Street cleaning is the biggest single request in San Francisco's 311 file

Street and sidewalk cleaning is not a small corner of San Francisco's 311 file. It is the biggest single category in it.

The San Francisco 311 file logged 6,625 street and sidewalk cleaning requests in the seven days through September 2. The city filed 18,089 requests of every kind in that same week. Cleaning was 36.6 percent of the whole file, and it outnumbered the second and third categories combined. Parking enforcement, the runner-up, drew 4,320. General requests drew 1,338.

The load is not spread evenly. Mission alone filed 1,338 cleaning requests in the week, one in five citywide. Tenderloin filed 554. South of Market filed 462, Nob Hill 391, and Bayview Hunters Point 303. The neighborhoods with the densest sidewalks produce the most requests, which is the pattern the file has shown all year.

Two operations carry most of the work. Public Works Street and Environmental Services handled 3,225 of last week's requests, 49 percent. Recology, the city's waste vendor, took 2,953: 2,530 for abandoned items and 423 for overflowing ones. The city's own service page says Public Works aims to respond to 95 percent of street and sidewalk cleaning requests within 48 hours, with litter patrols and steamer crews running around the clock.

What the weekly count cannot show is whether the block got clean. The file records a request and a status. Of last week's 6,625 cleaning requests, 5,263 carried a closed status when the data was pulled on September 3. Closed means the case was worked, per the city's own file conventions. It does not prove the sidewalk stayed clean afterward, and it does not tell you who did the work or when.

If you file one of these requests, take the photo from the same spot twice: once when you report it and once after it closes. Keep the case number from 311. That pair of photos is the only record that can answer the question the file never does, which is whether the cleaning actually happened on your block.