Trees and traffic—has a lesson been learned?

Press, 1 June 1977, Page 17

Trees and traffic—has a lesson been learned?

Making travel by car around Christchurch easier and safer has often led to the loss of fine old trees. When a street is widened the trees which once stood on private property or in parks mav end up on the new roadway or footpath, or be cut down. This will be the fate of the trees along the northern boundary of Sydenham Park when the last section of Brougham Street is widened.

Further north in the city the widening of Innes Road, which runs east off Papanui Road just north of the Merivale shops, has left a number of fine old trees standing well outside the new fence lines on the southern side of the street.

But anyone travelling down Innes Road who fears that when the work is completed the trees will be cut down has no cause for concern.

The widening of the road has been carefully planned so that almost all the existing mature trees will be left standing on

the new footpath; and the pathway itself will be carefully laid out to avoid the trees. This plan was adopted by the last City Council when the residents prevailed on the councillors not to adopt a plan which would have required the sacrifice of most of the trees. The way the council is handling the widening of Innes Road is in marked contrast to the way an earlier council handled the widening of Springfield Road in 1929-30. In 1929, the council widened Springfield Road (which runs north into St Albans from Bealey Avenue) on the western side up from Bealey Avenue towards Derby Street and Clare Road. The widening of the carriageway brought out on the new footpath a number of fine old trees between 60 and 70 years old which had been on private property. The most notable specimens were an oak on the Bealey AvenueSpringfield Road comer

and a Tasmanian Blackw o o d further up Springfield Road — one of only two specimens of the tree in the South Island at the time. In February, 1930, the works committee of the council, although declaring that it was loath to do so,

By

JOHN WILSON

ordered the trees removed because they were a traffic hazard obscuring the visibility of motorists; they were crowding the new footpath; and their roots would damage the new kerbing and reading. The trees enjoyed a stay of execution while the council considered an offer of a strip of land free on the opposite side of the road so that the new footpath on the western side could be widened and the trees saved. But at its first meeting in March, the council reaffirmed its decision that the trees would have to go; and they were all

down by the end of the month, the oak on the corner going first. “The Press” came out in editorials vigorously against the “blunder” of removing the trees, accusing those members who voted for the trees to go of “arboricide."

An editorial expressed the hope that the public would make the council feel its resentment against the council’s “stubborn and stupid preference to destroy beauty which it should be among its first cares to preserve.”

The suggestion made in “The Press” that the public wanted to see the trees preserved was right if the journal’s own correspondence column was a true gauge of public opinion. One correspondent accused the council of “stupid vandalism”; another described the council’s action as “one of the grossest acts of vandalism ever per-

petrated by a local body” and dismissed the talk about traffic danger as “so much piffle”; yet another called cutting down the trees a “lamentable outrage." Scorn was poured on the councillor who declared that the trees so blocked the footpath that a perambulator could not , be wheeled past them, by a correspondent who pointed out that none of the trees was closer to the • new fenceline than sft 6in. More scorn was poured on the council when the trees were uprooted to reveal roots that went straight down, and therefore could not have damaged the kerbing or roadway; and when a line of telegraph poles was immediately erected where the trees had been. Today’s city council engineers are confident that on Innes Road the widening of the carriageway and the removal of the telegraph poles will give motorists using the road much better visibility than they, had before; that

an adequate footpath can be provided without removing the trees; and that the roots of the mature specimens will not damage the seal or guttering. Few people today remember that Springfield Road ever had a fine row of trees at the Bealey Avenue end; the prediction of one correspondent of "The Press” at the time that Springfield Road would be renowned in the future “as the classic example of bungling to future generations of town planners and city beautifiers” has not been borne out.

People may in the future take the trees down Innes Road for granted, but that street deserves to be remembered as a classic example of careful city planning.

The engineer in charge of the Innes Road project is confident that an important precedent has been set and that the way things are being done along Innes Road is the way a similar situation will be handled in the future.