Leaf Cleanup / Blätter Aufräumen

The leaves are quickly changing colors and falling to the ground here. The view out our living room window used to be a wall of trees, and now we can see through the trees onto a parking lot and a very red apartment building on the far side.
People seem to be very efficient in sweeping the leaves off the sidewalks here. The row of shops on the way to Nikolas' school even has a leaf vacuum that is being used to vacuum up the fallen leaves every morning as we head out for the day. I've noticed that the leaves seem to get swept into the street, under cars and into free spaces, so that earlier this week there were large leaf mounds along the curb everywhere. No more.

For the last few days, the leaf men have been in our neighborhood cleaning up all of those leaves. Teams of three have spent their days sweeping and raking all of those leaves away from the curbs and out from under the cars, leaving tidy piles in the middle of the streets. Then an ordinary truck comes along and picks them all up. Once the leaves and the truck and the team of men have moved on, a street cleaning truck comes along to wash up any left over dirt or leaf crumbs (leaf crumbs?). It is quite an amazing process.

I remember in the US, different streets would have temporary 'No Parking' signs hung up on different days and then a truck would come along and suck up all the leaves, whoosh, voila. Is it a special truck just for sucking up leaves? It probably does the job faster, but employs less people. And perhaps it costs more to buy and maintain that special leaf-sucker-upper-truck than handing out brooms and rakes and having people do the work the old fashioned way.