> Using a leafblower is a sign of entitled loutishness.

You were fine up until here. Insulting people for wanting to use an easier option isn't a great look.

This is absolutely about selfishness. Growing up in the suburbs, every Saturday at 10 AM and every weekday at 8 AM, the leafblowers would start. They wouldn't be done until the early afternoon. And most of the people who people used them when they weren't home, and would just hire contractors to blow their lawns several times a week, while disturbing their neighbors.

Living in the world with other people means respect to others as much as tolerance.

If they waited until 8 on weekdays and 10 on weekends they did their part in waiting until most people were awake.

Dogs bark, lawn mowers cut grass, motorcycles or trucks have engines that are a cut above the rest in noise. People throw the odd celebration.

Get over it. You're not the only person in this world.

I don’t think it’s wrong to comment on people who care more about convenience and cost then the externalities they’re creating (air and noise pollution).

“Selfish” is not a protected class.

Especially on this website, where you can find a substantial number of people working from home in upscale developments.

Also this: the leafblower ban was voted on and passed. The majority of Washingtonians thinks that running your petrol toy in public is so rude and bothersome that the practice needs a city ordinance banning it.

Your comparison doesn't actually hold. Working from home, while more convenient, actually decreases the externalities we pass on to others.

I am in the "screw even bothering with leaf raking for anything but recreation" camp but I think that is essentially the longstanding state of progress when it comes to efficiency. It often pays off but not without costs and it shouldn't be done to extremes. We don't use x-rays to fit shoes anymore for instance.

It takes me 2 days at 8 hours a day to pick up my yard with a rake.

It takes me a half day with a leaf blower.

Between October and Feb I may have to pick up leaves 3 or 4 times to keep it from killing my grass or at the very least not be a bad neighbor and allow my leaves to blow over into the yard of people who just picked up theirs

I have a kid to take care of, other house upkeep to do, a 40-50 hour a week job.

This whole thread is filled with young, urban kids who have never been responsible for property

Yes, it's the suburbanite problem of too much house, too much yard. There's too much of everything to keep in presentable condition.

One solution would be to hire outside help to keep the excess of stuff clean, but that may be expensive. There's another solution, to cut down on the amount of stuff. When I was a kid the lawn would take 30 minutes to mow with a push lawnmower, and maybe 45 minutes for raking. Once a week. On Saturdays, because Sundays is quiet day.

Washington told its citizens to either earn enough and keep quiet or downsize to keep quiet. It's a good start.

It's time that other peoples' ostentatiousness stopped spilling over in my domain. Leafblowers are just one symptom. SUVs are another.

I'd rather have all the problems of the suburbs time 10 than live in then be ping ponged between the classist snobs that live in well off areas in urban centers and the high crime areas of those not so well off, with all your pollution and your asthma that you're breathing in day in and day out in concentrated ways, while taking my kid out to throw a ball or to walk my dog means i need to hop in a car and go to a park 5 miles away.

Portlandia isn't for everyone.

Nah, when I was a kid, I lived in a house in the suburbs with a front and back yard, and my mom always used a rake to take care of the leaves. We never even owned a leaf blower.

I should also mention -

Leaf blowers are a god send for people with medical problems that 8+ hours of raking would seriously harm them or be impossible for them.

A rake only works on grass. But if you have taller bushes and other types of plants it's pretty much impossible with anything else except a leafblower.

Also, good luck raking on the side a small, but steep, hill - you can't even stand on the hill without lots of pain and damaging the surface. But you can use a leafblower from the top.

i.e. just because you have a limited experience in the world, doesn't mean others do too.

Do those need to be leaf-free? I mean I thought the point was lawns, with less labor than a rake. But on land far too steep for lawn, can't you just leave things alone?

(I own exactly 2 pot-plants, FWIW.)

It's not too steep for a lawn though. (It's tough to mow, but not impossible.)

Plus even if you have flowers and such you don't want lots of leaves there.

How do you mow lawn on a slope you can't even reach with a rake? Maybe with a goat? :)

And, in my limited understanding of horticulture, I thought leaves happened later in the year than flowers. Don't they blow off or turn into fertiliser before spring?

you spend time making a garden, and then tell me if you want leaves blocking the sunlight and suffocating everything you spent time planting.

You can rake from the bottom then, downhill. The reach of a rake, foot-to-rake is ~4 meters, that's as far as a leafblower goes too.

What's wrong with leaving the leaves where they land?

I do prefer when the council blows away the leaves on the bike paths because it gives you better grip.