Arlington is asking its dogs to be a little more careful out there, and their humans could help out too.
The Arlington County Department of Environmental Services recently posted an appeal to the county’s canines to do their business away from the parking machines on the sidewalks, since the accumulated results can make things rough for the people tasked with working on the hardware. (And yeah — ease up on the champagne, too.)
Arlington canines: Please keep the p off the arking machines. It jams the coin doors, especially in summer. And take it easy on the champagne. https://t.co/Z3acjp9cUp pic.twitter.com/U9NFCBnAQS
— Arlington Department of Environmental Services (@ArlingtonDES) August 2, 2024
Peter Golkin, of the Arlington County Department of Environmental Services, says the stickers aren’t new — they’ve been around for about three years, but the annual reminder “always gets a good laugh when you put that on social, especially when you speak directly to the dogs of Arlington. Hopefully they follow us on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram now.”
It’s called a coin door, but it’s really the door that leads to the inner workings of the parking-fee machines. “I don’t think too many coins go in down that way,” Golkin says.
Whatever the function, the fact is that dogs doing their business can gunk up the doors and, well, make them disgusting — “particularly in the summer, when dog pee is particularly effective as a sealant and as a perfume,” Golkin says.
That’s not the only hazard these boxes face in their working lives. “People are driving these days, a lot of them, with a certain abandon,” Golkin says, and there just isn’t enough road for some of them. So anything along a curb — a parking machine, a light pole, whatever — is at risk of getting hit by a car. He recounts a particularly unpleasant experience with a destroyed traffic-light stanchion on a 10-degree Christmas Eve.
The parking boxes are not the only places where Golkin has dog-related problems: His department is responsible for the county’s rivers and streams, and when people who don’t pick up after their dogs, the resultant ecch gets washed with the rain into the storm drains and eventually in the county’s rivers and streams.
“So when people don’t pick up after their dog, it’s not just a threat to the bottom of people’s shoes. It’s a bigger issue.”
Golkin emphasizes that even though the tweet directly addressed dogs, it’s really a human problem: “[Dogs] don’t have thumbs but, but humans generally do. … All Arlington dogs are good dogs. They mean well, even when they have to relieve themselves. It’s just that we ask that their humans find somewhere else.”
Feature image by New Africa/stock.adobe.com
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