I bet this this website cost London £100k or more. They probably contracted it out to some supplier to build and maintain, and they are charging through the nose for hosting it, because the people on the London horticultural team don't do HTML.
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?
As anyone who’s been near government data publishing or asset tracking works attest - That’s a sure fire way to either publish stale/wrong information or simply lose trees.
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.
I'm glad this site exists. What doesn't get measured doesn't get managed, so I'm all for.
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
It probably wasn't outsourced. Local authorities have their own GIS and data people because it's essential to a council being able to do most of the jobs it does.
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/
London GDP is about £500 billion. They’ll need this info to maintain the trees in any case. If it cost 100k, it would be 0.02% of GDP. For the difference trees make to urban areas, it would be utterly trivial. If you made £50k cash after tax a year (so closer to 80k before tax), it would be £10 a year, that’s the fraction.
Of course it costs far more than £100k to maintain this data.
I think most Londoners wouldn't want to pay £10/year for a tree database.
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.
One of the benefits of representative democracy & taxes is that individuals don't get asked about spending for each line item. That decision lies on the people chosen (directly or indirectly by the public) to make those decisions based on better experience than the general public has. Problems tend to arise when small numbers of people try to micromanage government spending & actions by enforcing their minority views directly on the actions of government, not via representative elections.
Trees can be a hazard. Roots and branches need to be monitored, for tripping or falling risks, or the risk of the tree falling over. Trees need to be trimmed, especially where they intrude into problem space - cables (very rare in London), double decker buses, people's property, and so on.
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.
Trees can be a hazard. Roots and branches need to be monitored, for tripping or falling risks, or the risk of the tree falling over. Trees need to be trimmed, especially where they intrude into problem space - cables (very rare in London), double decker buses, people's property, and so on.
> I bet this this website cost London £100k or more.
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?
Tbh I feel like that's probably an underestimate, but otoh that's probably a fraction of the cost of maintaining the trees themselves, so I'm not sure it's worth fretting over.
And the whole point of having a government of London is because it's a huge city. If it was just a large car park it wouldn't need a government. The city is for people, and people both like trees and benefit from many properties of these trees such as their ability to absorb rainfall and provide shade as well as positive contribution to air quality (well, unless you're allergic to tree pollen) so it makes sense for the city government to look after them.
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.
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?