"More green on the sides of the streets"

In the 7th Sujata Jayawardena Memorial Lecture delivered by Defence Secretary, Gotabaya Rajapakse you can hear him say quite clearly that there should be "more green on the sides of the streets" of Colombo. 






In that case WHY would he transform Gregory's Road, one of Colombo's greenest,  into a horrendously paved area? 

Comments

  1. Anonymous9 August 2011 at 23:27

    Have you noticed that 90% of the tree cover comes from trees in the public space? ie along the road? The residents of Greg road seems to have decided that they are not responsible for greening the neighborhood... they seem to prioritize a built environment or little trees that need little maintenance and give little shade.

    Makes you wonder - do we expect public spaces, and public servants to keep the city green while we as private land owners and users have other priorities?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Priyanthi Fernando9 August 2011 at 23:37

    Good point. One of the owners of no 29 allowed for two beautiful මදටි trees, home to flocks of parakeets, to be chopped down despite our protests merely because the neighbours wanted them cut down and would broach no compromise.
    Having said that, I don't think we ought to completely devoid ourselves of our right to say what we want of our public spaces and from our public servants - we are taxpayers are we not?

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous14 August 2011 at 16:38

    were the roots of these trees by any chance affecting their(your neighbours) walls or the pavement/road?

    usually what we get along side the roads in Colombo are "madati", "maara"..etc which has shallow but very invasive roots which affect the walls or houses near by as well as the pavements and the roads as well. Do you think that was the reason for the removal of these trees? have they removed all the trees on road side or only some of the trees?

    Would appreciate if you can tell what your neighbours argument was on why they wanted the 2 trees to removed. And surely they must be taxpayers too right?

    ReplyDelete
  4. Priyanthi Fernando14 August 2011 at 18:44

    depends on what trees your talking about... the 'madati' trees within the premises had their roots going into the neighbours' wall and I can sympathise with wanting those roots removed - but I would have preferred to explore an alternative solution to cutting down the trees. There may not have been an alternative, and then cutting the trees may have been inevitable, but we were not allowed to explore that conversation.

    The trees that were removed from the roadside were removed to make way for pavements, parking and lamp posts - they have removed almost all of the small trees and left all the big ones, and hopefully all that construction has not destabilised the big ones.. we are happy to have relatively smooth pavements to walk on, and the cars at school time are a great deal more orderly, but we now walk in the sun (very limited shade) and the ambience of the road has changed..

    what do you suggest should happen when taxpayers have conflicting views?

    ReplyDelete
  5. Anonymous15 August 2011 at 21:15

    Priyanthi thank you very much for the clarification, so it was obvious that these trees indeed created some "issues".

    I'm bit puzzled why they have removed small trees and leave the big trees as bigger the tree higher the ill effects. Maybe for the ease of removing them now than having to do it in 5-6years time..

    The solution is to explore the possibility of planting some trees which are not invasive but provide shade I guess..

    about the taxpayers, I guess not everyone can be satisfied with any decision and there will always be winners and losers..

    ReplyDelete

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