When progressive ideas come into conflict with progressive ideas, you just have to laugh.
For instance, the San Francisco Chronicle published a story yesterday with the headline “Neighbors speak up for trees facing ax to make room for bus line.”
They could have cut the headline to “Neighbors speak up for trees,” and that would have been amusing enough. But to go on to say the neighbors are angry that trees are getting chopped down to make way for additional public transit cracked me up even more.
Prog Wars–it’s on, people. It. Is. On.
This all started when the San Francisco County Transportation Authority and the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency got the ball rolling on a $158.8 million project to create a bus rapid transit (BRT) line on a two-mile stretch of Van Ness Avenue–one of the busiest traffic corridors in the city–using money received from the federal government. Initial planning for the project began in 2006, with the project getting federal funding approval in December of 2013 following an extensive environmental analysis and period of public feedback. Construction begins next year and is scheduled for completion in 2019.
The final BRT plan provides for two lanes of buses to run side-by-side down the center of Van Ness with loading platforms for people to board the public transport, which means that the existing trees in the median have to be removed. The project is designed to reduce transit times on that length of Van Ness by 32 percent.
Sure, that seems worth the nine-digit price tag, which is certain to go no higher.
193 trees in all are scheduled to become lumber. Some people in the neighborhood are a little upset about it.
“This has just been a nightmare,” neighbor Mary Anne Kayiatos said. “It is a devastatingly awful thing to do to the San Francisco community. Trees make urban living a little more tolerable. Oh my God, this is so bad. I can’t even believe it.”
Ease your traumatized mind, Ms. Kayiatos. The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency plans to replace those 193 old trees with 401 new ones. That should please even the most avid arbor aficionados, right?
San Francisco’s tree canopy is at 13.7 percent, but most cities peg desirable tree canopy coverage closer to 25 percent, said Dan Flanagan, executive director of Friends of the Urban Forest, a nonprofit that has planted more than 49,000 trees since 1981. These benefits are hard to replace, he said.
“Tree preservation should be a much higher priority in planning,” Flanagan said. “Newly planted saplings will take years — maybe decades — to provide the same amount of benefits. The neighbors clearly did not know how many trees were to be cut down. … The dialogue with the public needs to be much better.”
Hmm. I guess doubling the amount of trees doesn’t cut it for some. They are more concerned about…shade, I think.
Phillip Ambers, who regularly babysits for a friend who lives near Van Ness, said the community was blindsided and that the information provided by the city has been unclear.
“A lot of people are upset and don’t even know what’s going on,” he said. “The city says the trees are diseased, but I don’t see how 200 of them could all be sick. We already don’t have enough trees in this city, and they keep cutting them down. How is this OK?”
Never mind that all sorts of information about the progress on the project is available online.
The trees that the Transportation Authority plans to take down were growing old, so they were all going to have to come down eventually anyway. It may take a few years for the younger trees to suck the same amount of filthy, rotten, life-giving carbon from the air as the mature trees, but those 401 new trees will someday store twice the amount of CO2 than the trees in the median do now. It’s rather selfish of the people in the neighborhood to not want to make a few sacrifices so that future generations can have strong, healthy trees to provide them with oxygen, as well as some urban ambiance. Iz for deh childremmm!
San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency spokesman Paul Rose maintains that the trees are unhealthy. The agency did a tree removal evaluation and analysis in 2012, and it showed a grim future for the trees, he said.
“A certified arborist evaluated the maturity of tree health and condition of all the median trees,” Rose said. “The preservation of the existing trees was proved nearly impossible. A lot of them are unhealthy or would be impossible or expensive to move.”
City officials considered replanting the trees in a different location, but that wasn’t feasible because of their maturity. Larger trees need to maintain a certain percentage of their root mass to survive transplantation
In their place, hundreds of new lemon-scented gum, Brisbane box and London plane saplings will be planted along the sidewalks and the new medians. Besides the 193 trees being removed, another 12 trees will be preserved in their current locations, and one cork oak dedicated to Rosa Parks — in the median between Jackson and Pacific streets — will be relocated.
There, see? The MTA is being culturally conscious as well as environmentally conscious. That $158 million for two miles-worth of public transportation down the middle of a busy street is going to be money well spent. You’d think the neighborhood would be welcoming this project paid with the taxes from a charitable nation with the jazziest of hands.
Let’s hear from Ms. Kayiatos one more time, shall we?
“This is just going to be so tough,” Kayiatos said, sighing. “The project has passed through so many stages of approval, so it’s going to be an uphill battle. But we are fighting for our trees.”
For our trees!
Sigh. There’s just no pleasing some progressives when progress interferes with their personal environment.
