[bikeqld] Local Roads & Engineers

[John Nightingale]

This is what we have always known:
SMH, today:


A lonely tree cries out for a drink in a city ruled by uncivil engineers

    * Elizabeth Farrelly
    * March 5, 2009

Evidence that engineers are vastly over-represented among the ranks of
international terrorists will come as no surprise to architects, who are
accustomed to picking up what few pieces are left after engineers have done
their worst. Now, however, it seems there may be a yet more sinister
engineering plot against the civilised world.

Somewhere near the start of Glebe Point Road there is a tree, perhaps a
poplar. It is in many ways a microcosm; it could be any street tree in any
city in Australia. But this particular street makes an especially poignant
example, since the council has just finished a long, slow refurb of same, at
considerable expense and no small disruption.

And engineers? What has the tree to do with them? Well, this. Post-modernism
may have come and almost gone but the road engineer still rules where
matters traffic are concerned. The people who brought us cloverleaf
interchanges and 10-lane flyovers have not gone away. They may be retiring
but they have not retired. Far from it.

In contemporary street design, everything that matters - which is to say the
trafficable space, the carriageway - is designed by engineers. And
everything that doesn't matter - which is to say the public, pedestrian
space - is designed by, well, designers. Pansies.

The engineers' bit, the carriageway, is determined by all sorts of
self-important, clearly set out and quantified standards, Australian
Standards no less, that govern structure, hardness, dimension, grade, camber
and porosity, to name a few. The public bit, on the other hand, is largely
subject to wishy washy discretionary forces; aesthetics, politics, whim and
fashion.

And there's the rub. For the tree, which stands at an odd, slightly wistful
angle and whose leaves are tired-looking even at this harvest festival
moment in the calendar, has a problem. February is often our wettest month
but for the tree it has been a long time between drinks. Around its base is
about half a square metre of that porous faux dogfood with which they apron
trees these days, reducing root-compression while admitting rain. But the
area of the dogfood is only around a tenth that of the root-ball, so that
not much falls there and most of what does, runs off into the gutter instead
of soaking in.

Said gutter, directly adjacent this small tree patch, is a smart new
square-jawed pre-cast concrete job that proudly declares its intention and
capacity to conduct stormwater to the bay. Hence the poplar's wistfulness.
Its roots may twist within centimetres of this rushing, gurgling stream,
happy as a newborn, but access has it none. It must spend every shower and
every rainstorm being tantalised, teased, then deprived.

The result is a tree in torture. It fails to thrive, drops its leaves, looks
miserable. More significantly, the shade decrement means that all those hot
black surfaces - asphalt on the carriageway, black terrazzo pavers on the
footpaths, - bake beneath unmediated solar radiation.

In cases like Sydney Uni, Cleveland Street and much of Chippendale, where
shady, spreading, deciduous exotics have been assiduously replaced by
politically correct, low-water, shade-stingy natives, you don't even have to
torture the trees to get this heat-island effect.

So the local microclimate thus gets hotter, and hotter, and hotter - some
6-10 degrees hotter, estimates sustainability coach Michael Mobbs. This
drives shoppers into their cars and air-conditioned malls and spins the
planet further down its climate change vortex.

So here's the question. Is it possible for local government engineers to
design a leaky gutter? Or for designers to plant trees below road level?

Demonstrably yes to the second. Green Square, for example, where the median
strips are designed as reeded stormwater swales. It can be done, yes, but
seldom is. Take the dying palms along Moore Park Road; the median strip is
raised to ankle height, doubling as a traffic barrier, so the trees are
cactus.

But engineers and leaky drains? Is that even conceivable? Everything natural
leaks, just like everything edible rots. But tell an engineer that a good
drain is a leaky drain and he'll burst a blood vessel.

Engineers, at least of the local government variety, are dinosaurs in
modernist bog, where only the quantifiable exists and problems must be
shorn, oversimplified, and solved in isolation. This is not that kind of
problem.

Every year nearly 2000 megalitres of stormwater washes our street filth (the
non-human variety) into Blackwattle Bay, already one of the most toxic
patches of sea bottom. The City Council, understandably concerned, runs a
Blackwattle Bay Stormwater Abatement program. It gets special state funding
to do really useful things like give away 22,000 consciousness-raising
postcards and install fish-design stormwater grates to remind would-be
butt-chuckers of their marine obligations.

They even run street-cleaning programs especially to cleanse the runoff. But
to reduce the runoff itself? A leaky drain along every street and park would
amount to a civilising jihad; feeding trees, cooling streets, greening
parks, reducing climate change, softening the urban experience and keeping
the muck on land, where it belongs. Way too simple.