Not too long after sunrise on a recent Tuesday morning near Dolores Park, Jamal Lavallier finished his last pickup of the day. He hooked a pair of bins onto his garbage truck, pulled the levers to engage the lift, and then set the bins back down, lining them neatly along the sidewalk.
It was 8:30 a.m. The neighborhood was waking up, but Lavallier was wrapping up his workday. He had been at it since 2 a.m.
The 48-year-old San Francisco native has been a garbage truck driver for more than a decade. As a kid, he said, he always used to come outside and watch the trucks along his street in Bayview. “I didn’t think I was going to be a garbage man, though, back then,” he said. He wanted to be a football player…