It is remarkable how calming it is to just sit there and stare at a tree.

Now everywhere I live has to have a big tree somewhere nearby. There’s one right outside and I spend at least several minutes, sometimes much longer, just staring at it.

Staring at a tree, 10/10

This is probably the one area that most cities in North Carolina excel at. We don't have great sidewalks or transit, but we have a ton a trees. Less than we used to though. But from my current apartment, I'm closer to seeing 300 trees than 3. The post-hurricane-Hugo effort to buy out houses in flood prone zones and turn them into greenways was probably the single smartest thing Charlotte and the surrounding towns have done (though I'm glad we got our light rail too - too bad for Raleigh). It's a good pattern - protects the natural watershed, gives wildlife a safe place to live, makes flooding less impactful, and creates pleasant away-from-road paths for walking and biking.

It took me a few days to understand - there are no trees in central London (the City).

Sure, you have a small/big park here and there, but no random trees on side walks. It's literally a (beautiful) concrete/glass wasteland.

Note: I only walked a few of the main streets, I'm sure I'm exaggerating a bit, but it's quite noticeable compared with other cities after you realize it. And there are random trees in other areas, outside City of London.

And here, somehow, that stupid excuse that they destroy utility cables and pipes didn’t cause to cut them out. It seems that it’s possible to solve this.

And of course, I’m basically in a forest. There are trees everywhere. The “park” here is an at least 100 years old forest. There is one about 30 meters from here, and about 500 meters an even larger one, where I’ve just lost today.

Of course, the city center is different, but even comparing the outskirts of other cities, this is very-very green.

30% tree cover looks very different depending on the trees your municipality chooses.

For example, Barcelona covers everything with a variety of Platanus, which is easier to keep than other trees, but it’s quite dirty and produces A LOT of pollen. For me, that I’m allergic to it, it just makes the city unavailable for 2-4 weeks every year.

Having smaller plants, with more variety also feels much better than just sprinkling the right amount of massive trees with equal spacing. I’m pretty convinced part of the “we need more green” feeling people get is actually “I need something in my environment to not look like a grid”.

Something like this has always been a driver of my home search. I've been lucky/glad to find something, but it's always been a stretch.

But as a more realistic policy I would start with homes and with ensuring schools have a play area with plants larger than the kids and too dense to see through.

I think the secondary effects on planning are just as important: urban planning goes awry when it fails to consider livability and beauty. Livability includes walkability, non-car transportation, and parking for car-dependent transportation -- things you need to do most days. Beauty has obvious direct effects, but indirectly it also encourages people to take care of the place, and to avoid being seen e.g., as a litterer.

As policy encouraging changes, it would be good to start with environmental enhancement sections in each permit, and (if possible) to publish them before they are finalized for people to contribute proposals. This expertise is rare in developers so advice would be welcome, and providing the opportunity would probably encourage people to contribute, with ideas and perhaps funding. (There should be no provision for blocking permits, to avoid adverse NIMBY incentives.)

Yeah, I can see trees. I can see about fifty trees without standing up from my desk. I cut down more than three trees a month, probably. The weirdest ones are yagrumo - in about five years they can be fifty feet tall and the wood is so soft you can cut them down with a butter knife, just about. Before moving here, I'd never really considered that the Venn circles of "tree" and "weed" can overlap.

I'm a little lucky to have found a house that borders a large therapeutic horse riding center so looking out my back windows (chain link fence on the back so minimal obstruction) I am looking straight into a small forest. That aside, my own property has 3 trees between 25' - 60` tall out front and out back there's an 80' tall sweet gum tree (it's lucky I value it's existence slightly more than I loathe the 6 billion stupid spike balls out drops for me every year) an 80' (I believe) maple, and a useless 95' Pine tree that the squirrels are slowly De-Branching).

It's a small property in the suburbs so those trees give me well over 30% coverage so I've got 2/3.

Quick check on Google maps and unfortunately I'm 483 meters away from my neighborhood park so I missed the mark there. But I think having 3-4 large parks all connected by 15+miles of hiking trails, a botanical garden, and an arboretum within a 5 mile radius more than makes up for that extra 183 meters.

Having spent the last 3+ years living with this level of access to nature spaces, it's become the bare minimum I expect from wherever I move in the future. And if I'm honest, I'll likely not be happy with anything less than being able to see more nature than society when I step out of the house..

[0] https://www.patternlanguage.com/apl/aplsample/apl159/apl159....

The middle one seems a lot harder to me than the other two.

Now we changed to a much smaller house on 5th floor, it's so much older than the previous house, but it has a lake side view full of trees, I can look out and see them from my window.

And now I realize in some extent, how badly the previous house affected me. My cluster-phobic episodes are completely gone, and I don't have those stuck feelings any more. I know I still have it, i feel it coming if the door knob gets slightly stuck, and takes little bit more time, but other then that none of the actions that used to cause it, not causing it anymore.

In our city we build jail cells for house in the name of safety. So all windows of the house are grided with no way to get out of the house in case the front door caught fire. But these trees gives me peace. I don't have to look at them, knowing that they are just by the window, makes me so much relaxed.

I still can't fathom how people can cut them down

I can, however, easily explain the division in Europe: In Italy (for example, in Palermo), the vigorous growth of many species very often leads to significant damage to infrastructure.

Here in Vienna, there’s a directory of trees[1] where you can see, among other things, the species and age.

[1] https://baumkarte.at/

I've seen suburban development that would easily satisfy the three tree test from any window on any property, but they still come off as desolate wastes. The age of the trees seems to be a non trivial factor.

Now I am curious if there is a dataset for the location of every tree in every city in the world? https://overpass-turbo.eu?

Here we go, correlation does not equal causation. Simple as that. Planting 3 trees will not give you a better mental health nor will planting 10 trees. But moving in to an environment where many trees grow in front of your window will probably change a lot more than just putting trees in your view.

Having lived in Europe for many years before, this is something that's most striking about Australia. I live in a state with one of the highest population densities and yet it still feels very sparsely populated relatively speaking.

Person walks along main roads in London and complains they see no trees. Meanwhile in other news .... :)

London is one of the most tree-ridden cities on this earth, so I dread to think what "main streets" you were walking along.

-- Picard

Edit: for canada map since the article ignores the country entirely, check https://www.globalforestwatch.org/map/country/CAN/

Could have been 200 meters or 500 meters or 4 trees or 2 or flowers.

This is the kind of ideology that is ruining public policies instead of being grounded on concrete and scientific facts and goals.

Parks are not nature. Parks are a sanitized parody of the natural world. They are a simulation meant to make us humans feel better about ourselves. They are gated grass farms, not wild areas, useful only to a select few animals (nothing bigger than a raccoon). Creating a park inside a urban area diverts land from actual nature. So, rather than build parks inside cities, we should develop that land and make our cities smaller.

We don't have to go all 40k hive world. Rather, if parks are kept at the urban periphery and/or are connected to each other, then they can thrive as actual natural space. We have modern transport technology. We can bring the people to the park rather than construct a park near the people and thereby deprive Bambi and all his friends of yet another acre of true wilderness.

Vienna cheekily cheats statistics by counting several adjacent forests as "urban green spaces" within city borders. The roads within the city, however, are mostly barren concrete deserts.