sideviews
Abandon the Green Lane widening project – Ravinder Singh
On the issue of cutting down trees to widen Green Lane, the City Council tried to calm Penangites saying that the trees will not be destroyed but relocated.
Of the trees standing in the way of the new road alignment, four young trees with a small girth in front of the District Officer’s official residence have been shifted two to three feet from their original position.
The rest of the trees earmarked for “shifting” are grand old trees. There is no way that these trees could be moved to a new site.
Some years back, a beautiful, rare old tree in front of the Dewan Sri Pinang was dug out and replanted several meters away to make way for a human-created beautification project.
The tree did not survive and Penang lost a valuable, rare tree.
Who benefitted if not those who were directly involved in the human designed beautification project?
They earned their money and who cares if that beautiful rare tree died as a result of “beautifying” the front garden of Dewan Sri Pinang.
In the photograph taken today, the tree nearest the camera escapes the axe as it stands to the left of the new drain under construction.
The rest of the grand old trees are between the new drain and the road, and have therefore to be removed. How do you dig out such big, old trees without the roots being mauled?
I stand by what I said that creating a “storage lane” by destroying these grand old trees is not going to move the traffic any faster through the bottlenecks at the traffic lights.
As such, this project should be abandoned.
No amount of road-widening will solve the problem of congestion.
The number of new cars being registered daily is very much higher than the amount of road space you can create daily for cars.
Just look at Kuala Lumpur with all the new roads, flyovers and underpasses that have not reduced congestion as more new cars are being registered daily than you can create road-space for. – March 4, 2016.
* Ravinder Singh reads The Malaysian Insider.
* This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malaysian Insider.
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