Vancouver has far fewer sidewalk trash cans per capita than the City of North Vancouver

Anyone who lives in the City of North Vancouver can attest to the quality of life in that municipality.

Smart city planning has created a vibrant retail strip in the middle section of Lonsdale Avenue.

It's also remarkably clean, thanks to diligent city workers, who are often seen emptying trash cans along the sidewalks.

In this part of the Lonsdale, there are often two trash cans per block on each side of the street.

Compare that with the City of Vancouver, where a resident can walk for more than two blocks along a busy thoroughfare such as West Broadway without seeing a single bin.

For a long time, I've believed that the City of North Vancouver has many more trash cans per capita than the City of Vancouver. Today, I got around to testing this hypothesis.

In 2002, the NPA-controlled Vancouver city council voted in favour of a "street-furniture" contract with a French company, JCDecaux. It required the firm to clean and maintain 800 trash bins around the city.

A couple of years later, council voted to add another 400.

Today, I was informed that there are still 1,200 trash bins on the sidewalks of Vancouver.

BC Stats reports that Vancouver's population in 2010 was 642,843. This means there is one trash can on the sidewalk for every 535 residents.

The City of North Vancouver has 135 trash cans on the sidewalks for a population of 50,725. This means there is one trash can for every 375 residents.

The City of North Vancouver has far fewer tourists on the streets than Vancouver. So relatively speaking, the little jewel on the North Shore has an even better ratio of people per trash can than the bustling and sometimes garbage-strewn metropolis on the other side of Burrard Inlet.

With a Vancouver election coming in November, this is an ideal issue for a clever politician to seize upon. Who doesn't want a cleaner city?