Kudos for the Gainesville City Commission. Downtown Gainesville is a better, more walkable, place because the City did a reverse course.
It was more than a year ago when officials were on the verge of removing a few trees – including a 40-year old oak – from the block of SE 1st Avenue across the street from the county courthouse.
Why? Because the trees were deemed to be an obstruction to pedestrians, especially disabled pedestrians.
But the problem was never the trees. The problem was a narrow, inadequate, broken sidewalk that would still have obstructed pedestrian passage even if the trees were removed.
The other problem was that the sidewalk could not be widened without eliminating, or at least reducing, all of the pull-in parking spaces that lined that block.
And in autoAmerica it is considered a cardinal sin to disrupt the easy passage (and storage) of automobiles.
It was only after activists went to bat for the trees – even symbolically chaining themselves to the oak – that officials began to have a change of heart.
Ultimately the commission voted to spend $250,000 to save the trees, widen the sidewalk and (gasp!) eliminate half a dozen car storage spaces.
As I noted in a blog early last year, the problem never was the trees. It was the cars.
That block of NE 1st had been closed for several weeks for sidewalk reconstruction. The space-gobbling angle-in parking slots have been replaced with fewer parallel parking slots (on Thursday I watched a guy in a monster pick-up try to parallel park in the sole remaining space. Lacking a big enough shoehorn, he eventually gave up and moved on).
The upshot? The trees are still there. Downtown GNV street life has been enhanced. And I hear that still more downtown sidewalk improvements are in the offing.
I love this town that so loves trees.
FreeGNV 