Street trees aren’t car-supremacist enough.
Let me explain what I mean by that: when a driver fucks up and his car careens off the street and hits a tree, the tree stops the car very abruptly. That’s great for, say, an innocent pedestrian who was saved by hiding behind the tree, but can apply rather serious consequences to the negligent driver. Car-brained traffic engineers see it as their mission to protect drivers from any and all consequences, so they insist on ripping out all the trees to create a gigantic “clear zone” so that the car is free to careen wherever it wants without hitting anything solid. Squishy things within the clear zone, such as pedestrians, don’t enter into consideration.
In other words, one important “advantage” of these “liquid trees” over real trees is that they can be mounted on breakaway stands, so that they yield (and therefore provide no protection to any hapless bastard who might’ve been sitting on the bench at the time) when a car hits them.
Source: I’m a former traffic engineer. But don’t take it from me; watch this confession from a much more experienced and credible engineer explaining it in even more stark terms.
I’m not sure if these scientists understand a lot of the reasons why trees are nice.
Because it is perfectly in line with our society’s continuous descent into a post apocalyptic wasteland?
Well Trees don’t make as much money for rich people who own everything and Trees make hot days more comfortable for homeless people
Algea is a much much better oxygenator with lower maintainence, people don’t seem to notice how fast cities can kill trees.
You don’t need to put algae in cities. They can be basically anywhere to absorb CO2.
Trees in cities tend to be carefully chosen for the environment. Are we in a climate where we need to put salt on the road in the winter? Choose trees that can tolerate some salt in the ground.
Maybe stop putting salt down in winter??? Who does that still they need to stop.
My first thought is you can embedd this inside buildings rather trivially
And the oceans are incredibly vast, so they provide most of the world’s oxygen! Obviously it’s hard to get a precise number but 50-70% is the accepted range.
There are many reasons to plant trees in the city but local oxygen supply isn’t one of them. Mostly trees look nice, and make people feel better by their presence. They also have a significant cooling effect, something a steamy tank full of warm algae definitely won’t help with on a summer day.
I think it has more to do with the fact trees require more maintenance, like raking up leaves and fruit, and having to saw off branches.
Also those roots can break pavement and pipes.
You really think those massive, experimental water tanks won’t require more maintenance, because you have to trim trees once ever few years? Or because their roots might grow too much?
Well of course, you can’t give working class people any money for working, you can only give them a slave-wage. That’s why all manufacturing was outsourced to very underdeveloped countries when NAFTA was first put into place.
You can easily get away with exploiting people who have no other choice but to work for a dollar per year, but it’s much more difficult to do that to someone’s neighbor in their community.
People can grow trees. You need a lot more to make one of those contraptions. Hard to control people when they can just grow a plant to do what they need.
All these people being like “why don’t we just use trees” as if the capitalists could profit from them like this. And not to say this is cost efficient, of course planting a tree would be better for everyone, but whoever installs these things will have a contract guaranteeing them money that taxpayers will be told is being put toward green initiatives and so will be eager to part with it I guess
Do you think that trees don’t require money to upkeep?
Plus, they fuck up any infrastructure they’re around, so that money is going to contractors anyway.
