> If the bike lane causes one person to give up their car and commute by bike, that's worth hundreds of trees per year. Where they did this is by my house, so

> If the bike lane causes one person to give up their car and commute by bike, that's worth hundreds of trees per year. Where they did this is by my house, so I think I can speak to this a bit. It was not good planning, not that you can only have one or the other. Trees are also huge fighters of climate change heat casualties. The tree coverage keeps the ground and, specifically, the asphalt cooler: https://www.wweek.com/news/2023/06/07/a-major-investment-in-east-portland-road-safety-will-deprive-a-heat-island-of-570-trees/ https://www.wweek.com/news/2023/06/07/a-major-investment-in-... Without the trees "heat islands" have developed and surprise, surprise they're in places where people have less money to throw at making the city to keep both a priority in their neighborhoods. The lack of tree coverage is also necessitating the purchase of cooling systems which many people can't afford (and yes, in Portland we do have people dying in their homes from high heat) - so the trees being missing necessitates subsidizing AC units for folks, which is a tangible cost now associated with lack of tree coverage vs proper tree coverage. > I wish uninformed people would stop trying to "gotcha" environmental progress. Believe it or not, the people planning these things are much more educated in the subject than a bunch of software engineers and "entrepreneurs" Not to "gotcha" you or anyone else, but it was the city planners themselves who came out with this mea culpa and did a study on the heat islands. Our government is very unique and not very cohesive so it is actually reasonable to investigate whether PBOT and the people who contract tree coverage in the city actually talked.