Batten down the hatches.....

That sums up pretty well what I was on about around here Scrungee. The pavements are useless for anything other than single file pedestrians (wheelchairs or motability scooter are a no go), and the road is narrowed in places, as well as them obscuring vision in many cases.

 

Your right about not thinking ahead - but could they really have envisioned the volume of traffic that we get and the fact that it would be so expensive to remove big trees (and replace them with small ones)? Nowadays it's not just the cost of the manpower (machine power!) and the carting away but the additional cost of having to close the roads to do it.

I know that they calculated, when removing the big old, dangerous, ash tree at the front of our place, that it cost the council £3,000 - and that was about 10 years ago! The road was closed from sunrise to sunset and that also caused additional costs to motorist (detours were anything from 2 miles to 5 miles) and the heavy lorries that use our road had to trundle through narrow village roads and extremely narrow country roads to find their way around it.

It took five months just to get the 'road closure' through the beaurocracy of regulations. The tree straddled the boundary of two district councils and they fought over who wasn't responsible, as they didn't want to foot the bill.

Then it had to go through 'Planning'. Another big struggle, as the council that it was determined was responsible for the removal didn't have the road going through their land. Once it had got through that, they then had to get permission from the county council as the road came under their jurisdiction and they had to provide the 'road closure'. The county council had to do a feasibility study of the diversion on the other county council roads. Then the local authorities had to do a similar study on the local roads.

A year prior to that there was a month long argument between myself, the council and the gas board over who the tree belonged to. The gas board were running a new gas main and putting it through the grass verges on the front of the properties. I had turned our grass verge into a flower bed decades before that and told the gas board they couldn't run their main through my land.

The council argued that it was their land as it straddled exactly where the boundary ditch used to run (that had been channeled underground in a giant pipe 50 years ago). I claimed ownership under the '12 year law' (was actually an '18 year law' in those days) and they disputed it.

After lots of wrangling I got them to put in writing that the verge was theirs before the laying of the main could go ahead (they'd continued laying it all down the road). When the men came along with their mini-diggers I pointed out to them that they were going to have to run the main around the tree (it had a 5ft diameter) and that if they got too close to the tree they would have a hell of a time trying to get around its roots.

To do that successfully they would either have to run it into my front garden (through a fifty year old laurel hedge) or could easily run it through the tarmac footpath and then just re-tarmac it. I think the £20 note might have helped the argument .

Six months later I called the council and told them that 'their' tree was in a dangerous condition and needed to be removed . Thank heaven I had proof that it wasn't my tree

 

Thinking ahead. Council. Nope, you've lost me lol

They have that ability removed on appointment (and you have to have an appointment!)