The Nightly Battle on the Streets of Montreal

Montreal is a pretty clean place. Maybe not quite as clean as I imagined, but clean none the less. This is in large part due to the creepy machines that they set loose to prowl the streets for garbage every night. They look like something that Doc Oc from Spiderman would have invented. It's basically a tractor with a big nozzle vacuum cleaner that is attached at the back of the tractor and comes up over the head of the driver, bending low enough to pick up each individual piece of garbage one piece at a time. The driver can manipulate the big hose like an elephant tusk to pick up stray Doritos bags and such. In the evening you start to see them appear around the city, stalking the sidewalks. It's a little spooky. It looks like some sort of sort of mad inventor experiment gone wrong. Far be it from me to criticize a city that is obviously doing so much right in terms of urban maintenance, but these vacuum machines seem a little inefficient. I have never seen a machine so large that was designed only to clean up, for example, one individual tissue or candy wrapper. It's sort of a U.S. military approach to garbage pick up, employing overwhelming force to waste removal. It seems a bit like overkill, like a tank being sent to arrest someone for jaywalking. Wouldn't a person with a broom and dustpan do the same thing without the cost of this large machine? Then again, it seems to be working. And how can you argue with success?