Mayor Villaraigosa has announced a new program to plant one million new trees across Los Angeles according to the LA TImes.
“Los Angeles, the dirtiest big city in America, has the opportunity to be the greenest,” the mayor said, referring to reports that the city has the worst air quality in the nation.
Wearing a white T-shirt displaying the campaign’s slogan “Live for Today, Plant for Tomorrow,” the mayor thanked the several nonprofit and neighborhood groups that have promised to help with funding, planting or both.
He urged residents to participate by calling the city’s 311 information line or by signing on to the program’s website at http://www.milliontreesla.org
Neighborhoods with lush trees are usually the richest and most desirable: Santa Monica, Brentwood, Beverly Hills, Hancock Park. In the San Gabriel Valley, wealthy San Marino is covered with a canopy of green, but south of Huntington Drive, arid middle class Alhambra sits under sun and smog.
But trees do not purify the air, despite what some believe. All the plantings along our freeways have never made an iota of difference in cleansing the toxic effuse of vehicle emissions. But trees shield us from the sun and make living in the desert kinder.
Here in Van Nuys 
About trees not purifying the air: trees take in C02 and send out O2. Maybe they don’t do it at a rate that will compensate for the massive amounts of CO2 that people and animals produce, but they still do it.
Photosynthesis takes CO2, H2O, and sunlight and makes sugars and carbohydrates as well as extra oxygen (that the plant releases into the atmosphere). If there was an overabundance of CO2, animals would have a hard time breathing. So, in this sense, wouldn’t you agree that trees do, in fact, purify the air?
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Alhambra isn’t part of the city of L.A. It is its own city. You are probably refering to El Sereno which is part of L.A.
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But we can create new streetcar tracks….. with trees, right?
It’s not impossible. The Blue Line has a landscaped median in Long Beach. It’s not a forest, but there’s some flora.
It is possible to place trees between the pocket of two tracks, but it has to be a tree that does not have thick roots that break up trees or canopies that grow so large they hang into overhead wires or scrape the trams.
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Wad-
Your last remark about the road that once supported streetcr tracks struck home with me. I can’t stop thinking
of that driving down Olympic in Santa Monica or along Chandler in Sherman Oaks.
But we can create new streetcar tracks….. with trees, right?
Andrew
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I would certainly love to see more trees throughout Los Angeles.
With some conditions:
1. No trees that drop their berries all over the sidewalk. These make a slipping danger and squished berries gunk up sidewalks.
2. No trees with roots that grow to push up the sidewalks.
3. No trees of any kind in road medians. A landscaped swath of land in the middle of the road is a waste of water and is more tacky than beautiful. Besides, presence of a median indicates that the road may have once supported streetcar tracks, and the wasted land can be made viable again for public transportation.
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But he better be providing the funds to trim them back or we will be worse off.
Those trees planted on Ventura Blvd. in Sherman Oaks by SOHA are seldom trimmed, and they prevent walking and driving hazards since drivers can no longer see street addresses or store signs and stores are losing business because of them.
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