Why is there more street cleaning in Cambridge than there used to be?

Cambridge used to clean the streets once a month from April to November. A couple of years ago, they extended that, and now they clean in December as well.

I was chatting about that with a group of longtime Cambridge residents, and one of them stated as an absolute fact that this was because of global warming -- that the leaves used to be finished falling by November, but now they're still falling so they need to do the last streetcleaning later. She might have expanded this theory to include that another reason they don't clean in the winter months is that it can't be done with deep piles of snow in at the sides of the streets, and global warming might have led to fewer large snowstorms in December.

Someone who was on the City Council or in the Department of Public Works might be able to answer this question definitively. My impression is that the streets always had leaves in them all through the winter because of the ones that fell or blew after the November cleaning, and what's changed is the demographics of Cambridge residents, who are now more likely to complain about leaves in the gutters.

New England weather is so erratic that I don't think a climatologist would really care to predict the effect of global warming on the amount of snow in December. It wouldn't surprise me at all if it went up instead of down.

Related posts:

1. New Cambridge Public Library Building
2. Stories from the polls
3. Cleaning out the house of a deceased person