The street cleaned before dawn receives a care its busiest hours may never notice.

Maintenance is scheduled for when nobody is watching, which is efficient and also why it disappears from public understanding. The pavement is swept, the bins emptied, the lights repaired while the city is asleep, so the daytime version of the street arrives already correct and appears to have been that way on its own. People then argue about services as though the work were optional. Absence of visible effort gets misread as absence of effort.

Get up early once and watch a place being prepared. It changes how you read the ordinary condition of everywhere you go afterwards.