Street Cleaning

We partner with property owners to maintain the highest standards of cleanliness along San Francisco’s busiest neighborhoods and commercial corridors to keep them safe, beautiful and inviting. Our staff are out on the streets, sometimes before the sun rises, to inspect rights of way, enforce codes and educate merchants and residents about City codes.
 

San Francisco Public Works Clean Streets Initiatives

• Bayview illegal dumping initiative brings together Public Works crews and Recology to run proactive illegal dumping runs five days a week, Monday-Friday, in known illegal dumping hotspots in the Bayview.
• Chinatown Clean provides manual block sweeping seven days a week in the Chinatown neighborhood; work is performed by a nonprofit partner.
• Cigarette butt ashcan pilot began in the Richmond and Sunset pilot neighborhoods and is set to expand. Public Works corridor workers empties the strategically placed cigarette butt receptacles in busy commercial areas.
• CleanCorridorsSF – an initiative launched in in 2020 and expanded in 2021 to deep clean busy neighborhood commercial corridors throughout the City with a coordinated focus on litter removal, steam cleaning, graffiti abatement, trash pickup and public education. This occurs during the day shift once a week on Thursdays in a different district each week, covering at least 10 blocks.
• Block Sweepers program puts underemployed and unemployed people to work manually sweeping litter from the sidewalk, gutters and tree wells. At full staffing, the workers cover more than 700 blocks in the City’s busiest neighborhood commercial corridors.
• Garbage can sensors have been installed in 800+ public trash cans to signal when they’re nearing capacity to prevent overflowing. Garbage can steam cleaning – all 3,500 street garbage cans are being steam cleaned on a routine basis – at least once a month, and more frequently in the downtown neighborhoods; work performed by a nonprofit partner.
• Graffiti team – public property – abates tags from property under Public Works jurisdiction in the public right of way. The team also abates graffiti that depicts racist statements or symbols, contains profanity or is known to be gang-related on public and private property that can be seen from the public right of way.
• Graffiti team – private property – with permission from business owners and property owners, Public Works will remove tags from private property free of charge in neighborhood commercial corridors.
• Hot Spots encampment crews, two total,  cleans and resolve encampments, seven days a week. Their shift starts at 4:30 a.m.
• Mechanical bike lane sweepers clean protected bike lanes that can’t be accessed by the regular, wider mechanical sweeping trucks.
• Mechanical street sweeping covers 150,000 curb miles along 90 percent of San Francisco’s streets.
• Median cleanup provides routine litter removal and weeding along select medians as part of a workforce development program.
• Multi-agency partnerships:
• DAILY
• Healthy Streets Operations Center (HSOC) addresses encampment resolutions
• Joint Filed Operations focuses on Tenderloin operations
• Mid-Market Run to address sidewalk crowding / illegal vendor issues
• NEAT Streets (Neighborhood Enhancement Action Team), also known as the Alley Crew, performs scheduled overnight deep cleaning of about 80 alleys in the Chinatown, Civic Center, South of Market, Mission and Lower Polk areas.  
• Night Shift, 10:00 p.m. to 6:30 a.m., focuses on downtown areas and City plazas and responds to emergencies in neighborhoods citywide.
• Outreach and Enforcement (OnE) Team provides public information and enforcement services largely in neighborhood commercial corridors to ensure that property and business owners comply with laws to keep their sidewalks clean and free of debris and maintain proper garbage services.
• Pit Stop public toilet program operates 30 staffed public restrooms in 13 neighborhoods. Each Pit Stop also is equipped with a needle drop box, free dog waste bags and trash bins.
• Public trash cans: Public Works provides about 3,500 public trash cans in areas throughout the City with a lot of foot traffic. The intended use is for the disposal of routine litter, not household or business trash. Click here for more information.
• Special Projects provides special cleanup coordination for parades, protests and other events; handles storage of bag-and-tag items, manages the public trash cans and cleans the tunnels.
• Swing Shift, 12 noon to 9:30 p.m., coordinates with citywide Healthy Streets Operations Center and Drug Market Agency Coordination Center operations, and focuses on service requests and emergency response.
• Volunteer programs, among them Neighborhood Beautification Day, Adopt-A-Street and Graffiti Watch, that partner with residents, merchants, schools, nonprofits and community programs on a variety of litter pickup and greening projects.
• Volunteer special events, such as one-day Love Our City cleanups with the hospitality sector, Battle for the Bay and Graffiti Wipeout.
• Zone Cleaning, both proactive and request-based, 6 a.m. to 3 p.m. Workers are split into six geographic zones; program includes litter patrol trucks, graffiti abatement and steam cleaning.

Data

• Public Works street cleaning operation averages 2,200 3-1-1-service requests a week.
• Crews remove an average of 900,000 pounds of litter and debris from the public right of way weekly.
• Public Works organized more than 800 volunteer cleanup events in Fiscal Year 2023.

Shifts

• Day Shift: 6:00 a.m. – 3:00 p.m.
• Swing Shift A: 12:00 noon – 9:00 p.m.
• Swing Shift B: 1:30 – 10:30 p.m. 
• Corridors: 11:00 a.m. – 8:30 p.m.
• Corridors Tenderloin: 8 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.
• Hotspots: 4:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.
• Night Shift: 10:00 p.m. – 7:00 a.m.