Originally Posted by morknmini

Sorry for this preachy aside but it's my cause du jour:

Our town's energetic young mayor is trying to beautify major streets by planting in the medians (he met with Chicago's Mayor Daly and got excited). I drove along one of the improved streets yesterday (Van Ness Ave) and it's got thousands of bright red geraniums bordering now-dormant day lilies and they make the formerly scruffy trees look decent. This (and a sunny day) cheered me up until I saw block after block of newspapers within the shrubbery.

Our mayor learned that a functional advantage of greening the streets is that it helps return stormwater into the aquifer. Similar to Boston our town combines stormwater and wastewater for treatment--as though this were germane to the subject of DMV or anything on NAM. Sorry.