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Comment by have_faith | Hacker News Reader

Where I live, Sheffield in the UK, the council was nearly toppled because they chopped down some street trees. They still haven't fully recovered from it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheffield_tree_felling_protest...

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I'm also against chopping down trees - but sometimes tree protection turns into a pretext for NIMBYism, especially if it's against projects that are also good for the environment, such as public transport (felling 189 trees for a bus lane sounds like a lot, but if the trees shown in this photo https://proarbmagazine.com/controversial-sheffield-bus-lane-... are representative, those look more like shrubs)

It was a bigger scale. The plan was to cut down 17,500 of 35,500 street trees, all due to a total mis-reading of a report.

Instead of backing down the council ploughed on, got people arrested and even tried to jail one of its own councillors for protesting. It was a huge fiasco.

There are a lot of species that may be misinterpreted as a shrub, i.e. a Hazel tree https://www.woodlandtrust.org.uk/trees-woods-and-wildlife/br... is dense, and forms many smaller straighter branches shooting up in parallel... could easily be mistaken as a shrub as this next pic shows https://cotswoldtrees.com/hazel-corylus-avellana/ .

Still a tree though, and all trees are good trees.

Hazelnut on cities are mainly from two different species. Corylus avellana is clearly a shrub, even if can grow 6m high with time, and will recover fast from being chopped, but the other species is a tree.

"one more lane" a buss lane means more hard and hot surfaces in a city. As long as you just add hard surfaces you are still making things worse. With that said buss lanes are more important than car lanes.

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