Are street cleaners a form of crowd control?

The fireworks were on last night. We live about 3 blocks from the place where they have them, and depending on where they anchor the barge in English Bay each year, we get to see bits of them from our balcony.

Of course, the fireworks only last for about 1/2 an hour. There will be 3 nights of them this year.

But for many hours before the event crowds of people migrate to the beach to get a spot to see the fireworks. The first wave is typically young families with whining or screaming children and parents. Organizing a trip to the beach is quite the exercise in major troop movements for them. The second wave is typically the hooting and hollering teenagers. They've shed their parental monitors, and now they're drunk and just out for a good time. The third wave is typically the mid-twenties adults in ridiculously high heels clattering along, having arguments with their dates, all running to the beach because the fireworks have already started.

Then thousands of dollars of fireworks go up in pretty explosions.

And now comes the exodus. It took hours to accumulate all these people. Now there are loud speakers telling them to get out quickly; police to move them along efficiently; thousands of dollars of fences around the gardens in the neighborhood to keep them off the flowers; security guards at most of the buildings to monitor our homes for vandalism... and street cleaners.

Machines to clean streets. They have brushes in front that turn to sweep big debris. They have water that sputters onto the ground to clean dirt. And really big, loud, insistent engines to drive them. Possibly making them the most efficient crowd control device we have.

The machines that comb the beach the morning after to get all the debris left by the thousands of people who don't live here, and think dumping their garbage here is OK, are also seriously big machines. No one ever sees them unless they get up really early, but they do a lot of work. And if you are on the beach at that time... you will go off for breakfast somewhere else quite quickly.

Cleaning as a form of crowd control. That's what we've come down to.