"demonstrably"?

Please define your terms. I have seen the people wielding these monstrosties piss around for hours chasing one or two leaves or meaninglessly form pile of leaves that have no function other than to appear large so that the other inefficient human can stop only once to load them onto their gasoline chariot.

Most of this work could easily be either: 1) solved by refusing the scorched earth, anal standard of lawn care ; 2) good old fashioned, quiet wheel barrows and rakes operated by people paid a fair wage for manual labor instead of externalizing costs onto the rest of us.

I have seen the same with rakes. Done the same, truthfully.

Used even remotely competently, a blower beats a rake. Hands down.

Now, there is a solid argument that for small yards, a rake and broom are fine. And indeed, that is what I use when doing my yard. With a large yard, though, blower with bagging lawn mower could accomplish in one day and ten bags what would take three days and forty bags. Easy.

If you want to really supercharge leaf collection, use a large tarp instead of a wheelbarrow, then carry your plunder like santa. Wheelbarrows are a waste of energy for carrying leaves.

Companies are not going to give their employees lead blowers unless it is a lot more efficient.

When I saw Gardners using leaf blowers in SF, Pacific Heights, they mostly just blew the leafs onto the street.. how that's allowed is beyond me..

With a rake or broom you can remove the leafs/dust, a blower mostly just makes it someone else's problem.

Some cities collect leaves and all you need to do is rake them into the street. The city comes around and sucks them up. I know I've lived in at least one if not two that did this - one of those cities also offered free compost to people. I seem to recall them using a street sweeper vehicle to do this with. And honestly, if you already use the street sweepers, might as well do what you can with them especially if you were simply going to have people use special lawn refuse bags for their leaves anyway.

I think it depends on the lot, but while you certainly can blow leaves into someone else's yard or the street it's definitely possible to control things enough to blow it into a pile or into the woods

> Even more, it isn't like rakes don't have a horrible sound of their own, as soon as you get a single paved section involved.

I can't hear your rake through my headphones two blocks and three stories up.

That's when you swap for a broom. It makes a beautiful sound.

We have different definitions of beauty. :)

That said, I definitely have a push broom I use to finish off the sidewalk. Have to first rake, though, as i am moving a lot of leaves over it.

I’m glad that there are Morons like you in the worls to help skew down average intelligence.