A tree on a street is incredibly expensive to maintain. The tree itself need maintaince from a gardner and the surrounding road and sidewalk needs extra maintenence too.
For the 18 years I lived in Brooklyn, the trees were never maintained by the city. Our block association planted them in the late sixties, and the houses on either side watered them when they were hosing their own sidewalks (as well as keeping all the stray dogs from shitting and pissing in their soil!).
I remember only one incidence of the city being called in, or a private contractor to repair the sidewalk by the two oldest oaks on the bottom of the block whose roots had lifted and cracked the walkway. They just expanded the opening; I'm sure it was not up to code after for width between the areaway fence and the tree's opening in the sidewalk.
I can't believe it costs much to maintain them after the initial cost of planting them. I never had to care much for the trees on my property in NJ either, other than pruning some dead limbs that were about to fall over my access way or roof from the taller trees. The younger trees did fine on their own. Although, almost all of the hemlock trees succumbed to the Gypsy moths, but even neighbors who spent thousands on trying to save theirs, suffered almost the same number of losses. I was also not quick to cut them down if they didn't 'look' right. Now one that neighbors said looked dead, is thriving again!
You are absolutely right about the cost, and I was way off when I wrote that comment. See below where I quote actual prices of about 40usd a year to maintain an inner city tree.
I looked up prices as I was initially in doubt if this was a good cost-benefit. This article claims that New York Cty trees have a lifetime cost of ~3,500 USD (in gardening). I was under the impression of a much higher annual cost, so I was way off in my initial reasoning.
This report puts annual gardening costs of Portland trees at around 40usd [1]
These numbers do not include added road, curb and sidewalk maintenance incurred by the tree, as far as I can tell.
At the end of the day it's money not being spent on something else. Would you rather spend 4min sitting in traffic on a tree lined street because plans to upgrade a 4way stop to something that can handle more volume was canned in favor of adding trees.
Pretty is nice but beauty without function gets old really quick.
We are members of two private gardens in Edinburgh - which are fairly large and have loads of trees. The costs of these are £80 and £250 a year - so I don't think there is anything inherent about trees being expensive to maintain if the costs are split among enough people (and these are only split between people who live on 3 streets).
