While I applaud the effort, I do wonder if it is tax money well spent. Perhaps a spreadsheet on a shared drive would have been better value for money?
I’m not in London but surely there is more than 100k in public policy good to be had in promoting trees as assets that are worth stewarding well. Is population scale care for trees with a month of arborist days?
Urban forests make air conditioning work. Consider it an indirect investment in power grid resistance.
They also help surface drainage. Consider it an investment in roads and stormwater.
Regarding drainage, there is so little soil left in London that surface drainage of the kind you seem to be thinking of is non-existent. We had to build the supersewer to deal with it, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thames_Tideway_Scheme
Keeping track of things is a really necessary function of any council. They have massive asset registers that need to know where everything is, from streetlights, to bins, to bus-stops, not to mention planning. They track anything they are responsible for, because otherwise it's rather hard to be be responsible for it.
That includes street trees, which are the council's responsibility. This is why the London one doesn't include ones in parks, since those are maintained by the Royal Parks people. This is their internal register of trees that someone has slapped a
My local council (Bath and North East Somerset) has a small but excellent data team, and they have an online map with all their data in one place. There are layers for everything, https://www.bathnes.gov.uk/webforms/maps/
Of course it costs far more than £100k to maintain this data.
Imagine a sign saying "Just donate £10 so we can have a database to tell us where our trees are", I bet the vast majority of Londoners wouldn't hand over £10.
Even a keen gardener wouldn't likely pay £10 to have a map of where all the vegetables in their vegetable patch were.
The database needs to be built.
The database needs to be built.
Also as someone else pointed out I got my maths wrong (I blame no calculator on an ipad): it is about 1p from 50k a year. I calculated with 500 million not billion.
Perhaps spend less time worrying about a made up estimate of tax money spent and more time lobbying internally for Google to pay their fair share of tax?
This is therefore a reasonable expenditure of some government resources. Just as when they paid "Royal de Luxe" to perform The Sultan's Elephant over several days. The Sultan's Elephant is street theatre, an enormous mechanical elephant, a giant little girl, and some other apparatus turns up, the puppeteers from Royal de Luxe operate these puppets to tell a story for the entertainment of just... everybody who happens to be there, it's on public streets, it's not ticketed, it's not in some arena or screened off area, it's just in your city where you live and/or work. Perhaps you came specifically to this part of the city to see the giant little girl, asleep so peacefully, or perhaps you were surprised to find your journey interrupted by an enormous elephant walking down the street when you went to buy lunch, it doesn't matter, this sort of street art is a reasonable investment.
I think the comment is specifically about the custom built website to track and map the trees.
We aren't all poverty stricken, I'm quite happy to commit my 1p share to this website.