at a time. This leads to massive leaf piles in the streets, which is extremely dangerous, limiting driving space on already narrow roads. Must a drive home from work be a game of MarioKart what with random piles of leaves in the middle of side roads? What if there are kids playing out there - don't they love jumping in leaves? What about school bus hours? We also have deer running around in the fall. Do we really need to make our roads more treacherous than they already are?

I propose a massive fine for anyone putting their leaves in the street. I think $500 for the first offense and $2000 per subsequent offense would be adequate to end the practice for all but the very, very rich who could afford to reseed or resod - barring the potential expense of human lives, of course - a narrow patch of dead grass.