Cross-posted from Eye Daily.
Glenn De Baeremaeker has declared that any pothole reported to the city will be filled in four days. (You can read about the guarantee made by chair of the works committee in today’s National Post and Toronto Sun.)
You’d think he’d be happy, but city council’s self-appointed pothole-fixing advocate Denzil Minnan-Wong says that De Baeremaeker’s guarantee “misses the point.†According to the Post: “He said the city should be developing a long-term strategy for road rehabilitation, rather than promising to patch small problems as they occur.â€
The same thing could be said for trees. Right now, the city is working on reducing it’s response time to maintenance requests made to urban forestry. Unlike pothole complaints, most of which are actually dealt with in around four days, tree care requests take between 3 months and 18 months to be handled (according to the city’s Our Common Grounds report). The city manages about 91,000 calls a year for forestry services. By comparison, it filled 50,000 potholes in 2006.
As urban arborist and LEAF spokesperson Todd Irvine has pointed out to me, what the city really needs is to develop a strategy for how it’s going to care for its trees and expand the urban forest. Simply promising to double our tree canopy is not enough. In 2004, the Our Common Grounds report called for the city to implement an Urban Forest Management Plan over the next 10 years. Toronto’s head forester, Richard Ubbens says this is still in the works. He also argues that urban forests should be getting some help from other levels of government.
“This country, this province, they do not have an urban forest strategy — municipalities are doing that on their own. In the U.S. there’s much more support for that,†he told me over the phone last week. “In Toronto, we have some expertise; we have a good relationship with the University of Toronto, but not every municipality has that.
Ubbens has some good ideas of his own for how Toronto could increase its tree canopy, and since he’s the head forester, perhaps one day we’ll see them outlined in a future plan, or better yet, become a reality. Here are some of the ideas he rhymed off over the phone:
-Look at growing Christmas trees in our hydro corridors.
-Require trees be planted on private property in new subdivisions (right now developers are only required to plant trees on city property along the street when new subdivisions are built)
-Narrow streets slightly to allow more space for a second row of trees. This could also help achieve other objectives, such as traffic calming. And, hey, less road surface may mean fewer potholes to fix!
