A few months ago, I heard a colleague at work call Jacksonville "clean." Since I think of Jacksonville as incredibly litter-filled, I was little surprised by this item of praise. Friendly? Yes. Clean? Never.
What was he thinking? It occurs to me that this is someone much more car-dependent than I am. He lives in a single-family house that is within walking distance of approximately nothing, gets in his car every day and goes on the expressway, and doesn't get off it till he is almost at work. So he doesn't see the commercial streets up close and thus doesn't have as much of a chance to see their grime and litter- he sees them from behind the window of a car moving 60 mph, and so he isn't looking at them as closely as I do when I walk. No wonder he thinks of them as clean!
