Beautiful. But I see that picture-perfect pathway, and wonder the cost and time to maintain the vegetation.
Bicycling through California suburbia, I see mostly dead lawns, ever since the droughts began. Few people (or cities) have time/money/motivation to create beautiful gardens. So I'm imagining a dusty gravel pathway instead.
In the longer term, the emergent benefit is that bicycle friendly infrastructure incentivizes density which saves on money and maintenance.
Maintenance is hard.
Manpower wise, the bushes along the path probably take as much average labor as the road.
Maybe material/gas to resurface the road every 10 years would make the road cost more per year.
Not sure what the comparative costs are, and a road would have similar maintenance if it was that close to trees (a bike path is just a narrow road).
That's basically what the front of our house is, with very minor drip irrigation (that I wish we would get rid of.)
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But in serious, this will be amazing once Civil Engineers, Urban Planners, Landscape architects etc - can use this, but have it also calc "cost of options" for each - and have it do Environmental Impact analysis based on the plan, AND Title 24 implications... which are always fun to deal with especially in cities such as San Francisco.
(Title 24 are the codes for efficiency, safety etc for new builds basically - but they can be a pain in the ass to navigate when planning in urban areas in California.. Environmental Impact studies cost a boatload and are usually lamented about for things like "Protect the Frogs of Marin" (which affected a lot of building aspirations especially in wealthy areas, such as Marin - but ARE very important when determining if a new development on top of some natural habit is going to F-up the surrounding ecosystem over the next N years)
Like, if nature itself needs upkeep, something other than lack of upkeep is the issue.
See, for example: Kudzu. We introduced it intentionally, and nature's own mechanisms have it literally growing beyond control -- blanketing (and typically killing) anything in its path in the US South, including mature trees.