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Introduction to Street and Municipal Sweeping |
Street Sweeping Isn't for BeginnersDoug Swatkowski is the son of an industry pioneer, Ray Swatkowski, who founded Florida-based Central Sweeping in 1967. As a result, Doug virtually grew up in the sweeping business. For the last several years before his father passed away in May of 2004, Doug has been running the company.by Doug Swatkowskiwith Ranger Kidwell-Ross Today, our sweeping company runs more than 20 pieces of equipment, including a dozen sweepers. These are split between 9 street machines (2 Schwarze M6000s, 6 Mobil Top Guns and a Schwarze A4000) and 3 parking area units (2 Schwarze 347-I's and a Tymco 210).
For example, even though the amount you can charge for the work is only about twice as much for street sweeping, the sweepers cost about 3 times as much. Unless you know what you're doing, you can get in over your head pretty fast. In our area, insurance for street sweeping also costs more than twice as much as for parking area work. For one, you're out on the street during the day, not in an abandoned parking lot at night. Street sweeping often requires additional equipment, too, like attenuator-equipped follower trucks and a lead truck to pick up items the sweeper can't handle. For the jobs that require it, if you don't have the needed extra equipment then you won't qualify for those types of work. Unless you're on a prevailing wage job, where wages are set at a particular, much higher, level by the state, you can still expect to pay from 20% to 40% more for your operators. Fuel usage on the big sweepers is about twice that of the smaller ones, too, and maintenance costs are much higher on the larger vacuum machines than on the parking lot air sweepers. Then, for mechanical broom units, there's another jump in the cost of operation, as well as for routine, preventive and unexpected maintenance. This is especially true for milling jobs, which are unbelievably tough on the machinery. That's also a segment of the business where you better have a backup sweeper available if you want to keep your customers. Milling jobsites involve a number of other machines, a large crew and, often, restricted hours of operation. If you can't do the job, for whatever reason, they'll find someone who can. Another area to consider is that when you operate the larger GVW equipment you must be in line with all of the DOT's regulations, including logbook items and safety compliance. Although there is certainly opportunity available to those who expand from parking area sweeping to handling street, milling and construction work, in a way it's a completely different, and much more difficult, segment of the industry. Unless you feel certain you can handle the complexity, and have the financial strength for the relatively larger expenses, the bigger machines may not be the way to go. As you can see, there are a number of considerations to evaluate prior to upgrading to construction, milling or street sweeping. Still, for those with experience and the necessary capital, this is an expanding area for contractors in this era of municipal downsizing. At the WorldSweeper.com website are two PDF files are designed to assist both contractors and municipalities in computing the expenses necessary to estimate costs of street sweeping. One provides the information needed to compute costs by the curb mile swept, and the other helps to generate costs of sweeping by the hour. These are helpful to either contractors or municipal organizations that are trying to get better estimates of their own costs of sweeping, as well as an excellent handout for contractors who want to assist municipalities in generating an accurate estimate of their current cost in sweeping in-house. Here's the link to view, download or print them. You may reach Doug Swatkowski via email. Ranger Kidwell-Ross is editor of WorldSweeper.com. You may reach him via the contact form on this website. |
 © 2005 - 2012
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Parking Area Sweeping Contents
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The differences in the parking lot and street sweeping portions of the business are huge. For one, the equipment is quite a bit different to operate, as is the type of sweeping you're doing. Everything is bigger, from the equipment to the payments to the difficulty in working on the sweepers.