How it works
Copy the schedule once. Let the dates take care of themselves.
Town Solutions turns the routines on your town's flyer into real dates for the next 12 months, moves them for holidays the way your town does, and puts them where you look.
1. Start a private calendar
No account, no email, no street address. You get a private link that opens your calendar: bookmark it, and keep it to yourself. Anyone with the link can change the calendar, and we cannot send it again, because we never asked who you are.
2. Add your routines
A routine is anything your town repeats: trash day, recycling, yard waste, bulk pickup, street sweeping, a parking rule, a bill or a license renewal. For each one choose how often it happens:
| How often | Example |
|---|---|
| Every week | Trash every Monday |
| Every 2 weeks | Recycling every other Thursday: give one date you know it came |
| Monthly by weekday | Street sweeping on the 2nd and 4th Tuesday; bulk pickup on the last Friday |
| Every few months | Water bill every 3 months from a due date (the 31st becomes the 30th in a short month) |
| Same dates every year | Property tax due January 31 and July 31 |
| Listed dates | The leaf pickup weeks your town prints each fall (up to 24 dates) |
Any routine can have a season, such as April 1 to November 30 for yard waste, or November 1 to April 1 for winter parking (a season may run over New Year).
3. Tell it how your town handles holidays
In your calendar's settings, tick the holidays your town or hauler keeps. Six common ones are ticked to start: New Year's Day, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving Day, Christmas Day. Check your town's list; many keep fewer or more.
Each weekly, every-other-week or monthly routine then follows one of three rules:
- Slide a day (a common hauler rule, and the start for trash, recycling, yard waste and bulk): if a ticked holiday falls on a weekday from Monday up to your pickup day, pickup moves one day later. If that day is a holiday too, it moves again. Example: with Thanksgiving and the day after both ticked, Thursday's and Friday's pickups land on Saturday.
- Skip: a pickup that falls on a ticked holiday does not happen. Your page shows "No pickup" so you know.
- No change (the start for sweeping, parking, bills and meetings).
Weekend holidays. When a holiday falls on a Saturday or Sunday, many haulers change nothing, and that is the starting setting. If your town moves it to the weekday it is observed (Saturday to Friday, Sunday to Monday), switch that on in settings.
Holiday dates are worked out by rule for every year: Martin Luther King Jr. Day is the third Monday of January, Memorial Day the last Monday of May, Labor Day the first Monday of September, Thanksgiving the fourth Thursday of November, Good Friday two days before Easter, Election Day the Tuesday after the first Monday of November, and so on.
4. Put it where you look
- Your private page opens on the next day with something on it, then the next two weeks and the month.
- Print this month for the fridge (free), or all 12 months in one printout (Household Pass).
- Download an .ics file for Apple Calendar, Google Calendar or Outlook: the next 90 days free, 12 months with the Pass. A download is a copy: it does not change when you edit your calendar.
- Subscribe to the live feed (Household Pass). Your calendar app fetches it again on its own schedule, so a change can take a few hours to reach your phone, and Google Calendar can take up to a day.
About reminders. Each routine can carry an alert for the evening before (7 PM) or the morning of (6 AM). Apple Calendar keeps the alerts of a subscribed calendar if you leave its option to remove alerts switched off. Google Calendar does not use alerts from subscribed calendars; it uses its own notification settings. In Outlook, alerts vary by version.
5. Keep it right
Town Solutions only knows what you enter. Schedules change with new contracts, storms and strikes. When your town announces a change, update the routine, and the dates, prints and feed all follow.
A calendar nobody opens or fetches for 400 days is deleted, unless it has Household Pass time left or a Pass that still renews. You can delete yours yourself from the bottom of its page.